That changed in 2008 when I moved to Georgia to take a job at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And those events always seemed far away, both in time and space: a family mythology, a legendary tale outside of history and context. It first came as oral tradition, from parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles. He lives in Athens, Georgia.Credit: Curtis Compton / Curtis Compton / was history I never encountered in any history class that I remember.
He is the author of award-winning books, including A New Order of Things Black, White, and Indian and West of the Revolution. Russell Professor in American History at the University of Georgia. 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.Ĭlaudio Saunt is the Richard B. When Congress passed the act by a razor-thin margin, it authorized one of the first state-sponsored mass deportations in the modern era, marking a turning point for native peoples and for the United States. citizens insisted that it was a betrayal of the nation’s values. Indigenous peoples fought relentlessly against the policy, while many U.S. 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.
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.ĭrawing on firsthand accounts and the voluminous records produced by the federal government, Saunt’s deeply researched book argues that Indian Removal, as advocates of the policy called it, was not an inevitable chapter in U.S. 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. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington’s small but growing bureaucracy. In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. In conversation with GPB’s Virginia Prescott. Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory.
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