Abstract
The foundation and history of the United States are fraught with contradictions. The Declaration of Independence declared that all men were created equal while enslavement remained the law of the land. In the years following the Revolutionary War, thousands of Americans forged their way westward over the Appalachian Mountains, cementing the notion of free migration as central to what it meant to be a citizen of the new republic. In Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States, Samantha Seeley argues that battles over removal were as central to defining the nation as the right to free movement. In this informative book, she compares battles over Native American and African American removal in the early days of the United States until the Civil War to explore how removal shaped the development of the U.S. alongside migration.
Two central claims are asserted. First, the history of removal in the United States goes back further than previously thought, with its seeds in British colonial policy. Second, Native Americans and African Americans were far from passive actors and through their resistance to, as well as participation in, removal shaped the discursive meaning of belonging in the early decades of the country. Additionally, the book’s focus on the Ohio River Valley and the experiences of citizens, not just leaders, represents a novel contribution to our understanding of this history. The focus on the lived experiences of average people making sense of the right to belong provides rich detail in understanding the gaps between law and reality. One can relay that Virginia passed a law in 1806 demanding the expulsion of newly freed enslaved people from the State. By following individual families’ attempts to fight this law Seely explores the lived reality of how this battle shaped the future of abolition for years to come.
Sociologists of citizenship and state formation will find much to recommend in this book. In T. H. Marshall’s (1950) classic formation of citizenship, nations proceed in a gradual process of expanding citizenship through civil, political, and social citizenship. Seeley shows how un-gradual or preordained this process can be. Instead, establishing civil citizenship in the early United States was a deeply contested and often bloody process. Similarly, by presenting an inverted case—through her focus on removal instead of remaining—we can better appreciate the conversational nature of civil citizenship rights.
For scholars of state formation, Seeley’s methodological and analytic focus on the actions of marginalized groups and individuals provides nuance to Weberian notions of state formation based on the state monopolization of violence ([1919] 2021). In the case of removal, the state’s monopoly was far from settled, providing great agency for bottom-up state formation through claims for removal or remaining. In this sense this book offers a compelling account of battles over early civil citizenship that would be at home within the constructivist tradition in the social sciences (Finnemore and Sikkink 2001) and law (Brunnée and Troope 2012). While Seeley’s book offers a compelling case for social scientists working in these traditions, the book could go further to situate itself within, and comment directly on, its applicability to these debates. However, the book has opted to foreground and center its historical contributions, which are rich in themselves.
The book’s first chapter traces the history of U.S. removal back to its legal and normative roots in British colonization and poor laws. British colonization, including in the United States, often used removal of subjects abroad to control criminals, suppress uprisings, and respond to poverty at home. The British poor law system, which aimed to control the free movement of “vagrants,” is shown to have provided the legal underpinning of Black and indigenous removal campaigns in the early United States.
Part One of the book includes three chapters focused on fights over Native American removal in the Ohio River Valley following the Revolutionary War. Chapter Two follows white settlers’ early push into the Ohio River Valley following the Treaty of Paris and the Natives’ forceful resistance through the eventual formation of the United Indian Nations. The chapter complicates classic narratives of Native responses to removal and shows how settlers forced the new republic into bloody conflicts it aimed to avoid. Chapter Three follows the United Indian Nations’ internal debate over whether to resist white encroachment through diplomacy or war. Their choice of war was undermined by the retreat of the British and Spanish, which ended Native attempts to play the powers off each other. The resulting Greenville Treaty of 1795 set the stage for future removal efforts turning ever-moving borders into tools of deposition. Chapter Four follows U.S. efforts and Native resistance to attempts to control Natives’ mobility. The United States hoped by tying tribes to the land and accepting Anglo conceptions of land ownership, removal would be easier.
Part Two includes four chapters exploring removal efforts aimed at African Americans. Chapter Five explores the rise in the 1780s of Black colonization schemes. Colonization was proposed as a solution to the wave of emancipation that was occurring in the upper South during this time. Southerners, Northern Abolitionists, and at times some Blacks pursued colonization in Africa as a means of addressing the perceived fact that freed Blacks lived in the new nation but were not “of the nation.” Chapter Six explores the rise of laws that aimed to simultaneously expel Blacks following manumission in the South and restrict their free movement into the Ohio Valley and other parts of the country. These laws were built on the British poor laws and essentially made African Americans stateless. Chapter Seven follows efforts of African Americans to resist these laws and demand the right to remain.
Chapter Eight brings together the history of Native and Black removal by exploring the archetypical story of removal, which focuses on the Cherokee Nation in the 1830s. By tracing the history back to the republic’s founding, Seeley complicates the common conception of this removal episode. Black exile into the Ohio Valley onto Native land generated complicated narratives of the formation of these new “free” states. The conclusion explores how northern abolitionists were pressured by African Americans to abandon removal and colonization considering Georgia’s expulsion of the Cherokees. Indigenous and African American removal are contrasted with the expansion of civil citizenship to all white men in this era.
Throughout this deeply researched and compelling narrative, Seeley offers a story of citizenship formation in the early United States that is complicated and discursive. Beyond formal federal or state policy, average people—white, Black, and Native—shaped the contestation over removal. By tying removal to the country’s foundation and British colonialism, the book highlights how important drawing boundaries is for the establishment of nations and their citizen populations. Students of citizenship, state formation, race, and American history will find much wisdom in this fascinating book.