Who Must Go?: Drawing the Borders of White Supremacy in the Early Republic

Abstract

Who Must Go?: Drawing the Borders of White Supremacy in the Early Republic Jeffrey Ostler (bio) Samantha Seeley, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States. Williamsburg, Va.: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. xi + 354 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $34.95. In this finely crafted, deeply researched, and highly original work, Samantha Seeley makes an important addition to a growing body of scholarship that is revealing essential connections between Indigenous and Black history in the early republic. Much of this work has focused on relations between Indigenous and Black people, especially in the South, where Native nations enslaved and incorporated Black people and where Blacks enslaved to whites crossed paths with Natives.1 Other work has examined evolving ideas and policies concerning the place of Indigenous and Black people in an aggressively expansionist United States.2 Seeley makes a significant contribution to the second area of inquiry, while also providing rich accounts of how Indigenous and Black people contested efforts to remove them beyond the boundaries of national belonging by pursuing what she terms “the right to remain.” When historians think of removal in the early republic what usually comes to mind is the expulsion of Native nations following the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Seeley takes a considerably broader perspective, observing that “removal was a capacious term,” applying, for example, to poor laws which required “self deportation” and the “forced relocation” of people prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Acts. Most often, however, “state and federal officials . . . directed removal toward free African Americans and Native Americans,” using it to “draw the limits of belonging based on race” (p. 7). Seeley also proposes that removal has a deep history. Rather than seeing Indian removal as emerging in the mid to late 1820s, a commonplace in the scholarship, Seeley contends that it “moved as rapidly and with such devastation in the 1830s because its foundation had been prepared over the preceding decades” (p. 23). Similarly, although the American Colonization Society (ACS), which proposed to colonize (remove) free and emancipated Blacks to Liberia, was organized in 1816, this project “distilled a variety of ideas” that had circulated since the [End Page 382] 1770s (p. 208). The opposition of free Blacks to the ACS also had deep roots, resting on the work of “Black men and women” who had “formed institutions to insist on their right to remain in the United States” in the 1790s (p. 208). Seeley amplifies her argument for a long history of removal in her first chapter, “Removal and the British Empire,” which serves as an extended preface by sketching various initiatives to control populations reaching back to the sixteenth century. One such initiative was the transport of convicts and vagrants, criminalized by poor laws, to Europe and overseas colonies. Mimicking the metropole, North American colonists themselves enacted poor laws. Colonists also needed to eliminate Indigenous people and so in parts of New England and Virginia, they turned to war to remove them, killing some, forcing others to relocate elsewhere, and sending many into slavery. At the same time, to meet labor needs without draining England’s population, the British entered the slave trade, a project that Seeley notes entailed removal of Africans from their native continent. By the late eighteenth century, British policy shifted to controlling migration through restrictions on taking up western lands in the Proclamation of 1763 and, as movements to abolish slavery gained strength, through plans to colonize emancipated slaves, possibly in Florida, possibly in the Caribbean. In this way, Seeley observes, “[r]emoval and abolition were linked from the beginning” (p. 41). The bulk of Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain is divided into two parts. The first of these, consisting of three chapters, focuses on Indigenous removal and begins with the observation that the American Revolution “created a nation dependent on Native land for its own future” and that the Rrevolution “made removal a founding project” (p. 56). Taking the usual meaning of removal, it may appear that Seeley’s chapters will focus on the uprooting of Indigenous communities from their homelands and...