The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
Unworthy Republic is a powerful and lucid account, weaving together events with the people who experienced them up close…Saunt doesn't try to smooth over the knottier parts of his narrative, which include Northern financiers and Indigenous slave owners who profited from expulsion; families that withstood "compulsion, enticement and duplicity" to stay on their homelands in the east; and the violent punishments carried out by tribes in order to quell dissent…His account acknowledges the diverse experiences within and across Indigenous communities…Saunt has written an unflinching book that reckons with this history and its legacy.
Publishers Weekly
★ 03/16/2020
University of Georgia history professor Saunt (West of the Revolution) investigates the origins and repercussions of the 1830 Indian Removal Act in this eye-opening and distressing chronicle. Contending that the “state-administered mass expulsion” of 80,000 Native Americans from their homelands was both “unprecedented” and avoidable, Saunt contrasts pro-deportation depictions of indigenous peoples as “impoverished drunks” facing “imminent extinction” with examples of diverse communities interwoven into regional economies in the Great Lakes and Southeast. He incisively recounts congressional debates over removal (Southern slave owners wanted to open up new territories for cotton production; Northern reformers argued that preexisting treaties should be honored) and notes that the legislation passed by a mere five votes in the House of Representatives. When Native Americans refused to emigrate, state officials turned “ordinary property and criminal law into instruments of oppression,” Saunt writes, and by the mid-1830s, federal troops were engaged in “exterminatory warfare” against indigenous families. He tallies deaths along the Trail of Tears, millions of dollars in real estate losses, and the spread of slavery into new regions across the South. Saunt presents a stark and well-documented case that Native American expulsion was a political choice rather than an inevitable tragedy. This searing account forces a new reckoning with American history. (Mar.)
Atlantic - Caitlin Fitz
"[Unworthy Republic] is a haunting story of racialized cruelty and greed, which came to define a pivotal period in U.S. and indigenous history alike. . . As Saunt persuasively observes, we have yet to reckon with them today."
Star Tribune - Charles Hewitt
"[T]horoughly researched and quietly outraged."
Star Tribune - Chris Hewitt
"Thoroughly researched and quietly outraged."
Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone)
"There has been insufficient ‘reckoning with the conquest of the continent,’ Claudio Saunt relays in this excellent new book. In many accounts of U.S. history, the discussion of the mass deportation of native nations during the 1830s remains far too brief. Deportation’s legacies in law, culture, and community continue to this day and find powerful exploration in this important addition to the field."
Nick Romeo
"[Unworthy Republic] is a major achievement… [Saunt] manages to do something truly rare: destroy the illusion that history’s course is inevitable and recover the reality of the multiple possibilities that confronted contemporaries."
Foreign Affairs - David Treuer
"A study in power.… The parallels with the present are eerie."
Sven Beckert
"One of the most important books published on U.S. history in recent years and should be required reading for all Americans."
Elizabeth Fenn
"Unworthy Republic offers a much-needed corrective to the American canon, showing how a heavy-handed president, a deadlocked Congress, and a lust for profit combined to construct a shameful national legacy.… A riveting story that invites us all to reflect on how we got where we are today."
Tiya Miles
"A bold, new, and urgently needed standard for the way we should understand the history of Indian Removal…Saunt demonstrates with searing insight and unparalleled narrative skill how the bureaucratic and blatantly militaristic ‘expulsion’ of 80,000 indigenous people profoundly reshaped the U.S. Republic and forever changed Native American lives."
Wall Street Journal - Peter Cozzens
"[A] much-needed rendering of a disgraceful episode in American history that has been too long misunderstood."
New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
"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."
Library Journal
02/01/2020
Saunt (American history, Univ. of Georgia) takes a hard, clear look at the ways Natives were dispossessed of their land in the decade after the passage of the 1830 Indian Removal Act. White administrators, legislators, and missionaries couched the deportation of 80,000 Indigenous peoples from Eastern states to territory west of the Mississippi as a so-called humanitarian effort, arguing that Natives would be better off separate from whites. In reality, to coerce them to leave, white Southerners, using laws and terrorism, deliberately dispossessed Natives of real and personal property—and their lives. Expulsion and extermination were prompted by Southerners' desires to expand cotton production and slavery into valuable Native farmland, but, Saunt contends, Southern white supremacist attitudes, secessionist threats, and northern investors' avaricious interests in land speculation were fundamental. Abysmally inadequate funding and planning, combined with Natives' refusal to leave, resulted in inexcusable loss of lives (and money) when Natives were forcefully moved west. For Saunt, this unprecedented and disgraceful state-sponsored mass deportation was not inevitable—a myth upheld by white Americans—and it resulted in a westward-moving militarized line and shameful legacy with enduring issues, yet unaddressed. VERDICT This valuable addition to the scholarship of Native American dispossession and extermination should be read by scholars and general readers alike.—Margaret Kappanadze, Elmira Coll. Lib., NY
MAY 2020 - AudioFile
In this indictment of the systematic expulsion of 80,000 indigenous people during the 1830s, narrator Stephen Bowlby's empathetic style smartly lets the stories’ damning evidence speak for itself. He seamlessly captures the bureaucratic ineptitude and cruel governmental indifference underlying President Andrew Jackson’s horrific plan to send the southeastern tribes to less than equal territories west of the Mississippi, which resulted in thousands of dead (native people and federal soldiers). This audiobook shares the stories of how differently great tribal leaders—John Ross (Cherokee), Osceola (Seminole), Black Hawk (Sauk)—responded to the government’s idea to remove them from their historic lands. Native Americans suffered from cholera, dysentery, measles, and malaria on their forced marches and boat rides west. “Indian wars” took a tremendous toll on the tribes, who often outfought green federal soldiers. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2019-12-23
A powerful, moving argument that the state-sponsored expulsion of the 1830s was a horrendous turning point for the Indigenous peoples in the United States.
The systematic expulsion of Native Americans—Saunt (American History/Univ. of Georgia; West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776, 2014, etc.) uses "deportation," "expulsion," and "extermination" as more accurate terms than "removal"—would not have happened without a law passed by Congress and approved by the executive branch, which occurred at the end of May 1830. The largely Southern-backed measure eagerly endorsed by President Andrew Jackson, who had made the "voluntary" movement of Native peoples west of the Mississippi a defining point of his candidacy, began implementation with money to remove the largely prosperous farming Choctaw of the South westward. These were the first peoples to be expelled under the 1830 law, which allowed their land to be appropriated by whites. It was an expensive and chaotic operation, not to mention horrendously inhumane, as those forced off their land endured miserable conditions, as observed and documented by Alexis de Tocqueville in late 1831. Other expelled peoples included the Senecas of Ohio and the Sauk and Meskwaki on the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers, and Saunt poignantly chronicles the movements of the dispossessed. When cholera broke out, it decimated these Indigenous communities on the move. The author incisively examines the various fictions propagated at the time to assuage the national conscience about the dispossession—e.g., that Native peoples were a desperate people dying out (many were quite prosperous) and that they were leaving their homes voluntarily. Moreover, the lands west of the Mississippi were not known or mapped, and the conditions were barren and uninhabitable. Saunt estimates the enormous wealth lost by the Indigenous families, the millions expended by the government, and the hideous wealth in land and resources gained by the speculators, colonizers, and cotton barons. The author also notes how these systematic mass deportations "became something of a model for colonial empires around the world."
A significant, well-rendered study of a disturbing period in American history.
