Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States by Samantha Seeley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States by Samantha Seeley Alaina E. Roberts (bio) Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States. By Samantha Seeley. (Williamsburg, Va.: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 368. Cloth, $34.95.) Historians have often traced the deliberate delineation of the American populace by analyzing the development of political or social rights in the United States. In Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain, Samantha Seeley adds to these two categories the trajectory of national removal policy. Seeley puts a welcome spin on the history of migration in North America by linking the historiographies of white western expansion, Native American history (intertribal power struggles, Euro-American invasion, and Native resistance), and African American history (colonization, Black homesteading, and legal petitions). She argues that removal, or refusal to move, was used by Native Americans and African Americans as ways to assert their identities as citizens (or their desires not to become such), express freedom and humanity, shift policy, and build community—even as white Americans attempted to use it, conversely, to “shape the racial geography of the nation” in an exclusionary manner (3). Rightfully laying bare the fallacy that forced Native American migration began in the so-called removal era, Seeley builds on the work of such scholars as Kathleen DuVal, John P. Bowes, Claudio Saunt, and Stuart Banner, among others, to demonstrate the long lineage of land cessions, theft, and violence that forced Native people out of their homes from the 1700s on. [End Page 566] The white Americans pressuring Native and Black people to move off their homelands or to not move to certain regions could be political leaders, but they also were everyday settlers using violence or the law. Furthermore, Seeley draws out the complexities in Native American movement. Native people, themselves, such as the Powhatan, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the tribal alliance that precipitated Pontiac’s War, pursued efforts to control regions, peoples, and goods, often ending in the death, enslavement, and dispersal of Native women and men. Some of these power struggles were directly related to Euro-Americans, while others were not. The book is broken up into two parts, the first dedicated to Native American history and the second to African American history (though there is some overlap within). This is a stylistic choice that allows Seeley to provide breadth on each group’s interactions with the American settler state before bringing them together to emphasize their similarities and differences in her two concluding chapters. While I appreciated part 1, part 2 does the most work to not only prove Seeley’s argument, but also bring together scholarship that is not always thoughtfully connected. Native history is nearly always conceived in terms of movement, even if only with regard to the 1830 Removal Act. On the other hand, outside of the Great Migration, the importance and commonplace nature of Black movement still seemingly has not made its way into most mainstream histories of African America. Seeley offers a way to rectify this. We know, through the work of Manisha Sinha, Claude Clegg, and others, that the movements for abolition and colonization were complex; they included both African Americans who looked to emigration as the solution to issues of racism and economic opportunity and Black people who viewed staying in the United States as a right, if not a duty. Moreover, a number of books examine Black homesteading in the 1700s and early 1800s as a way of claiming rights and citizenship and of avoiding racism. Some recent works in this vein include Anna-Lisa Cox’s The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality (2018) and Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (2021). Seeley’s analysis connects these two schools, while also broadening our view of the varied reasons African Americans saw place as an important facet of their identities, a source of protection, and something valuable enough to fight to...