The 1860 Arkansas Slave has information that can be useful in researching the ancestors of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Freedmen.
The first point of importance is the identification of the slave owner and his or her residence in 1860. Secondly the census provides the ages of those enslaved that can be useful in detecting the freedmen on the Dawes Allotment rolls who identified their enslaver or their parents enslaver in 1898.
Third for those who had ancestors listed as complainants on Equity Case 7071, the 1860 Arkansas Slave Schedules gives supporting evidence of their claims of Choctaw or Chickasaw ancestry.
On the 1860 census there are approximately 3150 enslaved people among the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. This figure was used to based tribal affiliation for freedmen and their descendants at the time of the Dawes Allotment and approximately another 1500 or so were attributed to the freedmen population in 1898 and enumerated on the final rolls.
It is interesting to note that one of the biggest fears of the Chickasaws was the freedmen community would naturally increase to such a number that would possibly make the freedmen the majority population in the nation if they were given citizenship.
If we accept their theory, the numbers seem to differ on the total number of increase in the freedmen population that reflects a 50% increase by 1898. However the increase in mulatto population appears to have increased almost twofold from 917 in 1860 to about 2000 in 1898, yet no similar increase is noted in the freedmen population that did not seek citizenship based on blood. Clearly, further research on this subject is warranted.