As in the rest of the South, the Confederates were not listening to any talk of neutrality, and they proceeded as energetically to stifle it as they had the Union and peace advocates in the several Southern States. All the Indian Agents and officials were ardent Secessionists, and at the head of them was Superintendent Albert Pike, originally a Massachusetts Yankee, and the son of a poor shoemaker. He had gone South as one of the numerous "Yankee schoolmasters" who invaded that section in search of a livelihood, had become a States Rights Democrat, and, as usual with proselytes, was the most zealous of believers. He was a lawyer of some ability, a successful politician, an active worker in Masonry, and made much pretense as a poet. Nothing that he ever wrote survives today. [Illustration: 281-General Albert Pike] Each of the Indian Agents began enlisting men into the Confederate service and using them to impose Secession ideas upon their fellow-tribesmen who were either indifferent or actually hostile. 282 The missionaries, being mostly from the North, were strongly for the Union, and their influence had to be encountered and broken down. The Indian Agents were commissioned Colonels in the Confederate service, and were expected to raise regiments, with the Chiefs as subordinate officers. The leader among the Agents was Douglas H. Cooper, Agent for the Choctaws, a man of courage, decision and enterprise, who raised a regiment mainly of the half-breeds of the Choctaws and Chickasaws. The Cherokee regiment was almost wholly half-breeds, with Stand Waitie, a half-breed, courageous, implacable, merciless, as its Colonel. Albert Pike was rewarded for his great service in bringing the Indians into line with a commission of Brigadier-General, C. S. A., and placed in command of the whole force. Principal Chief John Ross temporarily bowed to superior force and gave his adhesion to the Southern Confederacy. A large portion of his people would not do this. They, with a similar element in the other Nations, gathered around the venerable Chief Hopoeithleyohola, nearly 100 years old, and whose span of life began before the Revolutionary War. He had been a dreaded young war leader against Gen. Jackson in the sanguinary scenes at Fort Mimms, Tallapoosa, and Red Sticks in 1813-14. When he was a boy his people were allied with the Spaniards in Florida to resist the British encroachments upon their tribal empire in Georgia. When he was a War Chief, the British at Pensacola and Mobile had put muskets and ammunition into his hands for his men to resist the North Carolinians, Georgians, Tennesseeans and Kentuckians. In every decade he had fought and treated with the grandfathers and fathers of the same men who were trying to coerce him. 283