Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt Julia Lewandoski (bio) Native Americans, Indigenous, Indian removal, Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. By Claudio Saunt. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2020. Pp. 396. Paper, $16.95.) In Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, Claudio Saunt reframes the well-known story of the deportation of Indigenous peoples beyond the Mississippi River in the 1830s. He begins by choosing new, properly descriptive words. Instead of the "artfully vague" phrase Indian removal, Saunt uses three terms—deportation, expulsion, and extermination—to capture the destructive violence of the massive federal project that forcibly moved 80,000 people west from their traditional territories (xiii). Saunt has three central arguments. First, expulsion was a departure, in its scale and brutality, from earlier U.S. Indian policies. Second, eliminating Native peoples east of the Mississippi marked a grim milestone in U.S.-Indian relations, one that would shape the next era of military violence in the American West. Third, the mass expulsions of the 1830s were not inevitable but the product of contingent political decisions, intellectual currents, and human actions. Unworthy Republic proves these points easily, but its greatest strength is as a gripping narrative account. It is an exceptionally readable and deeply human story of the political and social processes of expulsion. It begins with the nascent visions of Indian "salvation in the west" proposed by Protestant missionaries and the familiarity with the internal slave trade that made the deportation of entire human populations imaginable to southern politicians (18). Saunt examines the ascendency of President Andrew Jackson and the Congressional debates over removal, [End Page 143] conducted among a resounding chorus of other voices, Indigenous and settler, who opposed it. Next, he describes the grim bureaucracy and short-sighted logistics of the process. He movingly demonstrates how the "divergence between the government's ambitions and its limited capabilities" led to grotesque cruelty and unnecessary suffering during forced deportations (183). Removal was a federal project, but settlers colluded along every step of the way. Saunt shows the intimacy of deportation, as "U.S. citizens moved into Cherokee houses, slept in their beds, and ate out of their pots" (278). By 1836, expulsion had descended into all-out extermination in the extraordinarily violent and expensive second Seminole War in Florida. Unworthy Republic situates removal primarily in the American South and in the 1830s. While it discusses the expulsion of tribes from Ohio and the U.S.-Sauk War, most of the book concerns the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles. This is a more conventional approach than other recent work, such as Jeffrey Ostler's Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven, CT, 2019), or John P. Bowes's Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (Norman, OK, 2016), both of which broaden the geographic and temporal scope of the subject. But for Saunt, removal is a southern story for persuasive reasons. The three-fifths clause enabled removal legislation to pass Congress. The southern states who threatened the nullification of tribal sovereignty under state law gave President Jackson's federal removal plans real teeth. And slaveowners were especially determined to "leave not a single indigenous person in the region, thereby making white men the masters of every square foot of the South" (275). White southerners, even after appropriating the exceptionally fertile lands of the Creek and Choctaw, still sought to remove the Cherokee from lands not at all suited to plantation cotton. It was white supremacy, not just greed for land or profit motive, that made removal so thorough and relentless. Saunt relies on written sources to tell this multinational story. Unworthy Republic is populated by nineteenth-century Native male writers, including William Apess,John Ross, and Elias Boudinot, alongside familiar villains like Secretary of War Lewis Cass and Georgia politician Wilson Lumpkin. The book shows just how present these Indigenous voices were in mainstream nineteenth-century debates over removal. [End Page 144] In a few places...