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

Abstract

Despite the similarity of U.S. and British policies towards indigenous people in the early nineteenth century, scholars have generally regarded government-sponsored efforts “to remove” indigenous peoples from their homelands in the 1830s as the specialty of the United States. By connecting U.S. and British removal policies, I present a new historical rendering of U.S. and British territorial expansion. This transnational perspective also offers a new conceptualization of the cultural (and intellectual) dynamics of American and British colonial authority during this period. I argue that in addition to broad economic and demographic trends, certain British and American officials mobilized a shared paternalist morality, in order to portray as just, necessary, and natural, the expatriation of indigenous peoples, and the expropriation of their homelands. Told through an interrogation of the writings and governing activities of two American and three British officials, I show how Thomas McKenney and Lewis Cass in the United States drew on conceptions of morality fundamentally similar to those of three British proponents of removal: George Arthur, Francis Bond Head, and Charles La Trobe.

Elucidating the dense weave of cultural connections among these men, my narrative moves between North America and British colonies in Australia. I begin by comparing similar efforts in the Great Lakes and Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s to impose legal jurisdiction over indigenous peoples. I then explore the meaning and significance of rituals and ceremonies held in the late 1820s in the Great Lakes to show a simultaneous shift in British and American Indian policy towards a new brand of paternalism. I subsequently draw out the meanings of specific encounters between the officials and indigenous people, highlighting the interpersonal dynamics that the officials never made explicit in their advocacy for removal. I then interrogate the more overt discursive logic that these removal proponents created through their advocacy. Finally, I highlight the removalist underpinnings of British protectionism in the 1830s and 1840s and tell a transnational history of indigenous removal in North America, which draws together British and U.S. Indian policy and relations in the Upper Great Lakes region.