Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain

Migration and the Making of the United States

Samantha Seeley

• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469664828
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

Who had the right to live within the newly united states of America? In the country's founding decades, federal and state politicians debated which categories of people could remain and which should be subject to removal. The result was a white Republic, purposefully constructed through contentious legal, political, and diplomatic negotiation. But, as Samantha Seeley demonstrates, removal, like the right to remain, was a battle fought on multiple fronts. It encompassed tribal leaders' fierce determination to expel white settlers from Native lands and free African Americans' legal maneuvers both to remain within the states that sought to drive them out and to carve out new lives in the West. Never losing sight of the national implications of regional conflicts, Seeley brings us directly to the battlefield, to middle states poised between the edges of slavery and freedom where removal was both warmly embraced and hotly contested. Reorienting the history of U.S. expansion around Native American and African American histories, Seeley provides a much-needed reconsideration of early nation building.

CHAPTER 1

REMOVAL AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE

The seventeenth-century English Atlantic world was a world of motion, as colonial projects sent people toward the Americas. Atlantic crossings were largely made by those who were bound to labor for someone else. Demands for labor in the Caribbean and North America brought three hundred thousand English, upward of twenty thousand Irish, and seven thousand Scottish migrants to the English colonies over the course of the century. Half of them were indentured servants with contracts that obligated them to remain in service for a set number of years, while a much smaller number were convicted prisoners from England and Scotland also subject to terms of indenture. By the eighteenth century, the great majority were forced African migrants. Enslaved Africans taken to the English colonies far outnumbered indentured servants.¹

Removal and seventeenth-century English colonization went hand in hand. Migration was calculated, something to be managed by the monarch toward the ends of empire. In vagrancy statutes, Elizabethan poor laws, and criminal transportation, expulsion was the punishment and solution for a variety of social ills. English monarchs, their counselors, and colonial promoters believed that the transportation of large groups of people to new colonies would reform those convicted of crimes, suppress rebellion, support claims to territory, and mitigate poverty while funneling laboring men and women to North America. English traders took thousands of Africans into bondage in the English colonies, in part by defining them as removable. In the colonies themselves, English migrants used removal once again as they attempted to dispossess Native people.

Whether forced, coerced, or free, transatlantic migrants entered a Native world that had also been in motion long before Europeans appeared. In the early thirteenth century, Mississippian societies—characterized by concentrated towns surrounded by villages and centered on maize agriculture—had predominated across the Eastern Woodlands for centuries. On the eve of European arrival in the Americas, those centralized communities had begun to disperse and form new confederacies that would dominate the eastern half of the continent by the seventeenth century. Those polities already sought to expel outsiders to their benefit. When the English set foot in what is now Virginia, the Powhatan Confederacy was in the process of replacing rival chiefdoms along the Chesapeake Bay’s coastal plain with those they had subjugated. Haudenosaunees would similarly displace outsiders, broadening the boundaries of Iroqouia in what is now New York. Up and down the Atlantic seaboard, seventeenth-century Native people fought English colonization and defended their borders by keeping colonial settlements to the coasts. For Indigenous people, as for transatlantic migrants, who moved and where had enormous consequences.²

Before the United States appeared on any map, removal had an extensive history in North America. British imperial officials relied on it as an instrument of colonization. Fueled by removal, the British Empire expanded dramatically by the eighteenth century. Removal made population serve the growing empire. Later, it would come to inform early national debates about population and who constituted the people in the new United States. British precedents lay the groundwork for those early national debates.

Early modern English thinkers vaunted removal as a crucial tool of governance—a way to harness population to the ends of state building. Accounting for population, however, had not always been important to how the English made sense of the world. Before the seventeenth century, European writers debated whether counting people was desirable or even useful. The first censuses taken in Europe were accounts made after the plagues of the Middle Ages, as societies sought to comprehend the devastation of epidemic disease. More routine curiosity in population only emerged later, in the seventeenth century. Colonization drove an interest in demography—a field for which European writers had no name. In an era of Atlantic connection and migration, counting people suddenly seemed important. What Molly Farrell has called “human accounting” lay at the center of English ventures in North America. As Native people grappled with the arrival of Europeans on their shores, they also used population counts to make sense of the changes the outsiders brought with them. Counting people provided a way to comprehend the vast new epidemiological, political, and cultural worlds that Europeans, Africans, and Natives had created by the seventeenth century.³

