"Growing Up with the Country": Family, Race, and Expansion in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom

While the majority of settlers in post-emancipation Indian Territory were identified in government records as white, many were recorded as black or "mulatto," a category still prominent on the federal census of this period.  A case study of a migrant with contested ethnicity is Thomas Jefferson Brown. Born in the 1850s to an African American man and
an Irish woman, Brown lost his father to the Civil War. He began traveling into the Territory, learning the languages of the Indian nations and becoming familiar with the land, people and opportunities for economic gain in this borderland. Upon settling in the Creek nation in 1870, he married twice into longstanding African Creek families, themselves struggling to lay claim to freedom - and Creek citizenship - in the wake of war.  Nearly every one of his eighteen children was allotted 160 acres due to their mothers' presence on the Dawes Rolls. This "white-looking" father was able to secure over a thousand acres of land, a school, church, and post office, shaping a distinct black and Creek settlement, known as "Brownsville." While Brownsville is today remembered as a black settlement, perceptions of Brown when he first arrived in Indian Territory were less about his racial identification than his (non-) national identification as a "non-native" or "intruder."  Early African American settlers like Brown bolstered their claims to freedom in the post-emancipation era by attaching themselves to American expansion, American Indians, and the acquisition of land.  In the end, however, in the face of post-emancipation Indian policy, what began in the spirit of national expansion ended as a powerful experience of racialized land loss.  Brown's story thus reveals a shift, in the long wake of the Civil War, from Indian and American to black and white national projects.