Elias Cornelius Boudinot

Who was Elias Cornelius Boudinot?

Elias Cornelius Boudinot was an attorney, politician and military officer in the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. Chosen as a delegate to the Arkansas secession convention, Boudinot served as a colonel in the Confederate States Army, and was elected as an Arkansas representative in the Confederate Congress.

He was the son of Elias Boudinot, editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper. His father and some other relatives were assassinated in 1839 as retaliation for having ceded their homeland in the 1835 Treaty of New Echota. The Boudinot children were orphaned by their father's murder, as their mother had died in 1836. They were sent for their safety to their mother's family in Connecticut, where they received European-American educations.

Following the Civil War, Boudinot participated in negotiations of the Southern Cherokee with the United States before the tribe was reunited; he was part of the Cherokee delegation to the US. In 1868 he and his uncle Stand Watie opened a tobacco factory, to take advantage of provisions under the nation's new 1866 treaty with the United States. It was confiscated for non-payment of taxes, and their case went to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled against them. Boudinot began to lobby for Native Americans to be granted United States citizenship in order to be protected by the Constitution.