~~~
CAMPED IN eastern Kansas on a surveying expedition, Isaac McCoy reflected proudly on his epiphany eight years earlier in June 1823, when he was struck with the idea of creating an “Indian Canaan” west of the Mississippi River. The plan would consume the rest of his life, at the expense of all else. Seven of his thirteen children would die while he was absent lobbying the federal government on its behalf. “I dare not, for fear of offending my God, neglect my duty even for the sake of Wife or children,” he confessed during one trip to Washington City, as the nation’s capital was known. Only a near-fatal wagon accident north of Philadelphia would keep the Baptist missionary from witnessing a pivotal congressional debate on his scheme.1
McCoy was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1784, but five years later his family ventured west, following other colonizers who were moving into present-day Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. Floating down the Ohio River, the McCoys passed abandoned and burned-out settlements on the right bank, territory claimed by squatters and speculators but still contested by the original Algonquian and Iroquois owners. The family settled on the opposite side of the river in rural Kentucky. The United States had only recently wrested the land from Shawnee people, and as late as 1795, the leading citizens of nearby Louisville had pooled their money to offer bounties “for every Indian scalp taken in the county.” But, compared with the violent region to the north, the indigenous population had dwindled, and confrontations between natives and newcomers had subsided, though not entirely disappeared.2
Perhaps inspired by his father, who began sermonizing after the move west, McCoy imagined from a young age that he was destined for great things, though he had no inherited wealth or any formal schooling. As he recalled, he was a serious child who “imbibed an unusual aversion to Dancing” and condemned the frivolous pursuits of his siblings. His only fistfight, he claimed, occurred when other children maligned him as a Methodist, an insult that was intolerable to the young and uncompromising Baptist.3
After much agitation and anguish in his teen years, McCoy began preaching, moved to the “strange and wicked place” of Vincennes, Indiana, on the banks of the Wabash River, and took a position as the town jailor. This lowly station did not damage his sense of self-importance. He interpreted a swarm of green flies passing by the jail as a sign of displeasure from God himself. During one illness, he concluded he had a gift for poetry, a conceit that did not subside with the fever, for he later boasted that composing verse was “not so difficult as I had always conceived.” In 1817, ailing and burdened by his own mortality, the thirty-three-year-old wrote a 479-page autobiography. He sent the manuscript to his brother-in-law, conceding that it was “astonishing” for someone as little known as himself to pen “extracts” of his life.4
McCoy survived the health scare and went on to discover his great calling, saving the Indians. He conducted missionary work among the Miamis, Odawas, Potawatomis, and other native residents in Indiana and Michigan. McCoy’s firsthand experience with indigenous westerners gave him a well-founded disdain for the East Coast officials who designed national policy with minimal familiarity with the rest of the continent. Even the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions, the organization that oversaw his work from its Boston headquarters, earned his scorn. Its members, he complained, were “modelling affairs” in the West, though they knew little more of the subject “than they did of the geography of the moon.”5
The counterpart to McCoy’s contempt for easterners was a stubborn insistence that he knew best, despite his exposure to only a small fraction of the diverse indigenous peoples living within the boundaries of the United States and its territories. He dismissed his antagonists as “pious and well-meaning” but “mistaken and obstinate,” a good description of McCoy himself. “How grossly mistaken are those writers who would have the world believe that the Indians are quite a virtuous people!” he declared. Native people were impoverished drunks, he insisted, mostly through the fault of “the very filth of civilized society,” the white Americans who exploited them at every turn. McCoy had witnessed emaciated mothers digging for roots for their children, men and women surviving for days on boiled weeds alone, and, in the winter, “half-naked” villagers immobilized with frozen arms and legs. From his missionary outpost, he recorded every act of drunken violence and every senseless murder, a bleak catalog of sins that served to confirm his view of human nature. “How depraved must the people be,” he exclaimed, “whose general character is drawn by such scandalous vices as we sometimes record in our Journal!”6
Even the success stories, the individuals who were “civilized” and “Christianized,” were “sheep for the slaughter” or at best “left to the rapacity of noxious vermin.” Caught between their “barbarous countrymen” and the remorseless racism of white Americans, they had no place of refuge. They were “hunted like a partridge on the hills,” chased with “canine assiduity,” and entangled in “a thousand intrigues and miseries.” McCoy saw only darkness: “The great mass have become more and more corrupt in morals, have sunk deeper and deeper in wretchedness, and have dwindled down to insignificance or to nothing, like the plant that is shaded to death by the thousands of the surrounding lofty trees of the woods.” Native peoples, he declared, will end in “total extermination.”7
Fortunately, on that June day in 1823, McCoy decided to dedicate his life to a “scheme” for the “national salvation of the Indians” that would transform the U.S. relationship to the continent’s longtime inhabitants. The plan was as obvious as it was simple. The United States would concentrate “the perishing tribes in some suitable portion of the country” and guarantee the land to them “forever.” Through the dedicated efforts of government agents and missionaries, displaced people in this inland protectorate would be instructed in “morality, literature, and labour,” and they would eventually cultivate a flourishing colony. They would become farmers, shopkeepers, teachers and principals, doctors, jurists, sheriffs, statesmen, and ministers, filling almost every conceivable role that existed in civilized society—except for the most powerful political positions, which were reserved for white Americans.8
