The Tides of Morality: Anglo-American Colonial Authority and Indigenous Removal, 1820-1848 by ...

363 Pages·2013·1.59 MB·English

by  Elspeth Martini

The Tides of Morality: Anglo-American Colonial Authority and Indigenous
Removal, 1820-1848

by

Elspeth Martini

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(History)
in the University of Michigan
2013

Doctoral Committee:

Professor Gregory E. Dowd, Chair
Professor Tiya A. Miles
Associate Professor Damon I. Salesa, University of Auckland
Associate Professor Michael Witgen
© Elspeth Martini
2013
To my mother
Christine Brown

In loving memory of her father
John “Jack” Brown

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Acknowledgements

I could not have completed this dissertation without the generosity, support, and
friendship of a number of people. My biggest thank you goes to my advisor, Greg Dowd. Greg
has been both an inspirational and indefatigably reliable mentor for innumerable reasons,
amongst which include the brilliance and humanity of his scholarship; his amazing
organizational skills; his always-positive pedagogical method; the fact that he submitted all my
reference letters weeks in advance of the deadlines; and his magical ability to give me supportive
feedback on chapter drafts within the same week that I sent them to him. Amid the pressures of
graduate school, to have had someone who has been constantly supportive and understanding has
been a great boon, and has helped give me the confidence to pursue my independent research.
A huge thank you also to the two other people who have been my mentors and constant
supporters since I arrived at Michigan: Damon Salesa and Michael Witgen. I am particularly
grateful for all the time they generously gave me for long conversations about historiography and
the state of their respective fields, which were hugely valuable as I tried to orient myself
intellectually. Like Greg’s, Damon’s and Michael’s amazing scholastic insights have left a
profound impression on my historical thinking, and they were hugely influential in
conceptualizing and executing this project.
I am also grateful for the support of a number of other scholars. A big thank you to Tiya
Miles for agreeing to be on my committee and for her invaluable feedback, and also for the
mentorship she gave to me and my fellow graduate students as head of Native American Studies;
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her advice was tremendously helpful in facing the practical challenges of researching and writing
a dissertation. Also to Leslie Pincus, who taught me so much about the writing process and who
both helped me formulate my optimal work schedule and made me realize that my own struggles
– far from being unique – were just part of the process, thank you. I am also grateful to a number
of other professors in the Department of History at Michigan, who I took courses with or taught
for, and who provided me with the intellectual inspiration and friendly support that has helped
make the department feel like home: Geoff Eley, Gabrielle Hecht, Sue Juster, Mary Kelly, Joel
Howell, Matt Lassiter, Gina Morantz-Sanchez, Marty Pernick, Mills Thornton, and Richard
Turits. Thank you also to other scholars who have taken the time to talk with me about my work,
in particular, Sharon Block, Miranda Johnson, and Zoë Laidlaw.
Thank you also to all my graduate-school colleagues at Michigan for perpetuating such
an exciting intellectual environment. While there are too many impressive young scholars and
people to name, I will just say a special thank you to those who have been some of my closest
and most supportive friends. Thank you to Suzi Linsley for being a friend and pillar of support
throughout; to Jenny Kohn, whose friendship, humor, and strength has inspired me; and to the
many others who have been unfailingly supportive, and with whom I have spent many much-
needed hours of fun and relaxation, including Crystal Chung, Nafisa Essop Sheik, Laura
Ferguson, Lauren Hirshberg, Nilanjana Majumdar, Stephen Sparks, Ronit Stahl, Colleen Woods,
and Jeremy Weijerman. And to many others for fun times, good chats, and exciting workshops,
including Rabia Belt, Aaron Cavin, Kelly Fayard, Amanda Hendrix-Komoto, Sara Lampert,
Gene Cassidy, Kara French, Sarah Hamilton, Trevor Kilgore, Angela Parker, Patrick Parker, Kiri
Sailiata, and Kiara Vigil. Thanks as well to all my Ann Arbor friends for their ongoing support,
and for reminding me that not all of life revolves around the university campus: Sammy Gupta
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and Pali Patel, Kate and Pat Hunt, Eric and Meghan Jankowski, Jason Kramb, Ben Morris, Katie
Tamarelli, Adam Wagner, and Sam Wintermute. Also thank you to Joseph Lambert for four
years of fun and for having such great friends.
For the financial support to research and write this dissertation, I am thankful for the
generosity of the Department of History and the Rackham Graduate School at the University of
Michigan. Thanks also to the helpful librarians and archivists at all the archives I visited,
particularly the friendly staff at the Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office and the National
Archives of Canada. Thank you also to the ever-helpful staff at the Hatcher Graduate Library at
the University of Michigan, in particular those in the Inter-Library Loan office.
And finally, to all my Australian friends and family, whose love and support has kept me
going despite the distance. Thanks to Dad and Lydia, Gromps and Jan, Marnie and Pa, and
Nannie; my siblings David, Sarah, Daniel, and James; my sisters- and brother-in-law Jacqui,
Stephanie, Taryn, and Clinton; and to all the Brown-Martini-Davis associates who have been like
family to me over the last fifteen years, especially to Karen Hunt and Steve Foster for making
London feel nearly as much like home as Melbourne. To the Poyners, whose approach to life
helps me to keep things in perspective, and to Gemma Deane, Sarah Pinto, and Jenny Zahara for
twenty years of loyal friendship and fun times, thank you. And above all, thanks to my stepfather
Kevin for his constant and ongoing support, and to my mother, Christine, without whose lifetime
of unconditional love and support none of this would have been possible.
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Table of Contents

