‘EAGER FIGHT FOR FREEDOM’
July 1863 was an extraordinarily bloody and decisive month, beginning with a three-day confrontation between General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Maj. Gen. George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac around the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. On the 4th, the Confederates suffered defeat at Helena, Ark., and, more important, surrendered the essential Mississippi River stronghold of Vicksburg. For four days in the middle of the month, violence erupted in New York City, where rioters protesting the draft—incited primarily by Irish immigrants—began a melee that morphed into murderous attacks against the city’s black population. On the 18th, a valiant but poorly coordinated Union attack on Fort Wagner outside Charleston, S.C., demonstrated on a grand scale the courage of black soldiers under fire. The 54th Massachusetts Infantry’s opening assault that day bore a grisly 121 casualties—54 known dead. All of these events were tipping points of some sort, and another—in the scrubby hill country of what is now Oklahoma—cannot be overlooked. On July 17, 1863, the fate of Indian Territory was being decided at a stagecoach stop known as Honey Springs.
Between 1831 and 1850, members of what were known as the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) had been driven west from their homes in the American Southeast to settle in what the U.S. government designated “Indian Territory.” They, too, would be divided during the Civil War. Within the tribes, some subgroups remained loyal to the Union while the majority embraced the Confederate cause for various cultural or economic reasons. A good many Cherokee, for example, were slaveowners.
A key figure during this turbulent period was Douglas Hancock Cooper, a Mississippi-born Mexican War veteran who earned the trust and respect of many tribesmen as an agent to the Chickasaw. When war broke out in 1861 and Cooper took a rebel stand, Confederate Secretary of War Leroy Pope Walker ordered him to “take measures to secure the protection of these
