Dan Snow's History Hit - The Expulsion of Native Americans

Episode Date: October 18, 2020

Claudio Saunt joined me on the podcast to discuss the United States' expulsion of Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington’s small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government’s auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everybody and welcome to Dan Snow's History here. I've got a great episode for you today. We're talking about a radical president swept to power in a heady mix of anti-establishmentism and racism. You're not going to believe this story. I'm of course talking about President Jackson in the early 19th century. Of course I am. This president was responsible for an extraordinary removal, Indian removal, where huge numbers of indigenous so-called Indian tribes were removed from the east bank of the Mississippi and sent west. It's an astonishing tale. And here to tell us about it is Claudio Sant. He's Professor of History at the University of Georgia. You're going to really enjoy this one. If you want to watch 19th century history programs, US and UK, please go to historyhit.tv. We've got global history on there. It's for

everybody on this planet. It works everywhere in the world. You just go to historyhit.tv. If you use the code 10661066, you can get a month for free and then three months for just one pound euro or dollar for each of those first three months in the meantime everyone enjoy here's claudio sant claudio thank you very much for coming on the podcast my pleasure just before we talk about the gigantic forced migration of 1830 onwards draw me a little map of how much the US expand on that east bank of the Mississippi from the date of independence up to the early 19th century. What's extraordinary is that for the first 100, 150 years of colonization, the colonists are really pressed against the east coast. And it takes well over a century for them to expand

into the interior of the continent. And it takes a couple centuries for them to cross the Appalachian Mountains into the interior. So by the early 19th century, still the majority of the colonial or U.S. population is still along the East Coast, concentrated in the Northeast, especially is still along the East Coast, concentrated in the Northeast, especially west of the Appalachians. There are some small settlements, but it's still largely indigenous land. So we think of the United States today as extending coast to coast, but it's far different in the early 19th century. People think about the British and the Americans duking it out, but there was a huge indigenous military activity there as well. Right. And Tecumseh famously is at the center of this. He's a Shawnee Indian from the Great Lakes region. He travels south. He visits the Cherokees, the Choctaws, probably heads as far

south as Florida to visit the Seminoles, although we can't be 100% sure of that. He sees this as the last chance for indigenous Americans to stop the expanding United States. And the reason he sees it as this significant moment is that he has the support of the British. So for him, it's a now or never moment. He understands that Native Americans are going to have to join together if they're going to make this stand. And so it's really this extraordinary moment. And we think of this often as a war between the British and the Americans, but it's very much also a war between Native Americans and the United States. He's killed. And then, as he predicted, the remaining tribes are defeated one by one, if you like. Is Jackson,

is the Seminole War, he's down towards Georgia and Florida, isn't he? He is. He is involved actually in the War of 1812, famously in the Battle of New Orleans against the British. But he's also involved in the Creek War, which breaks out in 1813 and 1814. And he leads Tennessee volunteers down into present day Alabama. Tennessee volunteers down into present-day Alabama, and they slaughter Creek Indians by the hundreds. And that culminates in this battle in the spring of 1814, the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, when they pinned about 800 Creeks, men, women, and children in the bend of the Tallapoosa River and slaughtered them. So along with the Battle of New Orleans, that was one of his great victories, as US citizens saw it, that really catapulted him to national fame. And he rode that all the way to the White House in 1828. And then we get to the famous moment, 1830. Tell me what was behind Jackson's desire to just force countless Native Americans off their ancestral land?

So the first thing I think to recognize is that Jackson is this kind of symbolic figure in this event, this horrific moment in U.S. history. But there is lots of blame to go around. And starting with Southern planters who are lusting after this land. And we can talk more about that in a minute. So Jackson is essential to this process of deportation in the sense that Southern planters need a friend in the White House. And so he is sympathetic to their cause. He does make Indian removal the kind of central piece of legislation, certainly during his first term. He makes it clear to congressmen that he wants this above all to get through Congress. So he pushes for the legislation. It passes just barely in May of 1830. And what the act literally says is that it gives permission for the president to negotiate with Indian nations to exchange their land east of the Mississippi River for territory in the west, present day

Oklahoma, what was then called Indian territory. In your book, it's very interesting, you point out this is not part of some great Whiggish scheme for American history that would eventually see it stretching from coast to coast. I mean, this was a fiercely contested piece of legislation here. It could easily have gone differently. What were the opponents saying at this point to Jackson? So one of the things I wanted to do was really bring out the contingency of this historical moment. So I mentioned it barely got through Congress. It passed by five votes in the House out of 199 cast. And that is in a Congress that is overwhelmingly Jacksonian. So there was a tremendous controversy over this legislation. It was really the single most controversial issue to face the Republic up to that date. It generated the first mass petition campaign to Congress.