Dedication .......................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... iii
Introduction
Removal, Morality, and “Natural” Processes ..........................................................1
Chapter One
Imagined Geographies of Justice ...........................................................................33
Chapter Two
Rituals of Morality .................................................................................................80
Chapter Three
The Moral Dangers of Encounter ........................................................................113
Chapter Four
Patriarchs of Expropriation ..................................................................................177
Chapter Five
Humanitarian Dispossession ................................................................................248
Chapter Six
Removal and Emigration in the Great Lakes .......................................................298
Conclusion
Paternalist Reckonings and Innocent Masculinities ............................................337
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................346

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Introduction
Removal, Morality, and “Natural” Processes

In his 1835 travel narrative, The Rambler in North America, Englishman and future
British colonial official Charles Joseph La Trobe wrote that one of the aims precipitating his
1832-33 travels in the “New World” had been “to be a guest in the lodges of that race, of whom
men speak as doomed speedily to disappear from the face of the earth.”1 Traveling in the early
years of the Jackson administration’s Indian removal policy, La Trobe apparently believed the
pronouncements of removal proponents, such as Secretary of War Lewis Cass, that the
government’s policy “to remove” the eastern American Indian peoples west of the Mississippi
River was a benevolent, just, and necessary policy. Given that “common observation alone”
apparently enabled anyone to predict the American Indians’ “utter extinction before the lapse of
many years,” La Trobe had “been led at length to admit” that the “white man and the Indian
cannot be near neighbours.”2 At first glance, La Trobe’s support for the Jacksonian’s Indian
removal policy seems surprising. As a Moravian Christian, committed to the civilizing mission
among “native” peoples, and as a man with self-proclaimed Tory sensibilities inimical to
Jacksonian-style egalitarianism, La Trobe had more in common with the proto-Whigs who in
1829 and 1830 led a concerted but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to block the passage of the

1 Charles Joseph Latrobe, The Rambler in North America, 2 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1835). 17.
2 Ibid., 130,34.

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Indian Removal Bill through Congress.3 Yet La Trobe’s writings on removal, and his subsequent
adoption of removal-style policies towards indigenous peoples in New South Wales, suggest that
“removal” – as a discursive concept and coercive practice – was not confined within the borders
of U.S.-claimed territory.
Despite similarities between “Indian removal” in the U.S. and policies adopted by the
British in their settler colonies, scholars have generally regarded government-sponsored efforts
“to remove” indigenous peoples from their homelands as a specifically U.S.-centered
phenomenon.4 Undoubtedly historical narratives of Indian removal in the United States tell
important stories regarding the republic’s national historical legacy. Most of these works focus
on the intensive efforts of the Jackson administration and the southern states against the “five
civilized” southeastern nations – the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles
– who struggled to retain their sovereignty in the face of intensive coercive pressure from U.S.
citizens eager to appropriate their lands.5 Yet even from the perspective of nationally bounded

