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BYPETERCOZZENS

I

N MAY 1830,Congress passed
the Indian Removal Act “to
provide for an exchange of
lands with the Indians resid-
ing in any of the states or ter-
ritories, and for their removal west of
the river Mississippi.” The legislation
made no mention of how Indians were
to be compensated for their lands,
which had been guaranteed them
by federal treaties, or how they would
be transported over hundreds of miles
of rudimentary roads to an indeter-
minate location that none of those
affected had ever laid eyes upon.
During the succeeding eight years,
the administration of President An-
drew Jackson—goaded by an unholy
alliance between white-supremacist
Georgia slave owners, determined
to expand their cotton kingdom onto
native lands in present-day Alabama
and Mississippi, and their New York
financier enablers—alternatively ca-
joled and coerced nearly 80,000 in-
digenous inhabitants of the South into
surrendering their ancestral homes.
The dispossessed were the Cherokee,
Creek, Chickasaw and Choctaw
nations, and the Seminoles of modern
Florida. The government also ejected
smaller Indian tribes from their lands
north of the Ohio River, but it is the
Southern exodus, culminating in the
Cherokee “Trail of Tears” in 1838, that
forms both the core of this shameful
episode in American history and the
focus of Claudio Saunt’s seminal
“Unworthy Republic: The Disposses-
sion of Native Americans and the
Road to Indian Territory.”
A professor of history at the Uni-
versity of Georgia who has written
extensively about the Southern tribes
and racial and economic injustice
in the early American Republic, Mr.
Saunt presents a passionate and pro-
vocative account of what he calls “one
of the first state-sponsored mass
expulsions in the modern world”; the
“U.S. counterpart of Europe’s ‘Jewish
question.’ ” He convincingly argues
that the root cause of the expulsion of
the Indian inhabitants of the South
was a vile mix of racial antipathy, un-
bounded greed and the naive idealism
of self-styled Indian experts like Isaac
McCoy, who convinced otherwise
reluctant members of Congress and
the public that deportation was in the
Indians’ best interest because their
way of life was both threatened by and
irreconcilable with that of the whites.
In fact, as Mr. Saunt trenchantly ob-
serves, “only one thing was truly irrec-
oncilable: native and white ownership
of the same land.”
Drawing on prodigious research
into primary sources, Mr. Saunt offers
the most detailed account to date of
the mechanics of Indian expulsion,
demonstrating that a woefully under-
staffed federal bureaucracy was inca-

Voyage of Mercy

By Stephen Puleo

St. Martin’s, 313 pages, $28.99

BYTERRYGOLWAY

A

MERICANShave grown
accustomed to seeing
their fellow citizens pro-
viding food, medicine
and logistical assistance
at disaster sites around the globe. It’s
not by any means an exceptionally
American tradition, but a tradition it
surely is.
Some might argue that it began a
century ago, when a brilliant engineer
named Herbert Hoover organized
humanitarian aid to feed millions of
starving, homeless Europeans during
and after World War I. But according
to Stephen Puleo, the nation’s impulse
to aid the afflicted beyond its borders
can be traced to the journey of a war-
ship bound from Boston to Ireland at
the height of the island’s potato fam-
ine. Its mission was not conquest but
relief, for in its hold were 8,000 barrels
of food donated by the young republic
3,000 miles away from Ireland’s misery.
The potato failures in Ireland in the
late 1840s and early 1850s are well-
known and little understood, at least
on this side of the Atlantic. In “Voyage

of Mercy,” Mr. Puleo joins a long list of

historians and writers who have

sought to explain why and how so

many Irish people died when the

potato failed. Easy to cultivate and

filled with nutrition, the potato was

their staple crop, but when it turned

black and putrid, they had nowhere to

turn. There was plenty of food in

Ireland, but much of it was designated

for export, and, as Mr. Puleo notes,

Victorian policy makers in London

were not about to question the wisdom

of laissez-faire economics. So Irish

people died of disease and starvation

while food was loaded aboard ships

bound for other markets.

As Americans learned of the horrors

in Ireland, they responded on a scale

that would become familiar in the

decades to come. President James K.

Polk, the legendary orator Daniel Web-

ster, and the great compromiser Henry

Clay delivered impassioned appeals for

action on behalf of the Irish. “It is not

fervid eloquence, nor gilded words,

that Ireland needs—but substantial

food,” Clay said.

