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

by Claudio Saunt

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

An excellently researched and significant account of how white-supremacist ideology and the economic interests of slaveholding states shaped the political and legislative actions of 1830s America that resulted in the expulsion of Native Americans from their lands east of the Mississippi River. Saunt brings new and devastating perspective on the historical impacts of power, caste, race and corruption. In the end, implied or intended, it is hard not to see the tentacles of genocide that play out to the present. An important and resonant work compellingly told.

Winner of the 2021 Bancroft Prize

Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction

Named a Top Ten Best Book of 2020 by the Washington Post and Publishers Weekly and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2020


A masterful and unsettling history of “Indian Removal,” the forced migration of Native Americans across the Mississippi River in the 1830s and the state-sponsored theft of their lands.

In May 1830, the United States launched an unprecedented campaign to expel 80,000 Native Americans from their eastern homelands to territories west of the Mississippi River. In a firestorm of fraud and violence, thousands of Native Americans lost their lives, and thousands more lost their farms and possessions. The operation soon devolved into an unofficial policy of extermination, enabled by US officials, southern planters, and northern speculators. Hailed for its searing insight, Unworthy Republic transforms our understanding of this pivotal period in American history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393541564
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/23/2021
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	11,531
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Claudio Saunt is the Richard B. Russell Professor in American History at the University of Georgia. He is the author of award-winning books, including A New Order of Things; Black, White, and Indian; and West of the Revolution. He lives in Athens, Georgia.

Table of Contents

Introduction: "Words Are Delusive" xi

Section 1 White Supremacy and Indian Territory

Chapter 1 Aboriginia 3

Chapter 2 The White People of Georgia 27

Section 2 The View From Washington City

Chapter 3 The Debate 53

Chapter 4 "Forked Tongue and Shallow Hart" 84

Section 3 The Best Laid Plans

Chapter 5 The Plan of Operations 115

Chapter 6 The Cholera Times 143

Section 4 Financing Dispossession

Chapter 7 The Financiers 173

Chapter 8 "A Combination of Designing Speculators" 201

Section 5 From Expulsion to Extermination

Chapter 9 1836: The Southern World at War 231

Chapter 10 At the Point of a Bayonet 258

Chapter 11 'Tis No Sin 282

Afterword: The Price of Expulsion 303

Acknowledgments 323

Abbreviations 325

Notes 327

Illustration and Map Credits 381

Index 385

Editorial Reviews

"A study in power.… The parallels with the present are eerie."

David Treuer - Foreign Affairs

"Thoroughly researched and quietly outraged."

Chris Hewitt - Star Tribune

"Claudio Saunt… offers a damning synthesis of the federal betrayals, mass deportations, and exterminatory violence that defined the 1830s.… Lining up his own calculations alongside recent studies of slavery, Saunt casts indigenous expulsion and the domestic slave trade as twinned trails of tears, economic successes rooted in profound moral failures."

Caitlin Fitz - Atlantic

"A much-needed rendering of a disgraceful episode in American history that has been too long misunderstood."

Peter Cozzens - Wall Street Journal

"Unworthy Republic is a powerful and lucid account.… Saunt has written an unflinching book that reckons with this history and its legacy."

Jennifer Szalai - New York Times

"There has been insufficient ‘reckoning with the conquest of the continent,’ Claudio Saunt relays in this excellent new book. In many accounts of U.S. history, the discussion of the mass deportation of Native nations during the 1830s remains far too brief. Deportation’s legacies in law, culture, and community continue to this day and find powerful exploration in this important addition to the field."

Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone)

"Claudio Saunt sets a bold, new, and urgently needed standard for the way we should understand the history of Indian Removal.… Sweeping and astute."

Tiya Miles

Unworthy Republic is a powerful and lucid account, weaving together events with the people who experienced them up close…Saunt doesn't try to smooth over the knottier parts of his narrative, which include Northern financiers and Indigenous slave owners who profited from expulsion; families that withstood "compulsion, enticement and duplicity" to stay on their homelands in the east; and the violent punishments carried out by tribes in order to quell dissent…His account acknowledges the diverse experiences within and across Indigenous communities…Saunt has written an unflinching book that reckons with this history and its legacy.