3 After intense debate in Congress, the Indian Removal Bill passed the Senate in May 1830. See Ronald N. Satz,
American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002). 19-31. On the
proto-Whig “antireomovalists” see Francis Paul Prucha, "Introduction," in Cherokee Removal: The "William Penn"
Essays and Other Writings, ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981). For the
involvement of women in the antiremoval campaign: Mary Hershberger, "Mobilizing Women, Anticipating
Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s," Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (1999); Alisse
Theodore Portnoy, ""Female Petitioners can Lawfully Be Heard": Negotiating Female Decorum, United States
Politics, and Political Agency, 1829-1831," Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 4 (2003). On the politics of the
second party system see, for instance, Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: the Transformation of
America, 1815-1848 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Charles Grier Sellers, The Market
Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
4 Cf scholars of “settler colonialism” who see removal as part of a geographically and temporally wider phenomenon
in which indigenous peoples faced similar patterns of coercion as invading settlers attempted to appropriate their
lands in places such as British North America (and subsequently Canada and the United States), Australia, and New
Zealand. See for example, Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: a Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke,
Hampshire, UK ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). This scholarship will be discussed in more detail below.
5 See Grant Foreman, Indian Removal: the Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1953); Michael D. Green, The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in
Crisis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Tiya Miles, Ties that Bind: the Story of an Afro-Cherokee
Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and
Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Knopf : distributed by Random
House, 1975); Satz, American Indian Policy; Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and
the Indians (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993).

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U.S. histories, few scholars have focused on government-sponsored efforts to remove American
Indian peoples further north in the region of the Great Lakes or “Old Northwest.”6 Reorienting
our gaze to this region brings into view crucial dynamics relating to the so-called “removal” of
indigenous peoples in the U.S. and British empire.
The political dynamics of the U.S.-British border region in the Great Lakes had a
particular impact on the formulation of U.S. Indian policy. Indeed, in the 1820s two major
proponents of Indian removal in the U.S. – Lewis Cass and Thomas McKenney – framed their
views on Indian policy as much in light of Great Lakes U.S.-Indian diplomacy and the proximity
of the British as they did with respect to the escalating conflict between the Cherokees and
Georgia. For Cass in particular, the perceived threat of the British loomed large. As governor of
the Michigan Territory and the territory’s ex officio superintendent of Indian affairs (1813-1831),
Cass’s Detroit residence lay, for instance, about 15 miles south of the British fort at
Amherstburg. With the War of 1812 a fresh memory, and the Native American and First Nations
people who allied with the British constantly crossing a border whose delineation had ostensibly
little to do with their nations’ sovereignty, a significant part of Cass’s Indian policy aimed to end
what he perceived as “the influence acquired by the British Agents” over “the Indians.” This
influence had, he wrote to the U.S. Secretary of War in 1816, “been uniformly exerted to hostile

6 Regional or tribal studies of the Great Lakes era, which include the first half of the nineteenth century, however,
discuss the impact of the U.S. government’s removal policy: see for example, Robert E. Beider, "Sault Ste. Marie
and the War of 1812: A World Turned Upside Down in the Old Northwest," Indian Magazine of History 95, no. 1
(1999); James A. Clifton, The Prairie People: Continuity and Change in Potawatomi Indian Culture, 1665-1965
(Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977); James McClurken, "Ottawa Adaptive Strategies to Indian Removal,"
Michigan Historical Review 12(1986); James M. McClurken, Our People, Our Journey: the Little River Band of
Ottawa Indians (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009); Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, A Gathering of
Rivers: Indians, Métis, and mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737-1832 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2000); Elizabeth Neumeyer, "Michigan Indians Battle Against Removal," Michigan History 55, no. 4 (1971); David
Lee Smith, Ho-Chunk Tribal History: The History of the Ho-Chunk People from the Mound Building Era to the
Present Day (Nebraska: David Lee Smith, 1996). Older local history narratives, particularly those in the Wisconsin
Historical Collections, also give accounts of the removal era in the Great Lakes region: for example, Reuben Gold
Thwaites, "The Wisconsin Winnebagoes: An Interview with Moses Paquette," Wisconsin Historical Collections
12(1892).

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