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

Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for NonfictionShortlisted for the 2020 Cundill History PrizeNamed a Best Book of 2020 by the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, and a New York Times Critics Top Book of 2020A masterful and unsettling history of Indian Removal, the forced migration of Native Americans across the Mississippi River in the 1830s and the statesponsored theft of their lands.In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel 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 Washingtons small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal governments auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence. Unworthy Republic reveals how expulsion became national policy and describes the chaotic and deadly results of the operation to deport 80,000 men, women, and children.Drawing on firsthand accounts and the voluminous records produced by the federal government, Saunts deeply researched book argues that Indian Removal, as advocates of the policy called it, was not an inevitable chapter in U.S. expansion across the continent. Rather, it was a fiercely contested political act designed to secure new lands for the expansion of slavery and to consolidate the power of the southern states. Indigenous peoples fought relentlessly against the policy, while many U.S. citizens insisted that it was a betrayal of the nations values. When Congress passed the act by a razorthin margin, it authorized one of the first statesponsored mass deportations in the modern era, marking a turning point for native peoples and for the United States.In telling this gripping story, Saunt shows how the politics and economics of white supremacy lay at the heart of the expulsion of Native Americans; how corruption, greed, and administrative indifference and incompetence contributed to the debacle of its implementation; and how the consequences still resonate today. 37 illustrations