That was not all. One day, indigenous people would be united in “one body politic,” McCoy imagined, and constitute “an integral part of the community of the United States.” Like the existing states, “Aboriginia,” as McCoy called his fanciful creation, would therefore be divided into counties and municipalities, with each tribe making up a separate district or county. At the heart of this Indian Canaan, sixty square miles would be set aside as the seat of government, “uniting the radii of affection of surrounding tribes, and diffusing in return the blessings of science.” There, the business of government would unfold and, in McCoy’s fervid and buoyant imagination, the diverse tribes would meet around a “central council fire” to smoke the pipe of peace and “mingle gratitude to God with the ascending fumes.” Was McCoy too optimistic? He denied it: “I am not enthusiastic, but form my conclusions rationally.”9
McCoy was not the first to propose a trans-Mississippi reserve for native people, though he was certainly the most zealous. Immediately following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Thomas Jefferson drafted a constitutional amendment to give Congress the right to exchange the newly purchased territory for indigenous homelands east of the Mississippi. Though Jefferson abandoned the amendment as unnecessary, he and his immediate successors in the White House encouraged the exchange of lands, contending that the scheme would protect native peoples until they could join the ranks of the civilized. Some isolated native communities accepted offers to decamp in the 1810s and 1820s. Andrew Jackson, still a decade away from the White House, negotiated one such treaty targeting the Cherokees in 1817. (On that occasion, only a few thousand individuals moved west of the Mississippi, largely to escape the constant pressure to conform to the U.S. civilizing policy.) Lewis Cass, then serving as the governor of Michigan Territory, concluded a similar treaty with a community of Delaware people a year later. Territorial cessions, if not actual expulsion, continued apace; in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the indigenous land base shrank by 600,000 square miles, an area roughly the size of Alaska.10 Nonetheless, these attempts to convince longtime easterners to move west were piecemeal and sporadic. Jefferson’s trans-Mississippi colony of indigenous people remained a distant vision.
Something had to be done. Expecting a sympathetic hearing from the governor of Michigan Territory, McCoy floated his idea first to Lewis Cass, who would later become President Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war. The “asylum,” located “somewhere in the extensive regions of the west,” he explained, would bring uniformity to the unsystematic efforts of the federal government. The benefits were legion: happy Indians, flourishing arts and sciences, and a federal government relieved of a burdensome and hostile population. “Is it practicable?” McCoy asked Cass.11
~~~
McCOY FAILED to pose the same question to the people subject to expulsion. In fact, most Native Americans had no desire to leave their homes. By the 1820s, they had been trading with newcomers and living next to them for several generations, and few of them believed, as McCoy insisted, that they could not survive amid people of “other colour.” Even between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River (then the nation’s Northwest), residents were reluctant to abandon their lands, though the United States had spent three decades waging war against them. In that region between 1800 and 1830, native peoples ceded territory totaling 140,000 square miles, an area the size of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois combined, and the U.S. population rose from 50,000 to 1.5 million. The numbers, as astonishing as they are, do not capture the magnitude of the loss, which affected every realm of indigenous society, from the mundane to the sacred. Yet the 25,000 native people who continued to reside in the region north of the Ohio wished to stay put. Meehchikilita, a Miami leader, insisted to U.S. officials in 1826 that they wanted to live with white Americans, “like brothers, and sell and exchange our property as we choose.” A decade later, under pressure to move west, Potawatomis politely refused. “We are poor,” they explained, “but love our little fields in the Country and are not yet willing to abandon them.”12
Their refusal to depart willingly resulted from an attachment to the land, a skepticism of U.S. claims that expulsion was best for them, and a persistent doubt that Indian Territory was the paradise it was made out to be. Nor did native peoples in the Northwest believe that they were quite as wretched as U.S. officials insisted. In Indiana, John Metoxen, a Stockbridge Mahican missionary, noted that his people were “farmers and macanics,” who possessed “considerable farms.” “It is my true wish and desire to be settled in some part of the world whare I can Injoy the Blessings of the soil that Gave me Birth,” he wrote, “and see my Children and family connection and all nations of people Injoying the same Priviledge with helth.” Even some U.S. agents had to admit that the dire reports of imminent extinction were inaccurate. After a tour of indigenous communities in Ohio in 1830, one official commented on the bumper crop of corn and added, “I . . . can truly say that I have never known them so industrious as they are at present.” Another agent, who visited the Wyandot community in northern Ohio, concluded that the residents were thriving. He underscored that it would be “a cruelty” to expel them. In some cases, indigenous people compared favorably with their American neighbors. A visitor to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula found that the Odawas were “far better” dressed than the U.S. citizens who surrounded them.13
Native nations in the Northwest in 1830 who were potential targets for expulsion.