Sixteenth-century English colonial promoters took advantage of this newfound preoccupation with counting people to propose North American ventures as solutions for the social ills they associated with high population density. Between 1560 and 1600, England’s population increased from three to four million people. Enclosures, poor harvests, and declining wages prompted the long-distance migration of people from rural areas to towns. English thinkers argued that these changes caused poverty and criminality, two mounting social ills that needed to be managed. Most dangerous in their eyes were those they called vagrants, the able-bodied poor who traveled looking for work and opportunity beyond their home counties. Vagrancy had been categorized as a criminal offense in the fourteenth century, but vagrancy statutes proliferated as long-distance migration became more prominent. From the late sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries, a series of thirteen poor laws defined the poverty of the able bodied as lawlessness.⁴

Colonial promoters promised to reform the able-bodied poor through removal. They made a case for their projects at court by suggesting that colonization would transport undesirable people out of England. Excess populations at home, they argued, would become the building blocks for successful colonization. People were key to what the early English lawyer Richard Hakluyt the elder believed was necessary to “man,” “plant,” and “keepe” the new North American colonies. Coerced and forced migration solved two interrelated problems of early modern statecraft—how to reduce the population of the metropole and how to “man” North American colonial ventures.⁵

Control over the movements of English subjects had long been the king’s prerogative. A 1381 act had allowed the king to restrain the emigration of subjects whose services he required. Elizabeth I and James I both assumed that monarchs enjoyed complete control over the movement of their subjects within and beyond England when they limited the mobility of Catholics. Proprietors were granted permission in colonial charters to transport people to new realms in the name of the monarch. The Georgia Charter of 1732, for example, authorized colonial proprietors “at all times hereafter, to transport and convey” people to the colony by permission of the king. People were, as Christopher Tomlins writes, “A resource of the Crown, to be rendered mobile or immobile propter communem utilitatem, that is, according to the best interests of the state.” Mobile subjects, however, never lost their allegiance. Sir Edward Coke’s 1603 interpretation of Calvin’s Case cemented a theory of subjecthood that was underpinned by feudal ideas about perpetual allegiance. Even traveling subjects could never renounce their responsibilities to the monarch.⁶

English monarchs could also transport undesirable subjects to new colonial spaces, where they would help to establish colonies on behalf of the crown. In the sixteenth century during the reign of Elizabeth I, the English began to punish vagrancy and transiency with transportation. A 1598 act threatened vagrants with whipping, removal to their place of birth, imprisonment, or banishment. In 1603, under James I, the Privy Council specified that “dangerous Rogues” could be sent to Newfoundland, the East and West Indies, France, Germany, Spain, or the Low Countries. Local officials also had the ability to move people domestically to address the problem of poverty. The Elizabethan poor law of 1601 made parish officials responsible for raising taxes to provide basic poor support for those who could not work and for building almshouses and arranging apprenticeships for those who could. As English men and women traveled longer distances to find work in the seventeenth century, the poor laws changed to address this new reality. To avoid overburdening the relief rolls of populous towns, a 1572 act gave people a settlement where they were born or where they had lived for three years or more, which made them eligible for poor support. The time it took to gain a settlement was reduced to forty days in 1662. Parish officers could remove those who did not have a settlement before they could apply for poor support. They decided who could make a claim on the community and who could not, determining its membership and policing its boundaries.⁷

English colonists in North America adopted poor laws wholesale, modeling colonial poor relief on English precedents. In Virginia, counties administered poor relief locally through the mechanisms of settlement and removal even before the colonial legislature passed a poor relief statute of its own. The vestrymen of Virginia parishes assessed the needs of impoverished people and determined the appropriate poll tax to levy on residents of their parish. In New England, it was town leaders who administered poor relief. To gain a settlement in a colonial town or parish, one had to be born or purchase land there. Children inherited settlements from their fathers. Women could obtain a settlement in their husband’s town or parish through marriage—a result of coverture, in which women’s legal rights were suspended and represented by her husband. Poor laws led to removal in some colonies but not others. In eighteenth-century Rhode Island, transients were often warned out, or told to leave, and sent back to the town where they had a settlement. In Vermont and Massachusetts, actual removal was infrequent, even when colonists were warned out. Boston overseers used warning out as a preliminary step to strip the transient poor from the city’s rolls and shift them onto the colony’s poor rolls. It was less a means of social exclusion than a clever accounting trick that kept Bostonians from having to assume financial responsibility for mobile people.⁸

