Who was Stand Watie?

Today in American Military History -- 1865
Stand Watie surrenders the last Confederate force still in the field

Stand Watie was born in Oothcaloga, Cherokee Nation (near present-day Rome, Georgia) in 1806. The son of Oo-wa-tie, a full-blooded Cherokee, and Susanna Reese, who was of half-Cherokee, half-European heritage, he was given the Cherokee name Degataga, meaning “stand firm.” After Oo-wa-tie was baptized into the Moravian Church as David Uwatie, he changed his son’s name to Isaac S. Uwatie, but as an adult the younger Uwatie combined his Cherokee and Christian names (and dropped the “U”) to get Stand Watie.

He was also a slaveholder, and established a successful plantation in Indian Territory. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Watie wasted no time in joining the Confederacy, viewing the federal government, not the South, as the Cherokees’ principal enemy. He raised the first Cherokee regiment of the Confederate Army, the Cherokee Mounted Rifles, and helped secure control of Indian Territory for the rebels early in the conflict.
At the Battle of Pea Ridge (or Elkhorn Tavern) in Arkansas in March 1862, Watie’s troops earned acclaim for capturing a Union battery in the middle of what turned out to be a Confederate defeat. By early 1863, the Confederate hold on Indian Territory was loosening, but Watie continued to torment Union troops there for the remainder of the war. On June 15, 1864, his men scored a major victory by capturing the Union steam boat J.R. Williams; the following September, they seized some $1.5 million worth of supplies on a Federal wagon supply train at Cabin Creek.

So dedicated was Watie to the Southern cause that he refused to acknowledge the Union victory in the waning months of the Civil War, keeping his troops in the field for nearly a month after Lieutenant General E. Kirby Smith surrendered the rest of the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi Army on May 26, 1865. A full 75 days after Robert E. Lee met with Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Watie became the last Confederate general to lay down his arms, surrendering his battalion of Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, and Osage Indians to Union Lieutenant Colonel Asa C. Matthews at Doaksville on June 23.