The diversity of indigenous peoples—hunters, farmers, beggars, drunks, teetotalers, Catholics, Methodists, animists—belied the simplistic narrative that U.S. officials fed the public. Native Americans in the Northwest lived in wigwams and lean-tos as well as clapboard houses with windows, brick chimneys, and wood flooring—materials that unrepentant U.S. citizens would later cart away as the dispossessed were escorted out of town by state militia. Some native people proved to be as enterprising and opportunistic as their market-savvy neighbors. When white Americans began charting a major thoroughfare through Potawatomi and Miami lands in Indiana and Michigan in the 1820s, native leaders recognized the several economic benefits. The road would facilitate their travel, furnish a market for their game, and stimulate trade. Accordingly, they successfully fought for a degree of control over the road survey to ensure that it passed by their largest villages. (In this way, they resembled the many twentieth-century communities in the United States that lobbied for the placement of highway interchanges.) When federal officials later pressured them to move west, Potawatomis were quite clear about their position in the region. Many white Americans wanted them to remain, asserted a Potawatomi leader named Red Bird. “They hunt with us and we divide the game,” he said, “and when we hunt together and get tired we can go to the white men’s houses and stay.” “We wish to stay among the whites,” he concluded, “and we wish to be connected with them, and therefore we will not go.”14
To salve their consciences, U.S. citizens maintained that their inability to live together with indigenous people was a law of nature rather than a choice. The purported law justified every act of dispossession, and every act of dispossession furnished yet more proof of nature’s inevitable course. Nonetheless, the law did not apply to all areas of the nation, an inconvenient fact that most U.S. citizens chose to ignore. Wyandots in Ohio spoke of the “terms of intimacy” and “ardent friendship” between themselves and U.S. citizens. To their north, Odawas joined with American allies to create the Western Michigan Society to Benefit the Indians, a lobbying group that reflected the shared economic interests of natives and newcomers. “We could not have done without the Indians,” recalled one early colonist. “They were our market men and women.” Odawas picked cranberries and huckleberries that were consumed in Buffalo and harvested maple sugar that was sold in New York City and Boston. One group of Odawas even successfully bid on a county road contract; others provisioned U.S. troops stationed in Detroit. After ceding territory to the United States, they used the proceeds to purchase land from the General Land Office, a clever way of placing their title on the same solid footing as that of their white neighbors.15
There is no need to romanticize the situation in the Northwest before the United States embarked on its determined and deadly campaign to eliminate native residents from the region. Some indigenous people were deeply impoverished. Alcohol consumption was rampant, as McCoy documented religiously—though it is not clear whether Native Americans consumed more than U.S. citizens at the time. Native communities were under heavy pressure to give up their lands. And yet most people insisted on remaining. Like the Wyandots in northern Ohio, they hoped that the U.S. president would “maintain them in the peaceable and quiet possession of that spot for ever.”16
In the U.S. Southeast, over sixty thousand native people, divided among the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole nations, were equally unwilling to abandon their homelands. William Hicks and John Ross, leaders of the Cherokee Nation, called the scheme championed by the federal government a “burlesque,” a word that perfectly captures the policy’s combination of starry-eyed utopianism and vicious cynicism. (John Ross, who had a masterful command of the English language, skewered his antagonists in the federal government, including Andrew Jackson, on more than one occasion. He once proposed a novel solution to the crisis surrounding their lands: If President Jackson removed white Georgians, he observed, “ere long the difficulties . . . would be amicably adjusted.”) Few indigenous Americans were fooled by the boundless promises of the United States. A group of skeptical Chickasaw leaders cast doubt on President Jackson’s offer of western land “as long as the grass grows and water runs.” Those were “his own words,” they gibed, unimpressed with the president’s patronizing adoption of indigenous imagery about grass and water. They instead preferred the formal legal expression, “in fee simple,” which describes the strongest form of property ownership in the United States. “If we go,” asked one prescient Choctaw leader, “how long first will it be when we shall be told to go a little farther?” “You are too near me,” the leader imagined U.S. officials would say after Choctaw families had crossed the Mississippi River. “The land here is ours,” white Americans would once again claim, “and we must have it.”17
The astonishing resilience and adaptability of native southeasterners made it difficult for federal officials to perpetuate stories of their wretchedness and despair, though eventually U.S. policies would create the very conditions that they were supposedly designed to alleviate. The Seminole people of Florida had weathered a series of invasions in the early nineteenth century—including one launched in 1817 by an impulsive general named Andrew Jackson—but had nonetheless built thriving ranching and farming communities. In 1823, one visitor to the Withlacoochee River, west of present-day Orlando, described bountiful fields filled with rice and corn plants. “I am satisfied that no planter in Florida,” he wrote, “can boast of so good a crop in proportion to the quantity of land planted.” A treaty that same year forced Seminole families onto less fertile lands but did not shake their determination to remain in the region.18
Native nations in the South in 1830 who were potential targets for expulsion.
