The government also ejected smaller Indian tribes from their lands north of the Ohio River, but it is the Southern exodus, culminating in the Cherokee “Trail of Tears” in 1838, that forms both the core of this shameful episode in American history and the focus of Claudio Saunt’s seminal “Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. The dispossessed were the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations, and the Seminoles of modern Florida. In May 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act “to provide for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi.” The legislation made no mention of how Indians were to be compensated for their lands, which had been guaranteed them by federal treaties, or how they would be transported over hundreds of miles of rudimentary roads to an indeterminate location that none of those affected had ever laid eyes upon.ĭuring the succeeding eight years, the administration of President Andrew Jackson-goaded by an unholy alliance between white-supremacist Georgia slave owners, determined to expand their cotton kingdom onto native lands in present-day Alabama and Mississippi, and their New York financier enablers-alternatively cajoled and coerced nearly 80,000 indigenous inhabitants of the South into surrendering their ancestral homes. In Unworthy Republic, Claudio Saunt, a historian at the University of Georgia, offers a damning synthesis of the federal betrayals, mass deportations, and exterminatory violence that defined the. Saunt shows his readers the cost of a racial caste system in the United States.David Treuer, Foreign Affairs Unworthy Republic is a powerful and lucid account, weaving together events with the people who experienced them up close.Saunt has written an unflinching book that reckons with this history and its legacy.

A Choctaw encampment on the Mississippi River, ca.

Unworthy republic claudio saunt