Claudio Saunt

Saunt’s telling of events from Alaska to Cuba during the late 1770s is a striking antidote to the conventional story of ‘a handful of famous men struggling to create a republic against insurmountable odds’ (from a review of the superficial Joseph Ellis version; how many ways can he retell the same story? and he’s a liar!).

On the western coast of North America, Russia and Spain contended for supremacy. After migrating west and adopting horses and firearms, the Lakota undertook the show more conquest of the upper plains from their base in the Black Hills. The Osage kingdom outnumbered the Spanish soldiers at St. Louis and the British at Arkansas Post and made a mockery of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years War and divided the continent between European powers at the Mississippi River. Diplomats from the Creek Nation made regular visits to Havana (with its population larger than Philadelphia’s in 1776) in order to partake of the rum and cigars of the Captain-General and to solicit reinforcements against British encroachment in northern Florida.

I heard Ellis boast of his finding a stack of revolution-era pamphlets at the American Antiquarian Society library in Worcester, in an attempt to justify his writing of Revolutionary Summer, but Suant’s work goes deeper and wider, and West of the Revolution is a reminder of how many different futures were still open in 1776. show less

A fascinating account of our history removed from the myopic prism of the Boston/Philadelphia corridor. It is short sighted to think that nothing was happening in this vast land while revolutionaries were battling the British in the north east. In fact entire communities were thriving in Alaska, California, Florida, Colorado etc. We just don't know about them because they don't have a "Daughters of the..." group to keep the memory alive. This is not to take away from the impact of the show more revolution on our lives; it in fact broadens our understanding of how this country developed everywhere which combined to enrich us. Claudio Saunt writes a compelling book about those areas and ideas and experiences that took place in 1776, hidden from our view. Subtitled "An uncommon history of 1776", it is indeed that. Well footnoted, it opens with Saul Steinberg's "View of the world from 9th Avenue" which really captures our eastern perspective and lets us know this is no ordinary history. Kudos for digging out and placing in one volume, in one moment in time, this vast history. show less

:A history of Native American expulsion, emphasizing the connections with slavery, including ones less obvious than “white supremacy.” E.g., the existing internal slave trade provided proof of concept for mass forced travel, although the profit motive and the more extended timeframe made for less death in transit. Georgia’s protests against national attempts to control its brutalities were the same secessionist/antifederal arguments that a few decades later started the Civil War. show more Whites not only appropriated the land to use for slave labor camps, they took homes and possessions as well, and somehow the compensation supposedly due the expelled people never quite showed up, in part because the US government deducted the (padded) expenses of surveying their territory and expelling them from the amount they were supposed to get from land sales (artificially diminished by fraud, violence, and collusion). Then the feds invested the remaining amounts in Southern banks that funded the land grab and the purchases of enslaved people to work the new cotton land. Draw your own modern analogies. The ideology at work is summarized in one quote praising a Georgia politician for protecting “the inalienable rights you possess to your slaves and to your Indian territory!” Saunt emphasizes that there was nothing inevitable here: the tribes were, if not all thriving, surviving rather than disappearing, and at every point the whites could have honored their earlier treaties. Also, very timely in light of Trump’s deportation promises: mass expulsion can’t be done cheaply, noncorruptly, or without massive suffering—but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen, just that certain people will benefit and others will die. show less

between 3.5 and 4 stars.

i am pretty sure that i can't overstate the importance of reading this book, and the fact of its existence. (it was a hard and slow read though, with so many details that seemed unnecessary, but that leant even more credence to the research.)

this is such a comprehensive and exhaustive history of both the idea and legislative movement around the deportation of native americans, as well as the details of what that meant for individuals and tribes. and how that so show more quickly and easily turned to a policy of genocide. (although i don't think he used that word once; he used extermination.)

it is absolutely horrifying to read this. a number of citizens and senators who were opposed to this treatment of the indians (which was nice to see; it reminded me of now, where we are protesting and speaking up, but where restrictive policies are still passing in the gov't) spoke of how this would permanently stain the nation and it's obviously done that - poisoned us from the root. the descriptions and quotes show not just greed (for land) and racism, but a direct correlation with slavery, which i had somehow never even considered before.

"A little more than twenty years before Abraham Lincoln depicted slavery as a moral failing and lamented the civil War's 700,000 dead as the 'woe due to those by whom the offense came,' a different president condemned the 'sickening mass of putrefaction' that was the nation's policy toward indigenous people. 'It is among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring them to judgement,' John Quincy Adams, then serving in the House of Representatives, wrote in his diary in 1841. The rupture between North and South forced white Americans to confront the nation's deep investment in slavery and to emancipate and incorporate four million individuals. They did so unwillingly, and the reconstruction of the nation is in many ways still unfolding. By contrast, there has been no comparable reckoning with the conquest of the continent, little serious reflection on its centrality to the rise of the United States, and minimal sustained engagement with the people who lost their homelands."

maybe it's just the way history is and the presidency is, but jackson really reminded me of trump, especially when he required loyalty and votes from congressmen. they were warned "that they would be denounced as 'traitors and recreants' if they failed to fall in line" and vote the way jackson wanted them to. "Jackson, they learned, would work to defeat the holdouts at the next election," which sounds awfully familiar.

"While white southerners cynically dismissed the stirring rhetoric of their opponents, at least a few self-questioning and thoughtful northerners recognized the difficulty they had living up to their ideals. 'It is a singular feature in our nature that we often condemn in others what we will do ourselves.'"

The Indian Office "...contained an impressive display of 130 portraits of indigenous Americans and McKenney's personal collection of "Indian dresses, ornaments, petrafactions [sic],' and 'minerals.' The paintings and objects, wrote one sightseer, were 'all suited to a place of this sort, where, long after the original owners of this country shall have mingled with the dust of their mountains, the curious will delight to repair, to study the appearance of the native owners of this continent, and indulge in reflections on these scenes which are past.' The Indian Office would be a monument to the people it made disappear."

"Though the treaty set aside some compensation for the loss of land, approximately 95 percent of the dispossessed received nothing."

"The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society stated in its annual report of 1838 that the 'primary object of the South, through the instrumentality of the national government, is doubly atrocious.' First, planter-politicians wished to take 'forceful possession' of native lands. Then they intended to establish slavery, 'with all its woes and horrors,' on the stolen territory. The targets of this allegation saw no reason to debate the point, since they were proud of the more of slave labor camps that they were building across the continent. The movement against expulsion, charged a slave-owning Tennessee congressman, was 'nothing more nor less than a branch of Abolitionism in disguise.'"

"If only the Cherokees understood that Lumpkin, not Ross, had their best interests at heart, they would abandon their homes for the West. Of course, the logical conclusion to this exercise in arrogance and self-delusion was that U.S. planters should enslave native peoples for their own good, a determination reached by more than one southern apologist."

it's like they're surprised that the indians are people: "...the War Department...shared the common characteristics of 'the Indian.' The Cherokee was "Grave in his intercourse with what's, good tempered or sullen according to the treatment he receives from them.'"

"While they postured by standing on states' rights, white supremacy in face made up the bedrock of their politics."

incredibly, people could say things like this in all seriousness: "It required 'greater moral courage' to 'hold back, to survey the whole subject coolly and impartially, and to restore harmony to a distracted country' by defending perpetual and hereditary slavery, he rationalized, than it did 'to minister to the popular feeling where we live' by fighting against the institution. Political moderation, as Cass practiced it in the 1850s, meant keeping four million people in bondage, just as in the 1830s it had meant deporting eighty thousand indigenous Americans." show less