In Alabama and Mississippi, many Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw families were tightly woven into the regional economy. “Europeans would be surprised to hear that many of these people have large property in slaves and cattle,” wrote an admiring British visitor, who noted that a few individuals possessed extensive ranches and upwards of thirty slaves. Cherokee leader James Vann, who owned a stately house that still stands on the site of his former eight-hundred-acre plantation in north Georgia, possessed over one hundred slaves. Said by one acquaintance to be “aristocratic, impetuous, and full of chivalric daring,” Vann was unusual in the scale of his possessions but not in the act of slaveholding. Wealthy Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole citizens, adapting to the ways of white southern elites, were engaging in their own version of African American enslavement. Over 5 percent of the 66,000 residents of those nations were unfree.19
Like the majority of their white neighbors, however, most native people sustained themselves without expropriating the labor of others. In rural U.S. households, men worked in the fields, tilling the soil with the help of plows and draft animals, while women tended to gardens, spun yarn and wove cloth, cooked, cleaned, and milked cows. Most indigenous people divided their responsibilities differently. Drawing on traditional subsistence practices as well as foreign technologies, men hunted, but they did so with guns instead of bows and arrows; women farmed with handmade hoes, even while fashioning garments out of European cloth rather than domestically harvested deerskins. The items they acquired in trade—calico blankets, needles, shirt buttons, handkerchiefs, bridles, butcher knives, gunlocks, and the like—are evidence of a hybrid economy.20
The ways of living pursued by indigenous Americans and U.S. citizens in the Southeast increasingly overlapped, a trend that John Clark, the governor of Georgia, found alarming, since the longer the two peoples were “suffered to intermix,” the more difficult it would become for the state to appropriate native lands. Choctaws were actually “pretty good neighbors,” admitted one federal agent, recalling that they sold game to the U.S. outpost in the area. The women, he said, were even willing to work in his fields for a reasonable wage.21 While U.S. officials would continue to complain about the bonds forming between their citizens and native peoples, they also insisted with growing urgency and dwindling evidence that the two ways of living were fundamentally irreconcilable. In truth, only one thing was truly irreconcilable: native and white ownership of the same land.
~~~
POLITICIANS WHO advocated for the expulsion of native peoples, whatever their deeper motives, often based their public pronouncements on two related and seemingly humanitarian tenets. The indigenous population, they asserted, was suffering an inevitable and rapid decline. That said, they went on to argue magnanimously that the fertile, well-watered, and generally desirable land west of the Mississippi would save native peoples from their tragic demise in the East. Taken together, these assertions ensured the happy convergence of self-interest and philanthropy, permitting U.S. citizens to dispossess native peoples and feel righteous about it. Neither belief was well-founded.
The decline of the native population was an acknowledged “law of nature,” according to Thomas Jefferson. It was “a great pity,” the Virginia planter and former president wrote, “and indeed a scandal that we let that race of men disappear without preserving scarcely any trace of their history.” Indians were dwindling, “dispirited and degraded,” agreed Senator John Elliott of Georgia in 1825. Elliott invoked a favorite metaphor: “like a promontory of sand, exposed to the ceaseless encroachments of the ocean, they have been gradually wasting away before the current of white population.” (Melting snow often served the same illustrative purpose.) Soon only a few survivors would remain to brood over their misfortunes or to look “in despair on the approaching catastrophe of their impending doom,” observed Secretary of War James Barbour a year later. Their imminent extinction—that was the preferred word—was described so frequently that its inevitability became an unquestioned fact, appearing in school readers, daily newspapers, and popular cultural productions such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and the hit Broadway play Metamora.22
What lay behind the regrettable decline of the continent’s first inhabitants was something of a mystery, though the subject occupied some of the brightest minds of the time. Jefferson singled out the practice of native women accompanying men in war and hunting. As a result, he observed, “child-bearing becomes extremely inconvenient to them.” Thomas Malthus, the minister turned fatalistic population theorist, suggested that the problem was rooted in the inferiority of hunting to agriculture—never mind that indigenous Americans farmed as productively as Malthus’s neighbors in Surrey, England. Benjamin Rush, America’s leading physician, attributed the primary reason to “the extensive mischief of spirituous liquors.” None of the explanations was wholly adequate. “The cause is inherent in the nature of things,” concluded the incurious superintendent of Indian Affairs.23 Regardless of the cause, it was obvious that indigenous and white Americans could not coexist.
