Claudio Saunt is Richard B. Russell Professor in American History and Co-Director of the Center for Virtual History at the University of Georgia. He is the author of four books, including West of the Revolution (2014), Black, White, and Indian (2005), and A New Order of Things (1999). His most recent book, Unworthy Republic (2020), was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Praised by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Elizabeth Fenn as “a much-needed corrective to the American canon,” Unworthy Republic reveals how slave owners pushed to make the expulsion of indigenous Americans national policy in the 1830s and describes the chaotic and deadly results of the operation to deport 80,000 men, women, and children from their eastern homelands. Unworthy Republic “manages to do something truly rare,” writes Nick Romeo in the Washington Post: “destroy the illusion that history’s course is inevitable and recover the reality of the multiple possibilities that confronted contemporaries.” Dr. Saunt has also developed several online projects, including the Invasion of America and, with Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana. In 2018, he received an NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant to produce an online, interactive time-lapse map of the African, Native, and European populations in North America between 1500 and 1800.

Drawing on his award-winning book Unworthy Republic, Claudio Saunt will explore how and why the United States drove Native Americans from their eastern homelands in the 1830s. Dr. Saunt will discuss the political and economic forces behind the passage of the “Indian Removal Act” in 1830 and investigate why the United States and Georgia persisted in their efforts to expel Cherokees, even after white Americans had taken most of the South.

I want to start by underscoring that there was nothing inevitable about Indian Removal, and I think John Ross saw this as clearly as anyone did at the time. There was a real chance for indigenous peoples to retain at least a part of their traditional homelands east of the Mississippi River. So that raises this question: if it wasn’t inevitable, then why did it happen? And why specifically did politicians, particularly Georgia politicians, target the Cherokees so directly and concertedly in the 1830s?

So, this is the story I want to dig into today. Why did this happen, and why specifically did politicians and national politicians, especially those from my home state of Georgia, focus so intently on removing the Cherokees?

I’ll tell this story in three parts:

1. The actual passage of the legislation passed in May of 1830.
2. The moment of dispossession—how white Americans separated Native peoples from their homes and farms.
3. The deportation itself—how thousands of people, including the elderly, women, pregnant women, and children, were transported hundreds, sometimes upwards of a thousand miles, west across the Mississippi River.

At the conclusion, I will circle back to this big question: why did all of this happen, and why specifically were the Cherokees targeted?

First, to give you a little overview of the situation around 1830, there were between 80,000 and 100,000 indigenous people living in the United States at the time. About 20,000 of these people lived in the Great Lakes region, and you can see their lands here. You can see the Iroquois, the remaining Iroquois lands in Western New York and Ohio, the Senecas, Ottawas, Shawnees, Wyandottes, Potawatomies, and Miamis in Indiana, and then you can see these somewhat larger land claims in Michigan and Wisconsin Territory. These lands were less valuable to white Americans than were indigenous lands in the South, as we’ll see in a minute, but there was still some interest in dispossessing native peoples in this part of the country. That was largely because there were some canal-building projects that financiers in the Northeast were interested in developing, specifically to connect the Great Lakes to the Ohio River, and to do that, they needed to build some canals through indigenous land in Indiana and Ohio.

But really, most of the interest was in this part of the country. You can see the so-called Five Tribes: the Seminoles, who still retained a large part of Central Florida; the Creeks in Alabama; the Cherokees, whose homeland still covered the northern fifth or sixth of Georgia, part of Alabama, Western Carolina, and Eastern Tennessee; and then you can see the Chickasaw and Choctaw homelands in Mississippi—they still had half of what is now the present-day state of Mississippi. These are vast areas of land, and there were at least 60,000, perhaps as many as 80,000, indigenous Americans living in this part of the country. As we’ll see in just a second, politicians, speculators, planters, and slave owners were especially interested in dispossessing native peoples in this part of the country.

Two things I want to underscore here:

1. These Native Americans, stretching from the Great Lakes down to Florida, were extraordinarily diverse. There were hunters, farmers, beggars, drunks, teetotalers, Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, animists. Some lived in traditional waddle and daub housing, others in log cabins like their white neighbors. Some dressed in deerskins, some were better dressed than their white neighbors, and some lived in plantation houses, as we know in this part of the country. They all had long-standing relationships with white Americans and had official diplomatic relationships with the federal government. In fact, if you read accounts from European or British visitors traveling to Washington, DC in the 1820s and 1830s, they will inevitably comment on the numerous colorful delegations of diplomats from Native American nations that they saw walking the streets in Washington. Each one of these delegations had their favorite tavern where they would take coffee in the afternoon.
2. U.S. politicians had been talking about expelling Native Americans since the beginning of the 19th century. But until 1830, until the passage of this act, there was no official state-sponsored systematic operation to eliminate Native Americans east of the Mississippi River. Thomas Jefferson had famously suggested after the Louisiana Purchase that native peoples could be moved out onto this land, but these efforts to expel people were makeshift and haphazard until 1830.

So what changed? Planter politicians in the southern states had long been eyeing these lands, and when Andrew Jackson entered the White House, they seized the opportunity. Jackson, of course, was himself a southerner, a slave owner, and had a long history of making war against Native Americans. So, these Southern politicians pushed to make the systematic expulsion of native peoples a national policy.

Why did they do this? These operators of slave labor camps were transfixed by visions of an expansive slave empire that would be presided over by themselves. Georgia, they thought, would become the largest and most powerful state in the nation, larger than even the empire state of New York if indigenous land were extinguished. Even more ambitiously, if native peoples could be eliminated from Alabama and Mississippi, then the slave empire would march westward, and the beneficiaries of this would amass tremendous wealth. But why stop there? These Southern planters had visions of expanding all the way to the Pacific coast and then down into Mexico, eventually hoping to seize Cuba as well. Cuba was then the single most valuable slave colony in all of the Americas. So, their ambitions knew no bounds, and the first step in this process was to remove native peoples close to home in Georgia, then Alabama and Mississippi.

There was an underlying geological reason why they wanted these lands. This dates back 70 or 80 million years ago to the Cretaceous Era when the waters were far higher, as you can see pictured here. There was this coastal region, now in Central Georgia, that arcs across Alabama and Mississippi, eventually producing extraordinarily fertile lands as the waters receded. Today, there is still this crescent of very dark fertile soil that arcs across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi that we call the Black Belt or the Black Prairie.

You can see it pictured here, and you can see two shadings: this very dark area is the so-called Black Prairie or Black Belt, and it cuts straight through the Creek Nation, arcs through Central Alabama, then cuts through the Choctaw Nation and up through the Chickasaw Nation. These were some of the most valuable agricultural lands in the entire world in the 1830s. Then there’s this far larger swath of land suitable for producing cotton, beginning in South Carolina and cutting through Georgia, then also through the heart of the Creek Nation, passing through the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. One speculator marveled at the quality of the soil, rich in black more than three feet deep with giant oaks and ancient oyster shells indicating, he said, the best cotton lands. In fact, there were ancient oyster shells—deposits left over from that vast ocean 70 or 80 million years ago. That was important to making this soil suitable for growing cotton because the deposition of all these marine