I’m wondering if anyone knows of this Freemen Chickasaw woman?
Never heard of her, and Google hasn’t either.
If you Google Lydia Love Jackson chickasaw there are a couple of pages that reference a Lydia Love or a Lydia Newberry, daughter of Ben Love.
Apparently the Chickasaw were slaveholders that largely fought on the side of the Confederacy. It looks like there are various blogs about this.
Also mentioned in this Boston Globe article.
In the article’s photo, the woman on the right is listed as “Lydia Jackson”, who is the great-great-great grandmother of Alaina E. Roberts. Roberts wrote the book I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land and if the OP wants to know more about this woman, it might be worth seeking out that book.
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I have heard of Lydia Love Jackson, enough to know her name but not to know much about her. When I went searching on the subject of blacks on native land, it was like a heavy curtain was drawn on the history of it. Frustrating but also understandable when you realize just how much of the history we have been exposed to has been written by white males alone.
What I find interesting is that the Boston Globe article (linked above) makes it sound like First Nations people only took to slavery after whites arrived. To a certain extent this is true, including calling them slaves. What surprised me though, was the discovery that some native cultures took prisoners of war and sometimes adopted them into their communities, but also sometimes treated them as slaves. The POW treatment seems to have varied a lot.
As I personally know of Lydia Love Jackson and her history, after all she was my great grandmother. I know intimately where she lived and died. Yes the Chickasaw’s had slaves and those slaves adopted the Chickasaw’s language and ways of life. As I understand it when the slaves were freed, they were ordered out of the tribe’s territory with exceptions. Lydia was not ordered out, but I digress. As I understand the main reason the slaves were not adopted into the tribal rolls is because there were more slaves than Chickasaws, the tribe would have been overwhelmed and would have become African Chickasaw in their eyes. For thirteen years the freed slaves were without a country, driven out of Indian territory, and not adopted by the U.S. government because their enslavers fought for the Confederates.
Humans are so cruel to humans. You think that I’d be over this having seen it time and time again but it still blows me away. Mind you, I understand the us vs. them in survival terms but personally, I still don’t get it, perhaps because I’ve been lucky enough not to live it. Does that make sense?
I’m going to look for this book.