Book Review: “Unworthy Republic” by Claudio Saunt

Unworthy Republic by Claudio Saunt

The history of the United States has many disgraceful incidents and dark periods, replete with racism, greed, and stupidity (usually all three).  But none are more dishonorable and disgusting than the “Indian Removal” of the 1830’s.

Saunt recounts the unseemly and horrible events whereby the sovereign, “civilized” tribes of the Southeast US were brutally robbed of their land and forced to relocate across the Mississippi River, in violation of treaties, legal principles, common sense and basic humanity.  The stolen lands were mostly converted to cotton plantations worked by slaves (“privately run slave labor camps” as Saunt puts it).

The story is ugly, shameful, and hard to read.  Greed and racism coupled with the power of the state were able to push through what today we would call “ethnic cleansing” (or, what today’s white supremacists would call, “replacement”).

Tens of thousands of peaceful Cherokee, Chocktaw, Creek, and Chickasaw were swarmed by invading whites, using every tactic from fraud, to threat, to outright murder;  backed by sherriffs, judges, and militias.

The US states asserted jurisdiction over the treaty defined homelands of these Indians, while also defining the Indian people as non-citizens.  This was essentially the same logic as applied to the enslaved people, and later in Jim Crow laws, and continues in various forms of legalistic disenfranchisement today.

This is twisted, unjust, and wrong; and I’d like to say that this is “Unamerican”, but for most of the history of the US, this has been the way things worked.

In the 1820s, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Federal government was powerless to enforce the treaties it had signed, since it did not have jurisdiction over the actions of the states. That’s right, the US government signed treaties, and then decided that it wouldn’t–couldn’t–actually enforce them. (This peculiar constitutional doctrine was mostly abandoned in the twentieth century, though “conservatives” seek to return to these very bad old days.)

The first tactic was a swap of lands out west for those who voluntarily ceded their land.  This was dressed up as humanitaria, swapping emperiled territory for a utopia out West.  It sounds too good to be true, it was too good to be true.  And not many fell for this nonsense.  Those who did suffered horribly on the trail, and found little but misery and starvation in the new “eden”.  (And things only continued from there.  And continued.)

When “voluntary” expulsion didn’t work, the next step was just plain theft.  Even in that period the gears of capitalism were very efficient at asset stripping, financial engineering, extortion, and fraud.  Vast fortunes were made investing in this stolen land.

Again, I’d like to say this is Unamerican, but, of course, the entire enterprise of the USA is based on taking over other people’s land.  This is as American as it gets, the founding principle of the country.

Even this chaotic land rush did not push out all the inhabitants fast enough.  So expulsion became extermination.  Those who stubbornly tried to stay and become US citizens were routed at bayonet point, herded into camps, and forcibly transported west.

It was brutal, dishonorable, and entirely successful.  Millions of acres were emptied of their Indian owners and replaced by cotton producing slave camps.  It was also a pattern for what was to come later in the century–out in the Western lands the Indians had been relocated to.

This book is somewhat timely because the heart of the story is how a determined US President can run roughshod over law, precedent, and fundamental principle; to the benefit of white supremacists allied to capitalist interests.  President Jackson was determined to evict the Indians he hated and promote slave owning white supremacy, and no amount of political resistance, morality, or even existing laws and treaties could stop him.

Again, I’d like to say this is not only “Unamerican”, but that “It can’t happen here”.  But it has happened again and again, and it is happening now.  So this is very, very American.

This is not a pleasant history.  But it is an American history, perhaps the American history.

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1. Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.

 

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