As with so many manifest truths, this one was wrong. Since the arrival of the first European colonists, indigenous populations had indeed declined as a result of disease, warfare, and out-migration. They were halved between 1600 and 1700 and then reduced again by a third between 1700 and 1800. “Many different groups of brown people stopped during that time,” observed the Cherokees, “and today there are just a few that can be seen.” In the Northeast, they lamented, “The Indian people . . . are now just about gone.”24
And yet by the early nineteenth century, the number of indigenous Americans in the East was on the rise or at least holding steady. That is true for the Southeast as well as for the Northwest and reflects the complex interaction of variables that affect human health, reproduction, and mortality. The imprecise figures that support such a conclusion are admittedly incomplete but inspire more confidence than the opinions of nineteenth-century experts, who usually substantiated their claims with nothing more than their own deeply held sense of indigenous degeneracy. “If any thing is certain,” declared William Harper before the South Carolina Society for the Advancement of Learning, it is that “savage and civilized man cannot live together.” (In his strolls around Charleston, Harper had apparently seen slaves “possessing Indian hair and features,” proving to the wealthy planter that, to save indigenous Americans from extinction, the “benevolent course” was to enslave them.) The few methodical efforts to estimate populations often produced dismal or no results, as one U.S. army survey admitted in the course of collecting “much important matter . . . both Topographical and Statistical” about the Cherokee Nation. Counting people, the engineers explained, was “impossible,” since local residents wisely concealed themselves at the approach of the surveying crew.25
Nonetheless, most white Americans held an unshakeable belief that native peoples were on the decline. John Ross admitted that in the Cherokee Nation “our population at present is small,” but, he added, “it is increasing as rapidly as could be expected.” Elias Boudinot, the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, the nation’s national newspaper, could barely contain his frustration with the advocates of deportation who circulated specious population numbers. “We repeat again,” he remonstrated in 1828, “that the Cherokees are not on the decline in numbers and improvement.” Their neighbors to the south, the Creeks, also bitterly objected to the parade of lies that distorted the debate. “To the public thro’ newspapers and ingenious pamphlets fabricated by men who style themselves our friends and reformers,” Creek leaders told the U.S. Congress, “we are represented as experiencing rapid diminution and decline in population, and to escape which, it is said we are anxious to emigrate to that country so much eulogised by the friends of Indian colonization.” “It is due to our Nation,” they asserted, “to contradict these statements calculated to mislead the minds of good men.”26
White Americans who continued to insist on the imminent extinction of their neighbors often held the equally unfounded but stubborn belief that native peoples would find salvation in the West. For a time, the advocates of expulsion argued that refugee camps in the West would be akin to a trans-Mississippi Jamestown or Plymouth Rock, the storied British colonies that had planted the seeds of civilization on the Atlantic Coast two centuries earlier. Aboriginia would animate the minds and harness the energy of dispossessed peoples, lifting them out of dependency and savagery.27
In this way, plans for the expulsion of Native Americans resembled another endeavor that targeted nonwhite peoples in the United States. In January 1817, a small group of well-connected reformers based in New Jersey and Washington City had founded the American Colonization Society (ACS), an organization dedicated to the quixotic mission of shipping African Americans to Africa, where the homesteaders were to establish a model colony that would both uplift them and help civilize Africans. In turn, the United States would be rid of its troublesome free black communities and, in the ACS’s most ambitious projections, relieved of its enslaved population. The conservative Supreme Court justice Bushrod Washington, the nephew of George Washington, quickly signed on as the organization’s first president, lending it an aura of prestige and legitimacy.28
The parallels between the colonization of native and enslaved peoples were too obvious to ignore. “The coincidence . . . is very impressive,” wrote Isaac McCoy, who was a charter member of the Indiana Auxiliary American Colonization Society. Just like native peoples, “Africans” had been degraded by white Americans, he observed; colonization would place both groups “on the same footing” with U.S. citizens and give them “the same opportunities of improvement.” As an added benefit, as Thomas Jefferson wrote of African American slaves in 1821, “deportation” would free up land for white laborers. In March 1825, Congress even considered colonizing “free people of colour” west of the Rocky Mountains, reviving a proposal that predated the ACS. Together with the relocation of native peoples, the proposal would have turned the continent’s demographic distribution into a bizarre manifestation of racial obsession, with “black” people in the far West, “tawny” people in the Midwest, and “white” people in the East.29
