The 1866 Cherokee Treaty, Article 9 clearly states that all freedmen and free persons living in the Cherokee Nation at the start of the Civil War were to receive “all the rights of native Cherokees.” Not partial rights. Not temporary rights. All rights. Primary sources confirm this wasn’t just theory—Freedmen themselves testified during Dawes Commission interviews that they lived in the Nation before the war and understood themselves to be citizens by treaty. Federal records from the Bureau of I

Trail of Tears: The Signature That Changed History

1866 Cherokee treaty article 9