Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal by John P. Bowes (review)

Abstract

98 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY common ground. They accepted all petitions and a vocal minority of members forced them to reconsider the principles on which any resident could be denied the rights of citizenship. Delegates could not avoid hearing arguments in favor of liberating ideas, often to their own embarrassment: the occasional discussions of women’s rights in some states were actually omitted from the official record, and difficult issues over black people’s rights were referred to referenda in four states. Thus, difficult moral issues were ultimately decided in the court of popular prejudice. Many of the decisions of 1846–57, Siddali reminds us, did not survive long. Married women’s property rights may not have gained recognition in these conventions (outside Michigan), but within twenty years legislative acts passed them everywhere. Most of these constitutions restricted the state legislatures to meeting only biennially, but the pressures of war soon forced the readoption of annual sessions. Above all, the Civil War and Reconstruction counteracted the power of racial prejudice, compelling the grant of formal civil rights to all born in the United States, including the right to vote on the same terms as white men. Thus, antebellum popular sovereignty in the Old Northwest was ultimately overwhelmed by national need and the moral transformations of the 1860s. Donald Ratcliffe University of Oxford