Despite the conservative leanings of the ACS—it condemned any and all interference with the rights of slave owners—southern planters soon turned vehemently against the organization. The tipping point occurred in 1822, when South Carolina officials arrested and executed thirty-seven African Americans and exiled forty-three others, punishment for an aborted uprising organized by a free black carpenter named Denmark Vesey. How much of the conspiracy existed solely in the imaginations of fearful Carolina planters and how much was real remains a matter of debate. Regardless, after the executions, slave owners demonized the ACS. The organization, they charged, raised the hopes of African Americans, intruded on the power of masters over their slaves, and even fomented rebellion. Following in South Carolina’s footsteps, in 1827 Georgia’s General Assembly passed a resolution condemning the ACS, adopting the same excessive language it used to discuss Indian affairs. The deportation plan was “wild, fanatical and destructive,” it declared, and “ruinous to the prosperity, importance, and political strength of the southern states.” Those who interfered in Georgia’s “local concerns and domestic relations” were guilty of either “cold-blooded selfishness, or unthinking zeal.”30
How could the colonization of African Americans be “wild, fanatical and destructive” while that of native peoples was just and humane? Constitutional principles, the favorite recourse of southern politicians, were unhelpful in this instance. Instead, white southerners and their northern allies devised an argument based on proximity. Native peoples imbibed all of the vices of U.S. citizens, they claimed, while slaves absorbed their virtues. In 1825, John Elliott of Georgia laid out the feeble rationalization on the floor of the Senate. Two “independent communities of people” who differed in “color, language, habits and interests cannot long subsist together,” he asserted, for the more powerful would always destroy the weaker. He was painting a “somber picture,” he admitted, but it was drawn from “real life.” By contrast, communities that “subsist together,” such as slaves and their southern masters, “increase and better their condition.” “In these instances,” wrote the owner of over one hundred enslaved people, “the mutual dependence which exists, creates, in some sort, a community of interests.” In sum, self-interest made it possible for these wealthy planter-politicians to convince themselves that it was best for African American slaves to be held close to their masters and for native peoples to be kept far away. Their expansionist ambitions seemed legitimated by an improbable convergence of the laws of nature. For Elliott and his planter allies, it appeared logical and inevitable, not greedy and self-serving, that the free inhabitants of lands they coveted for cotton production would be summarily exiled and replaced by an unfree labor force. In their minds, both dispossession and enslavement were acts of humanity.31
Elliott’s argument was preposterous on two accounts. First, although slave owners insisted that the malnourished, poorly clothed, and, by force of law, illiterate people who labored unwillingly on plantations were better off for it, there was no “community of interests.” The Denmark Vesey mass executions had powerfully illustrated the point in 1822. Second, just nine years before Elliott’s speech, the superintendent of Indian Trade had told Congress that every single case of native “advancement” could be “traced to their contiguity to, and intercourse with the whites.” Elliott, who was no authority on the subject, now told his fellow senators that the exact opposite was true. Later, the Cherokee leader John Ross would pen an incisive response to this favorite argument of the dispossessors. If indigenous people were suffering, it was not because of “the mere circumstance of their contiguity of a white population,” he said. Rather, it was because of the policies of white men, “when dictated by avarice and cupidity.”32
At heart, the plan for native salvation in the West was deeply cynical, but white Americans managed to cloak their cynicism in a cheery optimism. James Barbour, the secretary of war, asserted in 1828 that “collocating the Indians on suitable lands west of the Mississippi” would “produce the happiest benefits upon the Indian race.” The land was “admirably adapted” to the interests of native peoples, reported Wilson Lumpkin, a leading proponent of expulsion, who represented Georgia in the House of Representatives. It was “fine country,” Lewis Cass, the secretary of war in 1832, assured Creek leaders. More broadly, in the words of the House Committee on Indian Affairs, the deportation of native people to the West would allow the United States to atone for “wrongs inevitably incident to the settlement of the country by the white race.”33
Unfortunately, white Americans knew almost nothing about the land that was to be set aside as Indian Territory. Even the basics remained a mystery. Where exactly would the dispossessed be relocated? “No certainty can be arrived at, until the country is explored,” admitted Thomas McKenney, the superintendent of Indian Affairs, in 1826. Ignorance ruled the day. “The question occurs to us, as it does to the Indians,” he wrote, “Where is that home? Nobody can answer.” Paeans to expulsion stumbled over this most essential of questions. One map from 1828 exhibited both the promise and the peril involved in transporting people to the region. Drafted by William Clark, Meriwether Lewis’s companion in the 1803–5 transcontinental journey and now the superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis, it was largely a blank slate, inviting federal officials to project their fantasies onto it. Across the empty space, a War Department employee penciled in who might move where: “Indian Title Extinguished by the Quapaw Treaty of 1818,” “Presumed location Kansas under the Treaty of 1825,” “Choctaw Lands,” and (in pen) “Boundaries proposed for the Cherokees in Red Ink.”34