Shortly thereafter, USS Jamestown

was pulled from active duty in order to

transport food and clothing to Ireland.

An armada of relief followed in its

wake, becoming “the single greatest

philanthropic effort by one nation on

behalf of another,” in Mr. Puleo’s words.

There is no shortage of scholarship

on the subject of Ireland’s suffering

from roughly 1845 to 1851. Recent

books by Christine Kinealy, John Kelly

and Enda Delaney, among others, have

broadened our understanding of what

happened in Ireland more than 150

years ago and why the failure of a

Jamestown’s relief should be distrib-

uted in rural areas throughout County

Cork, one of the hardest-hit regions, or

restricted to Cork city. Capt. Forbes

was forced to intercede, and he de-

cided that the supplies were intended

for the whole county. Thus started an-

other American tradition—mediating

Ireland’s disputes—upheld, to take one

prominent example, by former Maine

Sen. George Mitchell, who helped

broker Northern Ireland’s Good Friday

Agreement in 1998.

Mr. Puleo correctly sees the voyage

of the Jamestown as a seminal moment

in the history of American-Irish rela-

tions. While British authorities worried

that the starving Irish would become

dependent on charity, Capt. Forbes and

other Americans delivered relief, no

questions asked. “An Irishman looks on

America as the refuge of his race,”

wrote novelist Thomas Colley Grattan,

a Dubliner.

But it wasn’t quite so simple, as Mr.

Puleo points out. American benevo-

lence shriveled up when the starving

Irish landed in New York, Boston and

other U.S. cities. Few would have pre-

dicted that two of those wretched ex-

iles would start a family in Boston that

would one day produce a president and

two U.S. senators. Yes, those Kennedys.

Mr. Puleo’s tale, despite the hard-

ship to come, surely is a tribute to the

better angels of America’s nature, and

in that sense, it couldn’t be more

timely.

Mr. Golway is a senior editor at

Politico and a member of the board

of advisers at New York University’s

Glucksman Ireland House.

America’s

Great Gift

To Ireland

single crop led to death and exile on a

gigantic scale, transforming not only

Ireland but the U.S. as well. But Mr.

Puleo has found a new way to tell the

story with this well-researched and

splendidly written chronicle of the

Jamestown, its captain, and an Irish

priest who ministered to the starving

in Cork city.

Robert Bennet Forbes had no family

connection to Ireland, but after hearing

of the distress in Ireland during a mass

meeting in Boston in 1847, he offered a

daring proposal: The U.S. should make

a warship available to bring aid to Ire-

land as quickly as possible, and he—a

veteran sea captain—would command

it. It took an act of Congress to achieve,

but it was done, thanks in large part to

the advocacy of Sen. John Crittenden

of Kentucky.

The Jamestown was retrofitted for

its new mission and set sail for County

Cork in March 1847. Waiting there was

the Rev. Theobald Mathew, renowned

then and now as Ireland’s apostle of

temperance. The priest put aside his

crusade against drink to minister to the

starving and the dying as they poured

into Cork city in search of something to

eat. He saw horrors similar to those

that a British administrator witnessed

when he stumbled upon, as he put it,

“six famished and ghastly skeletons, to

all appearances dead... huddled in a

corner on some filthy straw.” They

were not dead but perhaps wished they

were, for they were in the final throes

of hunger-related disease.

The arrival of the Jamestown and

the ensuing partnership between the

American sea captain and the famous

Irish priest is the dramatic high point

of Mr. Puleo’s book. But other narra-

tive threads are equally vivid. As the

Jamestown’s cargo is unloaded, for

instance, Mr. Puleo shifts to a scene

that would not surprise even casual

students of Irish history: There was a

split among the Irish over whether the

ARRIVALUSS Jamestown in Cork Harbor on April 12, 1847.

RODNEY CHARMAN/KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS MUSEUM

pable of managing the relocation—

most often forced—of 80,000 men,

women and children west of the Mis-

sissippi River while maintaining even

rudimentary standards of hygiene and

humanity. Thousands perished, and

“Unworthy Republic” recounts their

tribulations as fully as limited Indian

source material permits.

