While watching the film, “Cold Mountain” I noticed that there was a Native American soldier fighting with the Confederate troops. I was quite intrigued by this because I was not knowledgeable of Native Americans fighting alongside the Confederates. For this reason, I have decided to base my research paper around this and dive deeper and understand the background for this. According to the website, “Wikipedia”, Native Americans fought for both the Unions and the Confederates. There were, approximately 28,693 total Natives in both sides during the war. There were many reasons as to why they chose to join their respective sides. For example, this website brings about the statement, “Perhaps most importantly, participating in the war carried …show more content…
The United States pushed the Native Americans further west as they settled in the same direction. In their effort, they tried to gain the respect of the United States in order to become allies and put an end to hostilities with the relatively powerful nation. This however, was not the case for the Native Americans that chose to fight with the Confederates. The same website reports, “Because a Confederate loss could jeopardize their ability to own slaves and, with that, the tribe’s economy of the time, slave-owning tribes (including Cherokee, Choctaw and the Chickasaw people) typically sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War.” After reading that, you may rightfully assume that Native Americans were in possession of slaves. This comes to me as new information as I did not know that the Natives were slave owners nor would the idea of Native Americans being slave owners be even be plausible. The reasoning for this is because Native Americans themselves were oppressed by the white Americans. This same insightful website states, “Another contributing factor for Native Americans siding with the south, particularly for the Chickasaw people, was a general and growing distrust of the Federal government.” From this quotation, I inferred that a common “backbone” that connected both the Confederates and the Native Americans were their distrust with the Federal