Introduction

Abstract

No idea is more firmly ingrained in the American historical imagination than the movement of free people to the frontier after the American Revolution. Yet many people experienced the early national period not as one of free movement, but removal. Historians have carefully scrutinized both Jacksonian Indian removal and Liberian colonization. But long before the antebellum period, legislators, state and federal officials, reformers, intellectuals, and ordinary people pitched removal as a solution to the “problems” created by the American Revolution—land hunger, war debts, and slavery and emancipation. Observing the nation’s rapid growth in the late eighteenth century, they hoped to manipulate the movements of abstract populations to the ends of state formation. African Americans and Native Americans were not just candidates for removal, however. They also sought to control movement themselves, and they thwarted dispossession. Putting removal at the center of the story of the founding of the United States reveals how African Americans and Indigenous communities staunchly protected their right to remain in their homes and homelands. Most people in the early national period did not want unfettered migration—they hoped to remain in place.