Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States by Samantha Seeley (review)

Reviewed by: Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States by Samantha Seeley Nicholas P. Wood Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States By Samantha Seeley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. ix, 354. Notes, index. Clothbound, $34.95; paperbound, $29.95.) In Race, Removal and the Right to Remain, Samantha Seeley studies, in tandem, the efforts by United States politicians and reformers to push Native Americans farther west and expel free African Americans from specific states or the nation as a whole. Although these movements are most commonly studied separately, Seeley demonstrates how both reflected similar impulses to control the nation's "racial geography" and create a "republic based on whiteness" (pp. 3, 7). Seeley also traces both movements back to the late colonial period, whereas most scholarship on Black removal focuses on the period after the 1816 creation of the American Colonization Society (ACS) and studies of Indian removal generally give disproportionate attention to the period beginning with President Andrew Jackson's election in 1828. By integrating the history of removal and focusing on the early republic, Seeley offers a fresh perspective that also highlights the ways nonwhite Americans contested removal and defended their "right to remain." The "right to remain" is not part of our normal pantheon of rights, but Seeley convincingly demonstrates that it is a useful concept. Indeed, for the Black and Indigenous people she [End Page 93] studies, this "right" was closely connected to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Native Americans sought to remain on their ancestral lands where their communities hunted, fished, and farmed. Free African Americans sought to remain with their families, which often included members who remained enslaved, and/or acquire land they could work for their own benefit. However, these desires were often at odds with the interests of white Americans who wanted cheap land and who often sought to strengthen the institution of slavery by removing the anomalous class of free Blacks. Throughout the early national period, Native peoples banded their tribes together in larger confederacies in order to strengthen their negotiating and defensive positions. This cooperation enabled the United Indian Nations to resist removal pressure and score "major military victories against U.S. forces" in 1790 and 1791 (p. 92). During negotiations in 1793, the Indians again rebuffed pressure to cede land, responding: "It appears strange you should expect any from us, who have only been defending our just rights against your invasion" (p. 119). Instead of accepting the money offered for cessions, the Indians encouraged U.S. negotiators to use the funds to remove white settlers who were encroaching on Native land. Over time, divisions and disagreements among Indians weakened their position while the U.S. grew in strength, but the process of removal remained contested even as the federal government gained the upper hand. Meanwhile, many white Americans envisioned removing free Black people from the eastern states, either as a way to promote emancipation or strengthen slavery. Some African Americans also entertained the idea of Black emigration or colonization, but with a skeptical eye. As Seeley explains, "self-determination moved most African American emigrationists while exclusion motivated most white colonizationists" (p. 175). This distinction is apt, but at other times Seeley makes some misleading generalizations. For instance, she asserts that white colonizationists' motive of "removal" led them to consider settlements in both West Africa and "west of the Appalachian Mountains," whereas Black colonizationists looked to Africa as a site of "diasporic return" and missionary work but "never mentioned North America as the site for a colony" (p. 198). This distinction is not entirely accurate, for African colonization was generally far more popular among white slaveholders than African Americans, and many Blacks expressed interest in western emigration at least as early as 1773 and continued to do so after the creation of the American Colonization Society in 1816. Indeed, Seeley reports that Black migrants established "at least forty independent settlements in Ohio and thirty rural settlements in Indiana before the Civil War" (p. 301). These settlements may not have been formal colonies, but they seem to undermine...