There were hundreds of petitions signed by thousands and thousands of Americans sent to Congress to protest the passage of this legislation. So the opponents of the act, and they were really led, not surprisingly, by Native American politicians and public intellectuals. And they found allies among Northern reformers. And they said, look, we have been on these lands for centuries, but it's not just that. We have been living next door to you for hundreds of years. We trade with you. We have friends. Some of us are intermarried and we are perfectly happy where we are. And if it's the case, as you say, that these Western lands are so desirable, then they say, then you can have them and we will just stay where we are.

One of the other things they say is that there was a lot of rhetoric about Native peoples disappearing. And there was a metaphor that white Americans use frequently that Indians were disappearing like the snow and the sun or like a mound of sand on the beach worn away by the ocean. And native peoples pushed back and said, this frankly is not true. It is absolutely the case that there was a tremendous decline in the population. But by the 19th century, our best evidence shows that populations were stable in the east, if not actually rising. And Native peoples made that point over and over again. But there was a lot of misinformation circulating. There were PR campaigns that were pushed forward by Jackson's allies. And so there was this very public fight

about what were the reasons behind deportation and what was the need for it. And on the other side, you mentioned these Southern planters who eyed territory. Was there this providential strain in American settler identity that they did believe that all of the West should be theirs? I think the providential strain in American history is less important. It's certainly hard to get a grasp on. ephemeral than the actual desires of planter politicians to get hold of what was then probably the most valuable agricultural land in the entire world. So the Creek Indians in present-day Alabama, the Choctaws and Chickasaws in Mississippi, they lived on what we call the Black Prairie or the Black Belt. It's this arc of very fertile soil that crosses the South. It is prime cotton growing land. And planters were lusting after this land.

And they had these grandiose visions that they were going to expand westward. They were going to dominate not just the Union, not just the United States, but they were going to eventually dominate the entire continent. And then they had visions of expanding down into Mexico and establishing slave plantations there. And then later in the mid 19th century, they look towards Cuba. They want to take over Cuba as well. So they really think that they are on top of the world and that they are going to rule the globe with these slave plantations that are spreading westward. And now let's talk about what happened after 1830. So you mentioned that actually ethnic cleansing wasn't written into the legislation.

What happened on the ground that meant that the spirit of this legislation was not enacted? The legislation says in plainest language that this is voluntary, that Native peoples are going to enter into negotiations with the president. They can sign a treaty to exchange lands if they want to. In practice, it doesn't play out this way. Jackson and his allies in the War Department head out and start negotiating with Indians. They push back. Initially, they refused to sign treaties. And the southern states hatch a very cynical plan, which was to extend state laws over Indian peoples. And they say, well, this is just, they can live as citizens in the state of Alabama or Mississippi. They will have all the same rights and privileges, with some few exceptions, as it turned out, as white people would. But in practice, Southern politicians knew that this was really a way to oppress Native Americans, to make their lives in their traditional homelands so miserable, so unbearable that they would be forced to leave purely in order to survive. And in fact, that's exactly what happens. There are,

especially in the Creek Nation in Alabama in the 1830s, people are literally starving because the state is not respecting the territorial boundaries of the Creek Nation. They are encouraging squatters and planters to move into Creek farms, to run off Creek farmers at gunpoint, to take them hostage, sometimes to kill them. It's an extraordinarily violent moment. So by the mid-1830s, Creeks are starving, literally starving, and there are just horrific accounts of them stripping the bark off trees and eating it, eating diseased animals or rotten carcasses, begging for food in the streets of Columbus, Georgia. So by then they're not, although this is nominally voluntary, they're literally starving and have to sign a treaty to move west.