One congressman from Ohio summed up the absurdity of the situation. Do advocates of expulsion know anything about the land west of the Mississippi? he asked. “Their answer is, no; we know nothing about these matters, but first adopt the scheme—provide that the Indians must remove West of the Mississippi—let us decide that we will drive them from their lands which we want to occupy; and then, Sir, we will send our agents and commissioners with the Indians, to examine this country.”35
What little they did know about the region undercut the optimistic picture they painted. The first official report on the area, written by Zebulon Pike in 1806–7, predicted that the land would become an “American Sahara.” It was worthless for agriculture but, in Pike’s mind, perfect for native peoples. “I believe that there are buffalo, elk, and deer sufficient on the banks of the Arkansas alone, if used without waste,” he wrote, “to feed all the savages in the United States territory one century.” In 1820, U.S. army explorer Stephen Long confirmed Pike’s gloomy assessment. It was “unhabitable” by farmers, he wrote after traversing the region, though “peculiarly adapted as a range for buffaloes, wild goats, and other wild game.” Long fixed his description in the American imagination by printing “Great American Desert” across his map, which was soon published and widely distributed. Even the normally exuberant Isaac McCoy admitted that the land left something to be desired, though he still insisted that it was “very good, and well adapted to the purposes of Indian settlement.” The greatest defect—“and I am sorry that it is of so serious a character,” he confessed—was the lack of timber. A sober assessment by one federal official concluded simply that the region’s resources had been “greatly exaggerated.”36
~~~
McCOY’S “GREAT SYSTEM” to expel native peoples and create a segregated territory in the West departed from established policy.37 Since the Washington administration, the United States had pursued the goal of civilizing native people in place. Federal agents fanned out across the eastern seaboard, from upstate New York to central Mississippi, to instruct native peoples how to live right. They told indigenous men to abandon hunting and take up the plow, and they advised women to give up hoe farming in favor of producing homespun clothing. These deeply rooted traditional practices had proven to be reliable methods of providing sustenance for generations, however, and native peoples did not welcome guidance from newcomers, whose authority as federal agents did not impress them. In many instances, only a combination of bribery, threats, and environmental degradation convinced villagers to pick up the plow and the loom.
Church groups assisted the federal government by establishing missions to instruct indigenous Americans in English and, more to the point, in the Bible. Well-meaning but paternalistic benevolent societies collected donations to support the labors of missionaries, sending goods that salved the conscience of those who lived on land that had long ago been taken from native peoples. The Female Aboriginal Relief Society of Newton, Massachusetts—then as now a center of affluent activists—shipped a box to Niles, Michigan, filled with twelve women’s gowns, seven pairs of pantaloons, two jackets, four shirts, one comforter, and thirty yards of white cotton, plus some needles, pins, thimbles, buttons, and tape for the use of the Potawatomis. The recipients surely appreciated the donations, appraised at $30, but perhaps not as much as they valued missionary schooling, which many native people embraced, if only for its practical benefits. Though they had to balance their desire for literacy with their dislike of the proselytizers who provided the instruction, the Xs they placed on treaties constantly reminded them of the disadvantages that they faced in their negotiations with the United States. One group of Potawatomis complained, “We have none in our nation who is capable of attending to our business.” It was true, agreed Isaac McCoy. Without a formal education, “They could not compete with our government.”38
The civilizing plan was ethnocentric and self-serving. In its worst form—as when Thomas Jefferson admitted in a confidential letter that he desired to separate native people from their lands for their own good—it was also paternalistic and cynical. Indeed, the plan to civilize native people could bleed into a desire to erase them. Nonetheless, indigenous Americans understood it as the basis of their relationship with the United States and the governing principle of their treaties, and whether the motives of U.S. officials were nefarious or benevolent, native peoples used and manipulated the civilizing policy for their own ends. The president was their “great father,” a term often used by U.S. agents and native peoples alike, and he was therefore obligated to help them. “Be happy, and fear nothing from your Great Father,” Superintendent of Indian Affairs McKenney assured a party of Wyandot leaders in 1825. “He is your friend, and will never permit you to be driven away from your lands.”39 In short, the so-called civilization policy was distinct from the political and bureaucratic operation in the 1830s to deport tens of thousands of people.
