African Americans In The 18th Century

The Native and African alliance in the later part of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century could be better described as a political partnership with common interests. They both cooperated against British occupation and aggression, and later American expansion and slave raids. The tenuous partnership began disintegrating more so as early as the 1845 Treaty with the Creeks, which would be temporarily moderated with the elimination of all slavery among the Seminoles and the other Five Civilized Tribes (Creeks, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Chickasaw) because of Federal pressures to grant rights and cession of land to the African-American members of the Indian nations. There still existed the racial issue of African-American Freedmen that associated with their Native American brethren rather than with African Americans who came later and were previously the property of whites. Racial harmony was virtually undone by the Dawes Commission authorized by the United States Congress in 1893 that required to negotiate with the Five Civilized Tribes to create the Final Rolls of Citizens and Freedmen (or Dawes Rolls) to dissolve the reservation system and prove citizenship in each of the Nations. To prove membership in any of the Tribes, one must prove descent from a person listed as a citizen on the …show more content…
It can be blamed on the United States ' contentious efforts to negotiate, recognize, and define citizenship within its own national limits and throughout the Indian Nations. Whether by legislation, litigation, negotiated treaties (or challenges to them), measurement of blood quantum, or even modern DNA testing; ethnic and racial categories fail to help understand the co-joined history between the African Americans and the Native Americans and find a solution that will quell the legitimate identity of either group (or as a combined mixed