Mr. Saunt also graphically describes

the violence that Georgia and Florida

vigilantes, land speculators and other

impatient white invaders perpetrated

against Indians unwilling to quit their

lands or unwilling to seek refuge from

the white onslaught. Recounting an

atrocity committed by a Florida posse

whose dogs had picked up the scent of

what the pursuers thought was a run-

away slave, Mr. Saunt writes:

As the hunters closed in, however,

they discovered that the fugitive

was in fact Native American—and

therefore not worth sparing. They

raised their rifles, took aim, and

shot. As they approached the

wounded man, his identity became

clearer. He was about nineteen

years old and appeared to be a

Creek villager, who must have fled

across south Georgia in a desperate

attempt to find refuge in the Flor-

ida Panhandle. One hunter few a

knife, pulled the man’s hair taut,

and cut off his scalp.

Mr. Saunt admirably relates the

efforts of Indian leaders such as the

Cherokee statesman John Ross to

forestall removal, only to see Presi-

dent Jackson undertake it after the

Supreme Court, inWorcester v. Geor-

gia, rendered a decision that pre-

vented the state from dispossessing

the Cherokees of their land. The

author presents in startling relief the

tremendous economic cost of the

Indian Removal Act. “The federal

government expended about $75

million to expel native peoples from

their homelands,” he observes. “Vast

sums passed through the War Depart-

ment to fund the dispossession. In the

pivotal year of 1836, more than forty

percent of every federal dollar went

to enforce the ‘Act to provide for an

exchange of lands.’”

And what of the dispossessed? Mr.

Saunt calculates that the Creeks,

Chickasaws and Choctaws together

lost nearly $25 million in personal

wealth—more than $700 million in

today’s dollars. Withal, the Indian

Removal Act was a moneymaker for

the government; the funds realized

from the public sale of Indian lands

topped $80 million, a nearly 10% profit

realized on human misery of a sort

seldom seen in American history. In

Alabama in 1836, the Creeks—hemmed

in on fast-shrinking plots or wandering

homeless—“survived by eating bark

off trees and consuming rotten animal

carcasses,” writes Mr. Saunt. “The

most wretched of the dispossessed—

hungry, homeless, and drunk—could

be seen staggering about, with blood-

shot eyes and ‘clotted and bloody

garments.’ ” Their chiefs were helpless.

“I talk to them, but they have nothing

to eat,” bemoaned one Creek leader.

“What can I do? They must eat, they

cannot live on air.”

It was a fate both cruel and ironic

that befell the Creeks. While rightly

blaming the slave economy of the

South for Indian expulsion and its

attendant evils, Mr. Saunt neglects an

important precursor: In the early 18th

century, the Creek Indians reaped

handsome profits themselves selling

captured Indian enemies into slavery

to South Carolina plantation owners.

When that source of income ran dry,

Creek warriors became bounty hunt-

ers, tracking down runaway black

slaves from South Carolina and Geor-

gia plantations who sought refuge in

the Creek country.

Although Mr. Saunt does a highly

commendable job in relating the

plight of the Southern native peoples

during the era of Indian Removal, he

does not provide readers with a solid

sense of who they were. The cultures

of the tribes affected are not exam-

ined; neither are the long traditions

of both intertribal and internal strife

that prevented the Indians from unit-

ing against the white onslaught. In

this regard, occasional errors arise.

Of Jackson’s use of Creek warriors to

battle their Seminole neighbors in the

First Seminole War, Mr. Saunt writes,

“by employing Creek gunmen, Jack-

son exploited the fact that Creeks had

been bitterly divided since the U.S.-

Creek War of 1813-1814.” In fact, the

Creeks had long been divided into two

nearly irreconcilable factions; in this

rupture lay a root cause of the Creek

War, a seminal event that set the

stage for removal, but which receives

only passing mention.

This aside, “Unworthy Republic” is

a much-needed rendering of a dis-

graceful episode in American history

that has been too long misunderstood.

Mr. Cozzens is the author of

“The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic

Story of the Indian Wars for the

American West.”

Unworthy Republic

By Claudio Saunt

Norton, 396 pages, $26.95

Jackson’s Eminent Domain

HOMESTEADA Choctaw encampment on the Mississippi River, ca. 1833, by Karl Bodmer.

GETTY IMAGES

The Creeks, Chickasaws

and Choctaws lost nearly

$25 million in personal

wealth—equal to about

$700 million today.

BOOKS

‘We are despoiled of our private possessions, the indefeasible property of individuals. We are stripped of every attribute of freedom.’—CHIEF JOHN ROSS