Toward Cherokee Removal: Land, Violence, and the White Man's Chance by Adam J. Pratt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Toward Cherokee Removal: Land, Violence, and the White Man's Chance by Adam J. Pratt Emilie Connolly (bio) Native Americans, Indigenous, Georgia, Indian removal, Cherokee Toward Cherokee Removal: Land, Violence, and the White Man's Chance. By Adam J. Pratt. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020. Pp. 240. Cloth, $59.95.) Vigilante violence is as American as apple pie, and white men are at it again in Adam J. Pratt's often harrowing account of Georgia's role in Cherokee Indian removal. As any reader of this journal knows, the fraudulent Treaty of New Echota, signed in 1835 by a unauthorized faction of Cherokees, tore away the nation's remaining homelands, which once spanned parts of Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. It also dictated Cherokee removal to new territories in present-day Oklahoma, and three years later, the rightly notorious "Trail of Tears" began. Thousands of Cherokee citizens perished while languishing in detention camps, traveling west, or attempting to rebuild their homes in a disease-ridden and destabilized Indian Territory. As Pratt emphasizes, these federal actions against the Cherokee were significant but secondary to Georgia's aggressive and often chaotic ground war, which escalated after the Cherokee's announcement of their republic in an 1827 constitution. Scuttling a Weberian definition of state power as a monopoly on violence, Pratt shows how motley groups claimed and extended Georgia's ostensibly legitimate use of force, from vigilante groups bearing loose authorization from the governor, to a group of horse thieves branded "the Pony Club," to militias serving under federal officials, and every paramilitary variant in between. Pratt argues that terrorizing Cherokee people through bodily harm, murder, rape, and creative expropriation—forms of violence that were state-sanctioned although not always state-controlled—allowed Georgia to claim and eventually conquer Native land. Chapter 1 introduces Georgia's efforts to impose civil order and distribute unceded Cherokee territories. Pratt sees here more than a mere land grab: Georgia's actions aimed at the production of a lawful space in which free men could enjoy equal economic opportunity, or the titular "white man's chance." Chapter 2 introduces the Cherokee, including their adoption of standards of civilization pushed by United States policymakers and missionaries. Pratt here draws heavily and appropriately on historian Julie Reed, whose Serving the Nation demonstrated that timeworn principles of social welfare, rooted in Cherokee kinship practices [End Page 146] and clan law, informed newer institutions like orphanages and schools during the removal crisis (and long after).1 Pratt unfortunately trivializes Reed's argument by referring to Cherokee "community," "culture," and "traditions" as "harmonious," while also imputing to the nation "a romantic conception of nationalism, which they felt entitled them to their land" (32). Chapter 3 analyzes two vigilante groups, the Pony Club and the Slicks. Chapter 4 examines the convergence of federal and state aims in adopting a more aggressive posture against the Cherokee, who continued to defend their homelands as pressure to remove intensified. The discovery of gold in Cherokee territory, and the potential for that gold to serve Georgia's interests, plays a prominent role in this and following chapters. Chapters 5 through 7 cover specific armed groups, namely the state-authorized Georgia Guard and the Georgia militia, and discusses their role in imposing a blood-soaked "order." Drawing primarily on sources produced by Georgia officials and citizens, Pratt sees their ubiquitous states' rights rationale for Indian removal as underpinning state formation and campaign rhetoric. Georgia built institutions to market neighboring Native lands, usually a federal prerogative. Pratt treats Georgia's lottery distribution system as a "radical experiment" in "state-directed economic development" that emblematized the politics of white male equal opportunity (16). State lawmakers also planned to use Cherokee resources—land, but also gold—to supplement and ideally supplant taxation. By delving into the nuts and bolts of how Georgia seized Cherokee possessions, Pratt depicts how the fruits and controversies of this plunder shaped a political landscape already polarized by divisions between the upcountry and distant coastal regions, as well as a coalescing two-party system. In short, readers curious about how Cherokee removal provoked policy and political drama in the state of...