Some tribes are known to have kept black slaves and were allied with the Confederacy during the Civil War.

The war now raging is a war of Northern cupidity and fanaticism against the institution of African servitude; against the commercial freedom of the South, and against the political freedom of the States, and its objects are to annihilate the sovereignty of those States and utterly change the nature of the General Government. The Cherokee people and their neighbors were warned before the war commenced that the first object of the party which now holds the powers of government of the United States would be to annul the institution of slavery in the whole Indian country

There was some intermingling between them and depending on lineage standards for a tribe the offspring were considered fellow members despite black slaves otherwise being separate and subservient. Even before the war there was violence between them such as this slave revolt in 1842 that inspired other revolts in Indian Territory, stricter slave codes, expulsion of freedman from Indian Territory, and the establishment of a force dedicated to capturing runaways.