Indian land, once reclaimed, became plantation land, with vast numbers of slaves supplanting the Cherokees who had been unceremoniously driven out of their ancestral homes.

Imagine, for example, the extreme posturing required to assert (as Georgia politicians did) that the Cherokees’ presence in the immediate vicinity of white settlers was detrimental to the Cherokees, while at the same time asserting that the black slave population’s presence was enhanced and improved by their proximity to the whites. And none of it was inevitable, as Saunt makes abundantly clear. What Claudio Saunt makes clear is the extent to which layers and layers of hypocrisy, self-interest and double dealing led to one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the United States. This is history done right, a book of extraordinary scholarship, made accessible and riveting by the author’s ability to organize his research and drive home the story. When Congress passed the act by a razor-thin margin, it authorized one of the first state-sponsored mass deportations in the modern era, marking a turning point for native peoples and for the United States. Indigenous peoples fought relentlessly against the policy, while many US citizens insisted that it was a betrayal of the nation's values. Rather, it was a fiercely contested political act designed to secure new lands for the expansion of slavery and to consolidate the power of the southern states. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government's auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence.ĭrawing on firsthand accounts and the voluminous records produced by the federal government, Saunt's deeply researched book argues that Indian Removal, as advocates of the policy called it, was not an inevitable chapter in US expansion across the continent. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington's small but growing bureaucracy.

In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River.

Unworthy republic by claudio saunt