Greenwood LeFlore

Greenwood LeFlore or Greenwood Le Fleur (June 3, 1800 – August 31, 1865) served as the elected Principal Chief of the Choctaw in 1830 before removal. Before that, the nation was governed by three district chiefs and a council of chiefs. A wealthy and regionally influential Choctaw of mixed-race, who belonged to the Choctaw elite due to his mother's rank, LeFlore had many connections in state and federal government. In 1830 LeFlore led other chiefs in signing the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, which ceded the remaining Choctaw lands in Mississippi to the US government and agreed to removal to Indian Territory. It also provided that Choctaw who chose to stay in Mississippi would have reserved lands, but the United States government failed to follow through on this provision.

While many leaders argued that removal was inevitable, others opposed the treaty and made death threats against LeFlore. Ousted by the tribal council in a coup, he stayed in Mississippi, where he settled in Carroll County and accepted United States citizenship. He was elected to the state government as a legislator and senator in the 1840s. During the American Civil War, he sided with the Union.

Background

LeFlore was the first son of Rebecca Cravatt, a high-ranking Choctaw niece of the chief Pushmataha, and Louis LeFleur, a French fur trader and explorer from French Canada who worked for the Panton, Leslie & Company, based in Spanish Florida. Because the Choctaw had a matrilineal system for property and hereditary leadership, LeFlore gained elite status from his mother's family and clan. By the 1820s, as the historian Greg O'Brien notes, the Choctaw called such mixed-race children itibapishi toba (to become a brother or sister), which emphasized the connection to Choctaw, or issish iklanna (half-blood), which seemed to imitate Euro-American concepts. O'Brien notes the importance of their being first of all, part of the Choctaw elites. Choctaw chiefs recognized the advantage of using such mixed-race elite men as "trailblazers into an unprecedented universe of capitalist accumulation and renewable wealth."

Some, like LeFlore, gained a Euro-American education that enabled them to negotiate the changing world developing in the American South. When LeFlore was twelve, his father sent him to Nashville to be educated by Americans. After her death in 1829 he married again twice. He married Elizabeth Coody (or Cody) in 1830. He married Priscilla Donley, who was the sister of his first wife, in 1834.

Advocate of civilization

While LeFlore was not said to be popular among the full-blood tribal men, he became powerful and influential within the tribe at an early age, largely because of his mother's clan and maternal uncle's position

Removal or U.S. citizenship

thumb|right|upright=1.25|Greenwood LeFlore's horse carriage, late 1800s.

Despite being recognized as one of the "Five Civilized Tribes", the Choctaw were under pressure from encroaching European-American settlers. The settlers kept entering the Choctaw Nation lands in great numbers. The US government wanted to remove the Choctaw to lands west of the Mississippi River.

With the election of Andrew Jackson as president in 1828, who supported Indian removal, many Choctaw claimed that removal was inevitable. They concluded they could not give armed resistance. After passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the chiefs of the western and eastern districts resigned, and on March 15, 1830, the council elected LeFlore as principal chief, the first time that power had been so centralized among the Choctaw. He drafted a treaty which he sent to Washington, to try to secure the best terms for the Choctaw.

United States representatives came out to the Choctaw for a treaty council, where LeFlore used his formidable personal political capital and position as head of a unified tribe to secure the largest and most desirable areas of what would later be called Indian Territory. In addition, he believed that Article XIV would be honored and allow the Choctaw to keep some reserves in Mississippi. He regarded removal as inevitable, given his assessment of the politics and the sheer numbers of the growing European-American population.

The treaty included provisions allowing those Choctaw who chose to do so, to remain in Mississippi and become a citizen of the United States.

<blockquote>ART. XIV. Each Choctaw head of a family being desirous to remain and become a citizen of the States, shall be permitted to do so, by signifying his intention to the Agent within six months from the ratification of this Treaty, and he or she shall thereupon be entitled to a reservation of one section of six hundred and forty acres of land, to be bounded by sectional lines of survey; in like manner shall be entitled to one half that quantity for each unmarried child which is living with him over ten years of age; and a quarter section to such child as may be under 10 years of age, to adjoin the location of the parent. If they reside upon said lands intending to become citizens of the States for five years after the ratification of this Treaty, in that case a grant in fee simple shall issue; said reservation shall include the present improvement of the head of the family, or a portion of it. Persons who claim under this article shall not lose the privilege of a Choctaw citizen, but if they ever remove are not to be entitled to any portion of the Choctaw annuity.

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William Ward, who was the U.S. agent for the Indians, "refused to enroll the Choctaw claimants' reserves" in Mississippi, which undermined LeFlore's objectives for the treaty and led him to consider it a failure.

LeFlore's accomplishments in unifying and strengthening the Choctaw people are still honored as the historian James Taylor Carson writes, "He was a Choctaw nationalist who sought to carve out a new and powerful nation for his people within the Cotton Kingdom of the Old South." His pragmatic approach to their removal from ancestral lands is still controversial.

Many Choctaw at the time believed that LeFlore had let them down and could have refused removal. Mushulatubbee, who had resigned, took back his office as Chief of the Western Division (which would later become the new Choctaw Nation in the post-removal Indian Territory), and rejected many of the civilizing measures which the national council had ordered during the previous two years. The Western Division council led a movement to depose LeFlore, and in a successful coup, they elected his nephew George W. Harkins in his place.

Jackson and other American leaders at the time had generally low opinions of mixed-race leaders, related more to their own ideas of race than an ability to appraise the Native American leaders. Carson believes that such negative opinions have affected the writing of historians for decades and their assessments of men such as LeFlore. He considers LeFlore and leaders like him to have been a new Creole generation, raised as Choctaw but absorbing what they could of the changing world to make a place for their peoples. During the American Civil War Leflore opposed the Confederacy and secession. He sided with the Union when Mississippi seceded from the United States. When federal troops approached his property, he offered them assistance and said he was happy to see "the old flag again carried by United States Soldiers."

Malmaison

thumb|right|upright=1.25|Malmaison, Greenwood LeFlore's home

Leflore wanted a manor house that befitted his status as a wealthy planter. He commissioned James Harris, a Georgian, to design it.

American Civil War and death

LeFlore was a Southern Unionist. He was openly and notoriously opposed to secession and to the rebellion throughout its progress. In retaliation, a party of rebels fired on his home and attempted to set fire to Malmaison. LeFlore is said to have defied them, and calling for a United States flag declared his intention to die there under its folds. He died a few months after the war ended at the age of 65. He left, in addition to the mansion, an estate of 15,000 acres and 400 slaves. LeFlore was buried wrapped in the American flag, on the estate.

Carson describes LeFlore:

<blockquote>He was first and foremost a man whose family had positioned him to draw together Choctaw and Anglo-American worlds. He owned slaves which became freedmen, read and wrote, and prayed at camp meetings, but he also presided over a political hierarchy of pipe lighters and captains, provided food, shelter, and educational opportunities for his followers, and promulgated his vision of the Choctaw future at the foot of the mound [Nanih Waiya] that had given his people life.</blockquote>

Citations

External links

Greenwood LeFlore portrait and other images