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There are new episodes every week. And also part of it is provoking retaliation, isn't it? Young indigenous men would attack settlers, which of course is spun immediately, as it is in other crumbling frontiers, in other European empires. That's very powerful stuff in a literate newspaper reading society, isn't it, to hear about those kind of attacks? If you're starving, obviously you have no options but to secure food in whatever way you can. So there are raids across the border into Georgia,

desperate creeks looking for food. The same thing happens further south in Florida with the Seminoles. So yes, these are blown out of proportion in the press. And if you read through the newspapers, especially in Georgia, but these stories are picked up and reprinted elsewhere in the United States. But the stories just play on all of the white fears and stereotypes of savage peoples killing innocent families on the frontier. And it is true that some of these encounters were extremely violent. Native peoples were desperate. But yes, it is the rhetoric in newspapers turn these people who were victims into the propagators of this violence. And tell me now about the forced migration. We've got the creek in terrible condition, starving.

What happens next? There's a tremendous variability in the way peoples moved west. Some of them did so just of their own accord. Some of them did so just of their own accord. They just set out west and made their way as best as they could through hostile territory until they could cross the Mississippi River. Other peoples went under the guidance of federal officials. deportations westward were relatively trouble-free. There are groups of hundreds or even up to a thousand people who were able to move westward with minimal casualties. But there are plenty of other accounts we have. I'm thinking of one of the Cherokees in 1834, when about 500 people went by steamboat westward. Their steamboats were struck by cholera and people started dying first one by one. Eventually there were dozens dying each day. By the time they reached

Indian territory, one out of every six people had died. Some 45 children under the age of 10 had died during this journey. So I think the kind of overriding conclusion I can draw from this is that there was just a tremendous disregard for the fate of Native peoples on the part of the federal government. The federal government was overwhelmed with the logistics of the operation, but also fundamentally just didn't much care what happened to these people. Did the American people know what was happening? Yeah, that's a great question. I think for the most part, they didn't. I think it was a question of out of sight, out of mind. And certainly the majority of the population is still living in the Northeast at this time. They are far distant from what's going on in the ground out in Arkansas and Indian territory. There are some accounts that are trickling back, but the federal government is also planting these stories about how happy everybody is once they arrive in the West. So I think probably for the majority of U.S. citizens, they don't really fully grasp what's going on.

They just think that Native peoples have headed westward. grasp what's going on. They just think that native peoples have headed westward. Obviously, that's different for the small number of U.S. citizens who live in these regions, who live in Mississippi and Arkansas, and who witness the transportation of these peoples. Some of them visit the Indian camps as the deportees are moving westward. I think they do this out of voyeuristic interest. Other people are really truly horrified by what they witness. And I'm thinking of one letter in particular that's written by a retired military officer. He was living just west of the Mississippi River in present-day Louisiana, and he sees a group of Choctaw Indians who are migrating west. It's in the middle of the winter. He says they're barely clothed. They don't have any shoes. There are children

with them and they are starving. It was sleeting at the time. And he invited them into his pumpkin patch and said that they could take what they could find there. And he said they devoured these frozen pumpkins raw, that they were so desperate. So he wrote a letter to the Secretary of War and said, something is seriously wrong here and we need to do something about it. But he received a rather bureaucratic letter in response, assuring him that the United States was taking care of the situation. And give me a sense of the fact that so many of these Indian nations were condensed, you know, west of Arkansas, I guess you'd say Oklahoma today, even up in New England on the Canadian

border, you end up with tribes that began up there that end up in Oklahoma and being lumped together with groups from Florida. I mean, it's an extraordinary compression as well, isn't it? It's an extraordinary compression. They are putting people together who didn't like each other and had had hostile relations for decades or even centuries. They're moving people westward who had been living in their homelands for centuries, knew where to fish, when the fish ran, what kinds of medicinal plants they could depend upon when they were ill, where to harvest seeds and berries. And so they're moving westward. It's an entirely different climate, different vegetation. There's no hardware store or grocery store. So what do