For three decades, the civilizing plan persisted in various guises. In late 1816, the superintendent of Indian Trade confidently told the chair of the House Committee on Indian Affairs that “an enlarged and liberal policy” would serve to hasten the transition from “a savage to a civilized state.” The Creek, Cherokee, and Chickasaw people already excelled at agriculture and wore homespun clothing, he said. (In addition to demonstrating in this instance that women were using spinning wheels and looms, clothing had a charged symbolic value, as it still does today.) Success was not limited to the Southeast. Shawnee and Delaware residents south of the Great Lakes were also “mostly attired as we are” and, judging by their commercial acumen, exhibited a “capacity for the pursuits of civil life.” In all cases, the superintendent of Indian Trade concluded, “contiguity” and “intercourse” with whites were the key to success.40
Even the staunch racist and segregationist John Calhoun, who served as the secretary of war between 1818 and 1825, had to admit that the civilizing plan was largely successful, if still unfinished. No champion of autonomy and sovereignty when it came to native nations, he nonetheless spoke positively of the “humane & benevolent policy of the Government, which has ever directed a fostering care to the Indians within our limits.” “This policy,” he stated in 1824, “is as old as the Government itself.” The Cherokees were an unqualified success, he wrote, before predicting that “in a short time the advances of the Creeks” would be just as satisfactory. That same year, the House Committee on Indian Affairs felt that it was scarcely worth questioning the value of U.S. policy. “It requires but little research to convince every candid mind that the prospect of civilizing our Indians was never so promising as at this time.” Indeed, the progress of civilization “may be more rapid than any can now venture to anticipate.” Thomas McKenney, the superintendent of Indian Affairs, expressed similar confidence. “It has ceased to be a matter of doubt among intelligent people that Indians can be Civilized and Christianized,” he wrote. “The proofs have multiplied so of late, as to convince the most skeptical.”41
For state-sponsored expulsion to seem necessary, the prospect of civilizing “our Indians”—said to be never so promising in the mid-1820s—had to yield to the harrowing counterview of “approaching catastrophe” and “impending doom,” as the secretary of war James Barbour dramatized it. And the plan had to seem practicable rather than absurdly ambitious. The federal government employed fewer than 11,000 individuals, and the vast majority of them, approximately 8,000, delivered the mail and would be of no use deporting families. Only some 600 worked in Washington City. Likewise, the entire armed forces, responsible for guarding a 1,500-mile western frontier and a 2,500-mile coastline, barely surpassed 11,000 men. Only 6,000 served in the army, with most of the rest in the navy.42
There were numerous historical precedents for the wholesale relocation of tens of thousands of people, including the mass deportations of conquered peoples in the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the eighth century B.C.E., north China in the fourth century C.E., Sicily in the thirteen century C.E., and Iran in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to name but a few examples, though these lay far beyond the ken of nineteenth-century Americans. One planter and would-be scholar hazily recalled “only a solitary instance in all ancient history of a whole nation quitting their country and removing to another.” “I think it was a province of Gaul,” he speculated, “perhaps Belgium.”43
Better known to U.S. citizens were the forced migrations that took place in Europe over the previous few centuries, such as the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in the fifteenth century, of the Moriscos a hundred years later, and of the Huguenots from France nearly a century after that. The Acadians, French speakers evicted from Nova Scotia by the British in the 1750s, provided one example that occurred especially close to home. Many of these deportees ended up in Louisiana and became known as Cajuns, but the forced migration had not fared well in public memory. “Tradition is fresh and positive among us respecting the guileless, peaceful, and scrupulous character of this injured people,” Robert Walsh, a widely read and well-connected public intellectual, wrote in 1819. He was unequivocal about the “miserable vicissitude of their fortunes, and the extreme poignancy of their grief.” One of the nation’s most renowned historians, David Ramsay, similarly criticized the action and condemned the “severe policy” that Britain pursued against an “unfortunate people.”44
Robert Campbell, a lawyer from Savannah who was notable for being the sole white Georgian to vocally oppose the deportation of indigenous Americans, stated that “in modern times—in civilized countries—there is no instance of expelling the members of a whole nation from their homes—of driving an entire population from its native country.” The policy, he railed, would surpass even the “notoriously disgraceful partition of Poland,” when Russia, Prussia, and the Hapsburg Empire had divided the nation among themselves and erased it from the map. In fact, it proved all too easy to find unfavorable comparisons: “the partitioners of Poland,” “the invaders of Spain,” the “plunderers of India,” all instances in which empires stripped “the weak and defenceless of their possessions.”45
White Americans were not especially keen to model their Republic after the atrocities committed by European tyrants, and they imagined something altogether different for their own state-sponsored deportation. The expulsion of indigenous Americans, if it proceeded, would be a philanthropic enterprise, administered by an army of clerks, census takers, relocation officers, disbursing agents, auditors, and comptrollers. In the words of the secretary of war, it would be a truly “modern” undertaking that spared the weak and embraced “justice and moderation.”46
From the Capitol Building, situated among Washington City’s empty fields and scattered abodes, congressmen began to speak confidently in the late 1820s of launching a massive operation to expel indigenous peoples from their homelands. At the other end of the dirt road called Pennsylvania Avenue, the executive branch drew up ambitious plans. Bellowing bull frogs and the smell of rotting animal carcasses accompanied the planning.47 In this miasmic environment, the state-sponsored mass expulsion of indigenous people suddenly began to seem both necessary and practical. How did this happen?