When the doctrine of discovery became law
Steven Schwartzberg shows how the 19th-century arguments for Native American expulsion went against the intentions of the framers of the Constitution—and how they remain with us today.
Arguments over Genocide
The War of Words in the Congress and the Supreme Court over Cherokee Removal
“I was the witness of sufferings which I have not the power to portray,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America after seeing Choctaw nationals cross the Mississippi River into Arkansas on their way to the Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. The US government’s expulsion of Native American tribes from Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi in the 1830s is among our gravest—and often misunderstood—national sins.
To be sure, generations of middle and high school students have learned about Andrew Jackson, the Indian Removal Act, and the Trail of Tears, including some sense of its brutality and death. However, these lessons frequently come from perspectives that focus on national expansion and manifest destiny, rather than on the experiences of Native Americans or even the legal and ethical obligations of the US government. For example, the state of Texas’s social studies standards merely require students to be able to “analyze the reasons for the removal and resettlement of Cherokee Indians during the Jacksonian era.”
Steven J. Schwartzberg steps into this dearth of understanding to examine how the reasons given for Native American expulsion were extensions of the doctrine of discovery drawn up in legalese. More vitally, he shows that these arguments, crafted in the 1820s and 1830s contrary to the intentions of the framers of the United States Constitution, are still with us and must be overcome before there can be a true reconciliation between our government and Native American nations.
