Search Results

Chapter Two examines colonizing U.S. governmental discourse surrounding the Indian Removal Act of 1830 by positioning it in the crucible of Jacksonian era ideologies. Specifically, the chapter contends that as the executive, legislative and judicial branches codified the removal policy they overcame disagreements regarding Native policies and American Indian identities. The Indian removal debate significantly reduced such uncertainties for U.S. leaders and constructed American Indians as perpetual wards of a paternal government. These colonizing identity dynamics would remain intact until the dawning of the allotment era in the 1880s. The government’s removal era rhetoric punctuated the colonized identities of itself and Native communities by fomenting a cultural hierarchy.

This chapter presents a summary of the preceding chapters. John Marshall did not foresee that the doctrine he developed would be used to support the removal of the southeastern tribes. When given his first real opportunity to do so in Worcester v. Georgia, he reversed himself, a reversal the Court subsequently ignored. The discovery doctrine survived and it facilitated Indian removal. More than 180 years later, the doctrine would still be cited to support the assertion or retention of European-derived rights to indigenous lands, not only in the United States.

Beginning in the late 18th century and accelerating in the first half of the 19th century thousands of Highlanders were pushed off their lands to make way for commercial sheep farming. Many migrated to North America. About the same time, in the first half of the 19th century, the United States moved toward and then implemented a policy of Indian Removals, forcing thousands of Indian peoples from their homelands in the East to new lands in the West. With particular emphasis on the Sutherland Clearances in the north of Scotland and the Cherokee removal from Georgia, this chapter considers both phenomena as products of economic change affecting the Atlantic world, and notes that some of the Creeks, Cherokees and other Indians who were forced west were sons and daughters of Highlanders who had experienced similar dispossession.

Many Creeks, including Katy Grayson, understood Indian removal as an object lesson in the power of race to shape their lives. The policies of the federal and state governments as well as scientific racism, propounded by some of the nation's leading scholars, suggested that dark-skinned peoples faced a daunting future in the United States. When Katy Grayson arrived in Indian Territory, she settled far from her black relatives.

The sixth chapter focuses on the political debates over the removal of the Cherokee Indians. White Georgians had few misgivings to expel the Creek Indians in the wake of the wars of the 1810s, but the same was not true with the Cherokees. Within the state, a sizable population opposed forced-relocation schemes. As migrants flooded into the Georgia upcountry, the numbers favoring Indian removal dramatically increased. These men shifted the demographic and political balance in the state. The new settlers possessed little wealth and arrived in search for land. They pressed for new priorities, especially a speedy resolution to the obstacles to white settlement on the remaining Cherokee lands and the creation of a white republic.

This chapter shows how throughout American history that the United States government, state governments, and U.S. citizens relied on Discovery principles to claim and acquire the lands and rights of the native governments and peoples who owned the lands that now comprise the United States.

This chapter provides an overview of removal-era Cherokee history. It recounts the rise of the Indian removal policy and the state of Georgia's campaign to compel the Cherokee Nation to negotiate a removal treaty. It describes Cherokee resistance to removal and the experience of the "Trail of Tears." It also offers a brief narrative of Cherokee Nation history after removal, while explaining the emergence of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina. The chapter ends by describing several ways in which Cherokees and non-Indians employed the memory of removal in writings from the late nineteenth century. These writings established themes later broadcast by twentieth century commemorations.

This chapter examines the final decades of American policy toward incorporation of lands east of the Mississippi. It first considers the federal government's continuation of land and expansion policies under the Jeffersonian Republicans from 1800 to the mid-1820s before discussing the federal government's initial incursions into the lands purchased from the French, especially Orleans Territory that became the state of Louisiana. It then explores how the addition of Louisiana, and its French settlers who were actively involved in the slave trade, exacerbated existing national debates over slavery. It also looks at the role of judges and courts of law in privileging the rights of settlers in their claims against both Native Americans and the federal government. Finally, it analyzes the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and its enforcement, with emphasis on the politics of removals of Native Americans.

This chapter describes the sequence of treaties spanning less than forty years, through which commissioners such as Thomas Hinds and Andrew Jackson employed bribery and threats to coerce the Choctaws and Chickasaws to surrender all of their tribal land in Mississippi. While contending with the relentless demands for land cessions, the tribes provided the U.S. government with military support in the Redstick War and made use of Protestant missionary schools to better prepare their children for an uncertain future. The options of the Chickasaws and Choctaws began to diminish when the Mississippi state legislature supported the federal removal effort with acts in 1829 and 1830, which placed the tribes under state law. The federal officials who orchestrated Indian removal claimed that they were saving the tribes from annihilation. This sentiment may well have been genuine, but by opening up a vast amount of agricultural land in the Southeast, Indian removal meshed conveniently with the United States’ accelerating economic engine fueled by the cotton boom and the profits of the interstate African American slave trade. Removal also assuaged racial concerns of whites who nurtured the stereotype of the drunken and intractable savage.

