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A review by jdintr
Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt
4.0
This is one of the hardest books I've ever read. I'm lucky that I got the change to read it.
This is a history of loss, chapter by chapter, as the reader follows the ethnic cleansing of the American southeast, the sense grows that a great crime has been committed here (I live in Tennessee), the ground cries for justice--as it has for almost 200 years now.
Saunt follows five southern tribes: the Cherokee (Tennessee-Georgia-NC), the Choctaw (Mississippi-Alabama), the Chickasaw (Mississippi-western Tennessee), the Creek, (Alabama-western Georgia), and the Seminole of Florida. Beginning in the 1820s and leading through the terms of Andrew Jackson & Martin Van Buren, these peoples were removed from their homes, where they had lived peacably since 1813, and exiled to Oklahoma.
Saunt tracks the avarice of Georgia politicians, who sought to extend state law over the independent domain of the Cherokee (Indians were not allowed to testify in state courts, and seizures of their property went unpunished). When Jackson took power, one of his first acts was one of Indian removal. And one of his reasons for removing native southerners was that he couldn't control roguish state governments and militias. Saunt also follows the career of Wall Street maven JD Beers whose fiscal machinations opened Indian lands to speculation and fraud.
While Saunt's book covers the removial of southern Indians, those looking for information on Oklahoma or the Trail of Tears, may be disappointed. I'm sure these elements are covered in more depth in other books. But Saunt (a professor at the University of Georgia) takes a deep dive into the legal, political, and military machinations behind the deportation of natives.
I didn't want to pick this book up. I couldn't put it down. Scenes of Cherokee standing by as government agents marked their properties for resale are burned into my mind--as are images of the US Army (surely a moral low point for the organization) hunting down Seminoles, family by family and stringing their corpses up from trees. And to think the underlying purpose for removal was to provide more land for what Saunt calls "slave labor camps" in the Deep South.
This is a challenging history. It is an essential one, especially for those who live in the South.
This is a history of loss, chapter by chapter, as the reader follows the ethnic cleansing of the American southeast, the sense grows that a great crime has been committed here (I live in Tennessee), the ground cries for justice--as it has for almost 200 years now.
Saunt follows five southern tribes: the Cherokee (Tennessee-Georgia-NC), the Choctaw (Mississippi-Alabama), the Chickasaw (Mississippi-western Tennessee), the Creek, (Alabama-western Georgia), and the Seminole of Florida. Beginning in the 1820s and leading through the terms of Andrew Jackson & Martin Van Buren, these peoples were removed from their homes, where they had lived peacably since 1813, and exiled to Oklahoma.
Saunt tracks the avarice of Georgia politicians, who sought to extend state law over the independent domain of the Cherokee (Indians were not allowed to testify in state courts, and seizures of their property went unpunished). When Jackson took power, one of his first acts was one of Indian removal. And one of his reasons for removing native southerners was that he couldn't control roguish state governments and militias. Saunt also follows the career of Wall Street maven JD Beers whose fiscal machinations opened Indian lands to speculation and fraud.
While Saunt's book covers the removial of southern Indians, those looking for information on Oklahoma or the Trail of Tears, may be disappointed. I'm sure these elements are covered in more depth in other books. But Saunt (a professor at the University of Georgia) takes a deep dive into the legal, political, and military machinations behind the deportation of natives.
I didn't want to pick this book up. I couldn't put it down. Scenes of Cherokee standing by as government agents marked their properties for resale are burned into my mind--as are images of the US Army (surely a moral low point for the organization) hunting down Seminoles, family by family and stringing their corpses up from trees. And to think the underlying purpose for removal was to provide more land for what Saunt calls "slave labor camps" in the Deep South.
This is a challenging history. It is an essential one, especially for those who live in the South.