Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory

While pitched as another book on the Trail of Tears, this book has both a different emphasis and a broader perspective. Saunt makes a point of discussing the removal of each of the Five Nations from the South to Indian Territory. He also gives less-thorough treatment to some dispossessions from Illinois, Indiana, and especially Ohio. He puts these dispossessions in a broader context of slavery, seeing the southern removals as freeing up land for plantation agriculture (“slave labor camps” in his terms). This obviously does not characterize the Midwest dispossessions, and Saunt does not try to explain the contradiction. An explicit ideology of white supremacy, stronger in the South but also found in the Midwest, may help connect the two cases.Within this broad perspective, Saunt provides depth by focusing on the bureaucracy of dispossession. He emphasizes the financial accounting for removal as well as the inadequate “compensation” for the Indigenous lands the federal government stole. Government clerks seemed more interested in trying to save the taxpayers’ dollars then in the human consequences of their actions.While describing the banal evils of the government clerks supporting genocide at a distance, Saunt also discusses the banks in New York and Philadelphia that helped finance the project. That finance provided essential capital to build plantations, purchase enslaved people, livestock, and seeds, and build the transportation infrastructure that would take export crops like cotton to international markets. Formerly Indigenous land produced huge amounts of cotton in the coming years.Though the economic benefits of dispossession were great for financiers and plantation owners, the project made only a small profit for the federal government. It sold the lands it took for about $80 million, while spending $75 million to expel Native peoples from their lands. That represents about a trillion dollars in today’s money, or $12.5 million in current dollars per deportee. The War Department did not use the funds to compensate the dispossessed people fairly, transport them safely, or help them build new communities. Instead it spent the money on contractors and steamboat captains at first, and then bought munitions for a brutal war of conquest.Those calculations of profit and loss do not include the inherent value of the human lives that the policy disrupted and destroyed. Removal killed a significant share of the people removed, and inflicted horrible trauma on the survivors. Though Saunt tells us about the horrors of removal, this book does not engage that legacy in any detail. While tales of bookkeeping show how ordinary people can be coopted for genocide, a fuller story would include the generations of suffering in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) at least through the Council of Fort Smith in 1865.

I was somewhat underwhelmed by Steve Inskeep's "Jacksonland," so I sought out this more recently-published book for a less folksy, more scholarly look at Indian Removal in the 1830s. And I'm glad I did.Saunt provides a very thorough, eye-opening look at the Indian Removal Act of 1830, encompassing the stories of the politicians who advocated for it, the landowners and financiers who profited from it, the Native Americans who suffered from it, and the often bungling bureaucrats who carried it out.The shorthand version of the story that most people remember is that the government decided to expel the Native Americans from their lands east of the Mississippi, and off they went on the Trail of Tears. But Saunt's work fills in all of the gaps. The Trail of Tears doesn't occur until late in his book, because not only were other tribes expelled before the Cherokee, but Saunt describes how bureaucrats first had to identify and survey the western lands to which the deportees were to be sent, figure out how to get them there, and how to pay for it all. Needless to say, it didn't go as smoothly - and many Native Americans didn't go as willingly - as advocates had hoped.One of the strengths of the book is how Saunt shows how the issues of Indian Removal and slavery were intertwined and can't be considered separately. While slavery did exist in the North to a certain extent, and Native Americans were expelled from the North as well, the South is where slavery and Indian Removal were most prevalent. And slavery, Saunt paraphrases Thomas Jefferson as saying, "turned planters into despots who were habituated to ruling but not being ruled." That's what emboldened southern slaveowners to ignore Native Americans' rights, push for the Indian Removal Act to advance their own interests, defy court rulings that didn't go their way, and even threaten secession if need be to get what they wanted.And the end result of Indian Removal was the expansion of slavery into former Native American lands, a booming cotton crop, and a corresponding increased reliance on slavery - putting the lie to the idea that slavery would eventually just die out on its own. So you could almost draw a direct line between the Indian Removal Act that strengthened slavery, and the Civil War that was needed to end it.If anything, I thought the book was too short and I would have liked for it to be even more thorough in its coverage. There's little background about the generations of mistrust between American settlers and Native Americans that set the stage for this final showdown over the remaining Native American land. European settlers who showed up in America and staked their claim may have been the initial instigators of the conflict, but Native American warriors could be pretty brutal in battle, and tended to side with the United States' enemies in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. So without the benefit of our modern-day hindsight, you could see how this would fuel the argument at the time that Whites and Native Americans simply could not peacefully coexist. Native Americans were seen as a problem that needed to be solved, so the stage seemed set for a final clash of some sort.Andrew Jackson's role in the events of the time also is not really explored - rather than being portrayed as the instigator of the Indian Removal policy, he plays a somewhat passive role in the book, as a president installed by Indian Removal advocates who needed an ally in the White House who would help push things along.But Saunt does provide a very detailed look at a very specific time period. It's unflinching, but not in a judgmental, revisionist-history, Howard Zinn kind of way. Ultimately, as compared to the triumph of the "good guys" in the Civil War that is so well-studied today, this time period a few decades earlier is little remembered by the general public, Saunt concludes, because "expulsion was the war the slaveholders won." And in this case, as in so many others, the history was written by the victors.

This book summarizes just a few reasons why people need to learn the true history of the United States. Genocide is baked into out very foundation, and to ignore that is to doom repeating these kinds of horrors.

A well written about the dark history on the relations between indigenous & white americans.