Chapters 3 and 4 revisit the famous case of John Dunn Hunter as a means of reading comparatively the Shawnee leader Tecumseh’s Pan-Indian movement in the Old Northwest and the ill-fated Red and White Republic of Fredonia spearheaded by Hunter near Nacogdoches, Texas, in the 1820s. Author of a popular captivity narrative and ethnographic treatise on Plains Peoples, Hunter championed Tecumseh’s Pan-Indian politics and published the only record of the latter’s speech before the Osage—only to be denounced by Cass and Clark as an imposter, his writings fabrications. Revisiting his case here, and the vehemence with which he was attacked in the 1820s, reveals the degree to which the ideological struggle to shape an emergent national narrative concerning Indian Removal in the 1820s was impacted by 19^th-Century Indian linguistics, while underscoring the challenges of working with sources of oral and manual evidence on the margins of historical verifiability.

This chapter focuses on Warner McCary's desire to escape his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, and his own painful past by reinventing himself. It explores the brickyards and barbershops of the Mississippi River port and sketches the city's complex cultural milieu—its reliance on chattel slavery, its briefly flourishing free black community, its connections to other ports, its rich indigenous life and history, and its varied cultural venues. McCary's decision to represent himself as an Indian following his manumission and departure from Natchez must be evaluated not only in the context of slavery, but also with an understanding of the influence of Native people and affairs on life in the South, including the context of Indian removal.

This chapter examines the early life of Lucy Stanton. It describes her role within early Mormonism, her time as a religious refugee during the 1830s and 1840s, and her own background as a performer. Her experiences reveal the unique place of Indians within the Latter-day Saint theology and the virulent anti-Mormonism that swept the nation during the era of Indian removal. They regarded Indians as descendants of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. This belief gained momentum because it answered both the theological question of why the Bible had not accounted for this seemingly unique and isolated population, and the political question of whether Native Americans were truly indigenous to the continent and thus had a prior right to the soil. Stanton's decision to remake herself as an Indian was rooted in both her experience of early Mormon fervor and the persecution she suffered because of it.

This chapter traces the history of black people's emancipation from slavery in Indian Territory, with particular emphasis on the 1866 treaties that leaders of the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw nations entered with the United States to abolish racial chattel slavery in each nation. From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Native American slaveholders held thousands of people of African descent in bondage, exploiting their labor and reproduction for power, prestige, and wealth. During the 1830s era of Indian Removal, the federal government forced Indian nations to leave Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, and resettled people in the region known as Indian Territory, where the nations retained limited sovereignty over their people and land. This chapter shows that the federal government's actions to end slavery after the Civil War went hand in hand with efforts to expand national sovereignty over the lands of Native Americans.

The chapter investigates how the Shawnees adapted to the new geopolitical order created by the American victory in the Twenty Years’ War. It focuses on Catahecassa and other Mekoche chiefs who strove to rebuild the impoverished and scattered nation under their leadership in northern Ohio. The chapter juxtaposes this Native project with the federal government’s “civilization program” which aimed at assimilating Indian peoples into the American society. The chapter reveals that the Mekoches combined traditional and novel ideas to reinforce the nation’s economic and political independence, often, for example, cooperating with American missionaries. Among the Mekoches’ most vocal Shawnee opponents were the Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa and his brother Tecumseh, who took up arms against the US in the War of 1812. However, it was American opposition that destroyed the Mekoche project of national rebuilding in Ohio: in the 1820s and 1830s the growing popularity of “scientific racism” and states’ rights movement led to the Indian removal and the Shawnees, too, were forced to relocate to Kansas.

In the 1830s the federal government forced one thousand Shawnees to relocate to a new reservation in Kansas as part of the Indian removal program. On the reservation the Shawnees faced repeated assaults on their sovereignty and culture by American officials and missionaries intent on assimilating the Natives. Focusing on American plans of assimilation and Shawnee resistance, this chapter examines how Joseph Parks and a small group of allied Shawnee leaders asserted a centralized control over decision-making and resources on the reservation. The chapter grounds this process in broader cultural and social transformations, such as the erosion of the clan system and Christian missionizing. It also investigates how and why some Shawnees, especially a group of traditionalists known as the Black Bobs, contested the political and economic centralization promoted by Parks and his allies.

This chapter examines how politics affected the ways that American missionaries approached their work in the Cherokee Nation. After a decade of work among the Cherokee, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions's attempts at a settlement mission appeared to have paid off well. The Cherokee seemed to be adopting the civilization that the missionaries had been pushing, and there were tangible signs of these developments. While the numbers of Christian converts were never overwhelming, Cherokee missionaries saw a regular stream of several conversions a year, more than most other Board missions did in this era. This chapter considers the moral politics of the Cherokee mission and how the missionaries became entangled with politics due to the issue of Indian removal. It also discusses the Nullification Crisis and its impact on public opinion about the mission's opposition to Indian removal. Finally, it assesses the implications of the failure of the opposition to Cherokee removal for the mission movement's vision of a global Christian imperialism.