Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain - (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American Histo) by Samantha Seeley (Paperback)

About the Book

"This work explores the conflicts over migration at the center of the social, political, intellectual, and physical landscape of the early United States. Examining the voluntary and forced migrations of Indigenous, African American, and Anglo Americans in the decades immediately following the Revolution, Samantha Seeley argues that the United States took shape as a white republic through contentious negotiations over who could move and where, who could remain and how. Removal was not sweeping, top-down federal legislation. Instead, it was a battle fought on multiple fronts. It encompassed tribal leaders' attempts to expel white settlers from Native lands and African Americans' legal battles to remain within states that sought to drive them out. National in scope, the book is grounded in a close examination of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri--states poised between the edges of slavery and freedom where removal was both warmly embraced and hotly contested"--

Book Synopsis

Who had the right to live within the newly united states of America?

In the country's founding decades, federal and state politicians debated which categories of people could remain and which should be subject to removal. The result was a white Republic, purposefully constructed through contentious legal, political, and diplomatic negotiation. But, as Samantha Seeley demonstrates, removal, like the right to remain, was a battle fought on multiple fronts. It encompassed tribal leaders' fierce determination to expel white settlers from Native lands and free African Americans' legal maneuvers both to remain within the states that sought to drive them out and to carve out new lives in the West. Never losing sight of the national implications of regional conflicts, Seeley brings us directly to the battlefield, to middle states poised between the edges of slavery and freedom where removal was both warmly embraced and hotly contested.

Reorienting the history of U.S. expansion around Native American and African American histories, Seeley provides a much-needed reconsideration of early nation building.

Review Quotes

"Seeley bridges the historical gap between social and political migration studies by foregrounding the removal experiences of everyday Native and Black people and centering them as 'decisive participants in determining what kind of nation the United States would become.' . . . [Thus] Seeley demonstrates how ordinary Americans made and altered American borders and transformed understandings of space."--Chronicles of Oklahoma

"A remarkable history of migration, removal, and how these ideas and policies intersected in the experiences of Indigenous peoples and free African Americans in early America. . . . [T]his book helps us recognize that [removal, belonging, and migration] are a part of a longer history in the matrix of Indigenous sovereignty, Black freedom, and attempts at exclusion."--Journal of African American History

"Highlights important issues to consider as further research on Indian Removal is tied to historiographies on slavery and the rights of free people of color in antebellum America."--North Carolina Historical Review

"In, Samantha Seeley studies, in tandem, the efforts by United States politicians and reformers to push Native Americans farther west and expel free African Americans from specific states or the nation as a whole."--Indiana Magazine of History

"Recommended. . . . This work demonstrates the central role removal occupied in the creation of the American Republic."--CHOICE

"Seeley's work reminds us that, from its origin, the United States has been a multiracial society, a project built by hands of many colors. There was no all-white founding of the nation. In our current fraught political moment, this book is a timely and meticulous documentation of this fact."--American Indian Culture and Research Journal

"This fine study shows that removal, as a set of foundational ideas and policies, has made a deep imprint on the United States in ways that we are only beginning to fully appreciate."--H-Net

"Timely and essential. . . . Cross-Border Cosmopolitans is convincingly driven by a premise, that of the need to 'excavate, recover and reconstruct' the history of the African diaspora in North America which Adjetey argues is an important part of the history of the Atlantic world."--Ethnic and Racial Studies