American Historical Ephemera and Early Photography

1p, 8 x 10 in. (toning consistent with previous framing, light creasing at folds, adhesive remnant at top edge line on verso). Signed ("x") by Lotty James with her mark. Witnessed by William Wilson and Davis James. Stationer's mark on upper left corner of document. Docketed on verso "Bill of Sale of Ingmon."

Lotty James of Perry County, Choctaw Nation, sells "a certain negro man named Ingmon, aged about twenty two years" to Thomson McKenney of Scullyville County, Choctaw Nation, for the sum of one thousand dollars.

The woman who sold Ingmon and signed with her mark may have been Charlotte "Lotty" Colbert James (ca 1805-ca 1857), the daughter of Chicaksaw Chief Levi Colbert ("Itawamba"), who was born in the Chickasaw Nation in Mississippi before forcible removal to Indian Territory in 1841. Though the relation is not clear, Davis James may be Lotty's Choctaw husband, child, or other near relation.

Just as slavery was a divisive issue in the northern and southern United States, so too did the issue greatly impact the Choctaw Nation and other Native Americans in Indian Territory. By the 1830s, African American slavery was established in the Indian Territory. When the Civil War erupted in 1861, more than eight thousand Black men and women were enslaved in Indian Territory, comprising 14 percent of the population. Because of the large number of slaveholders among its leadership, the Choctaw people were the most strongly committed of the Indian Territory's nations to the Southern cause, and subsequently the Choctaw Nation signed a treaty with the Confederate government in 1861.

An exceptionally scarce slave bill of sale documenting a transfer of ownership between two enslavers both of whom are Native Americans from the Choctaw Nation.