you do to feed yourself? Where do you plant? And so they have to figure this out on the fly. They end up planting right along the banks of the Arkansas River. It's the most fertile soil, but they didn't know that the Arkansas has tremendous floods in the spring. their farms. And there was a terrible flood in 1833. It washed away all of their crops. And so they were starving again in the West. So there was this whole other kind of secondary process once they had survived the deportation in which they had to figure out how to survive in the West. What kind of numbers do we think overall were killed during the period that your book covers? There were about 80,000 people who were transported west. We could count simply the people who died during deportation, or we could add in the folks who died of malnourishment before deportation, when their farms were being overrun by squatters. We could also add in the people who died during the Creek War in 1836. We could add in the Seminoles who died during the Second Seminole War, which ran between 1835 and 1842. So once we start adding in all these numbers, the total number of deaths gets larger and larger,

obviously. I think about 7% of Native peoples died in the 1830s. But then I think we also have to add in the people who died after deportation, this period when they were trying to carve out a living in Indian territory. And so the numbers get larger and larger. They're also suppressed birth rates because of malnourishment and depression and all the other causes. So exactly what that figure would be, I can't say. But let's say at a minimum, 7% of the indigenous population died in the 1830s. I mean, it transformed the world of the indigenous people beyond recognition. How did it transform the Republic? Because I'm mindful of these Jacksonians, you've got Jackson, Polk, Taylor, these presidents who were men of the frontier, they were warriors,

they had won their spurs in these battles. Did it give the office of the presidency, did it set the American Republic on a very different path? I think it's a turning point. And the reason I say that it's not because these men of the frontier, as you rightly described them, would have been somehow more sympathetic to Native peoples had they not been deported. It's not that at all. It's that it remakes the geographic relationship between the United States and indigenous Americans. So in the 1820s, there are these large indigenous populations, nations, sovereign nations, living within the boundaries of the republic. And there are savvy native politicians who figure out how to deal with the United States. And they have lobbyists in Congress. There are wonderful descriptions of visitors in Washington, D.C. in

the 1820s. And they're walking down these streets. These are largely. in the 1820s, and they're walking down these streets. These are largely fields in the 1820s, but they see dozens and dozens of indigenous delegations. They go to cafes, and there are Native people sitting there having a drink, waiting to have a meeting with the Secretary of War. So that's the situation in the 1820s, but the geographic relationship is reconfigured in the 1830s. Native peoples are moved to the outermost edge of the expanding republic. And as the frontier then moves westward, there is a concerted effort on the part of the U.S. Army to expel, to continue pushing westward, indigenous Americans. I think if they had been able to retain their sovereign status in homelands

in the 1830s, we would have seen, I mean, who can predict what would have happened? But I think we should not discount the creativity and savvy of Native politicians to be able to establish some sort of tolerable working relationship with the United States. And was this land grab, this brutal land grab, it was presumably an important precursor to the even larger land grabs, the Lunges West under Jackson's success. It's much more complicated than that. And if you if you really dig into it and look in detail, there are plenty of times in the early and mid-19th century when Congress believes there's too much public land on the market. The market is awash with land. No one wants to bid on it. That is the case, some white Georgians say, in the 1820s. They say,

look, we don't actually need Cherokee land. I'm thinking of one editorial in particular in the 1820s. They say one of the reasons we have been so wasteful with our land, that one of the reasons we haven't cared for it and we exploit it so badly, is that the government just tells us, don't worry about it, we'll just go get more native land to farm upon. So they say we don't need Cherokee land in the 1820s. There's plenty of land for us. So even in the North Georgia mountains where there is this fabled gold rush that breaks out in 1829, it seemed to be one of the motivating factors for the removal of the Cherokees. Even then, the state distributes this land to its citizens by lottery,

but a lot of that land was never claimed by winners of the lottery. They didn't want the land. Once the prime mining lands had been taken, there was lots of land left over that nobody actually wanted. So yes, there are certain times and there are specific places where there is this overwhelming desire to seize the land and expel the indigenous residents. But there's lots of other times and places, I think, where we've kind of exaggerated this process. Well, thank you very much indeed. The book is called? Unworthy Republic. Well, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks. My pleasure. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying, and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts, and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps, and basically boosts up the chart,

which is good, and then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't want to subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't want to buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favour. Thanks.