Parenting & Family Quote by Stand Watie

A man headed for the historical dock, Stand Watie tries to move the trial somewhere safer: into God’s courtroom. The line is built like a defensive fortification. First, he invokes the highest authority available, not the public, not politics, not even posterity. Then he offers a carefully staged inventory of loyalties - friends, then the elevated category of “above all others my wife and children” - as if moral character can be audited through attachments. It’s intimate on purpose. In a moment when he expects his motives to be flattened into slogans, he insists on a private emotional ledger.

The sharpest blade is in the closing clause: “the oppinion of the world to contrary notwithstanding.” That old-fashioned legal rhythm (“notwithstanding”) turns the sentence into a rebuttal. He anticipates condemnation and names it without arguing with it, a rhetorical move that both concedes the noise and dismisses it. The misspelling of “opinion” and the breathless pacing only add to the sense of urgency: this is not polished statesmanship; it’s a soldier’s last word trying to survive the record.

Context matters because Watie is not just any Confederate figure; he was a Cherokee leader whose wartime choices ripped through a nation already battered by forced removal and factional conflict. The subtext is grimly modern: when public morality turns you into a symbol, you reach for family and faith as proof you’re still a person - even if history won’t agree.