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

★ 03/16/2020

University of Georgia history professor Saunt (West of the Revolution) investigates the origins and repercussions of the 1830 Indian Removal Act in this eye-opening and distressing chronicle. Contending that the “state-administered mass expulsion” of 80,000 Native Americans from their homelands was both “unprecedented” and avoidable, Saunt contrasts pro-deportation depictions of indigenous peoples as “impoverished drunks” facing “imminent extinction” with examples of diverse communities interwoven into regional economies in the Great Lakes and Southeast. He incisively recounts congressional debates over removal (Southern slave owners wanted to open up new territories for cotton production; Northern reformers argued that preexisting treaties should be honored) and notes that the legislation passed by a mere five votes in the House of Representatives. When Native Americans refused to emigrate, state officials turned “ordinary property and criminal law into instruments of oppression,” Saunt writes, and by the mid-1830s, federal troops were engaged in “exterminatory warfare” against indigenous families. He tallies deaths along the Trail of Tears, millions of dollars in real estate losses, and the spread of slavery into new regions across the South. Saunt presents a stark and well-documented case that Native American expulsion was a political choice rather than an inevitable tragedy. This searing account forces a new reckoning with American history. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Unworthy Republic offers a much-needed corrective to the American canon, showing how a heavy-handed president, a deadlocked Congress, and a lust for profit combined to construct a shameful national legacy. This book is timely, provocative, heart-wrenching, and original—a riveting story that invites us all to reflect on how we got where we are today."

Elizabeth Fenn

"One of the most important books published on U.S. history in recent years and should be required reading for all Americans."

Sven Beckert

"[Unworthy Republic] is a major achievement… [Saunt] manages to do something truly rare: destroy the illusion that history’s course is inevitable and recover the reality of the multiple possibilities that confronted contemporaries."

Nick Romeo - Washington Post

"[T]horoughly researched and quietly outraged."

Charles Hewitt - Star Tribune

02/01/2020

Saunt (American history, Univ. of Georgia) takes a hard, clear look at the ways Natives were dispossessed of their land in the decade after the passage of the 1830 Indian Removal Act. White administrators, legislators, and missionaries couched the deportation of 80,000 Indigenous peoples from Eastern states to territory west of the Mississippi as a so-called humanitarian effort, arguing that Natives would be better off separate from whites. In reality, to coerce them to leave, white Southerners, using laws and terrorism, deliberately dispossessed Natives of real and personal property—and their lives. Expulsion and extermination were prompted by Southerners' desires to expand cotton production and slavery into valuable Native farmland, but, Saunt contends, Southern white supremacist attitudes, secessionist threats, and northern investors' avaricious interests in land speculation were fundamental. Abysmally inadequate funding and planning, combined with Natives' refusal to leave, resulted in inexcusable loss of lives (and money) when Natives were forcefully moved west. For Saunt, this unprecedented and disgraceful state-sponsored mass deportation was not inevitable—a myth upheld by white Americans—and it resulted in a westward-moving militarized line and shameful legacy with enduring issues, yet unaddressed. VERDICT This valuable addition to the scholarship of Native American dispossession and extermination should be read by scholars and general readers alike.—Margaret Kappanadze, Elmira Coll. Lib., NY

Library Journal

★ 2019-12-23
A powerful, moving argument that the state-sponsored expulsion of the 1830s was a horrendous turning point for the Indigenous peoples in the United States.

The systematic expulsion of Native Americans—Saunt (American History/Univ. of Georgia; West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776, 2014, etc.) uses "deportation," "expulsion," and "extermination" as more accurate terms than "removal"—would not have happened without a law passed by Congress and approved by the executive branch, which occurred at the end of May 1830. The largely Southern-backed measure eagerly endorsed by President Andrew Jackson, who had made the "voluntary" movement of Native peoples west of the Mississippi a defining point of his candidacy, began implementation with money to remove the largely prosperous farming Choctaw of the South westward. These were the first peoples to be expelled under the 1830 law, which allowed their land to be appropriated by whites. It was an expensive and chaotic operation, not to mention horrendously inhumane, as those forced off their land endured miserable conditions, as observed and documented by Alexis de Tocqueville in late 1831. Other expelled peoples included the Senecas of Ohio and the Sauk and Meskwaki on the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers, and Saunt poignantly chronicles the movements of the dispossessed. When cholera broke out, it decimated these Indigenous communities on the move. The author incisively examines the various fictions propagated at the time to assuage the national conscience about the dispossession—e.g., that Native peoples were a desperate people dying out (many were quite prosperous) and that they were leaving their homes voluntarily. Moreover, the lands west of the Mississippi were not known or mapped, and the conditions were barren and uninhabitable. Saunt estimates the enormous wealth lost by the Indigenous families, the millions expended by the government, and the hideous wealth in land and resources gained by the speculators, colonizers, and cotton barons. The author also notes how these systematic mass deportations "became something of a model for colonial empires around the world."

A significant, well-rendered study of a disturbing period in American history.

Kirkus Reviews

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