Undesirable people subject to removal to the colonies also included those convicted of a wide range of crimes as well as indigent children, political radicals, and religious dissenters. In 1615, an act of James I’s Privy Council allowed banishment as a punishment for pardoned felons who had been found guilty of certain capital crimes. They could choose banishment, usually but not always accompanied by a fixed term of servitude. Criminal transportation in the seventeenth century was carried out in an ad hoc manner. Sometimes those convicted of crimes were allowed to arrange their own transportation while others were consigned to merchants who transported them alongside other unfree laborers. When a new Transportation Act made exile a statutory punishment for many noncapital as well as capital crimes in 1718, rather than as a conditional requirement for a pardon, the convict transportation business expanded to meet the needs of the new law. After its passage, transportation became the most common punishment for noncapital crimes. Thirty thousand English convicts were exiled to North America between 1718 and 1775, and at least fifty thousand English, Irish, and Scottish convicts were transported over the course of the eighteenth century as a whole. Convict transportation was a lucrative business for English merchants, who carried people from London and Bristol to Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and colonies in the West Indies. From the perspective of English ministers and colonial promoters, transportation made those convicted of crimes useful to the state by sending them to the colonies where they would serve colonial labor needs. In the cases of vagrancy and criminal transportation, removal and colonization were bound together.⁹

In the colonies themselves, the success of English imperial projects depended on the removal and replacement of people who already lived there. Ireland, where the English sought greater control beginning in the sixteenth century, provided a model for colonizers in North America. During the Elizabethan era, the English feared Irish Catholics as internal enemies who might assist a Spanish army to invade Protestant England. Military campaigns targeted rebels who defended Ireland’s autonomy, confiscated their lands, and removed them to make way for English migrants. As punishment for threatening the security of the realm, Irish dissidents were expelled after rebellions in the 1570s, 1598, 1606, and 1641. English colonizers hoped that transplanted English migrants would have a civilizing effect on local communities, turning those they called savages into subjects by reforming Irish religion, language, modes of dress, and farming. By placing their own bureaucrats in charge, English officials believed they could diminish the power of clan leaders. They put this agenda into practice in Munster in southern Ireland in the late sixteenth century, where they sent thousands of English settlers to create a model colony on land taken from Irish rebels. They did the same in Ulster in the early seventeenth century, attracting one hundred thousand Scottish, Welsh, and English migrants there by 1641.¹⁰

The English brought the example of Ireland with them to colonial projects across the Atlantic. Indeed, the same colonial promoters were sometimes involved in ventures in both places. They also looked to Spanish colonization and the tributary relationship the Spanish had imposed on Indigenous people as a model for their own colonies. English state builders believed that moving English subjects to North America, as they had done in Ireland, would similarly transform Native agriculture, dress, religion, and politics. When the English landed in 1607 in what is now Virginia, it was with these assumptions and expectations that they first approached the Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan people who controlled the region.¹¹

The coastal plain where the English established Jamestown was the territory of the Powhatan Confederacy, a paramount chiefdom of more than thirty Algonquian polities ruled by the paramount chief Powhatan. The confederacy’s chiefdoms stretched across Tsenacommacah, the coastal territory from the James River to the Potomac River, and they all paid tribute to Powhatan, who had the power to allocate use rights to lands held in common to particular communities. Powhatan had the same idea as the English. He planned to fold them into a tributary relationship that would allow him to augment his own power and dominate English trade networks.¹²

When conflict ruled out the subordinate relationships that both the English and the Powhatans imagined, they turned to war—the English to dispossess the Powhatans and the Powhatans to conquer the English. Powhatan had already successfully subjugated and relocated other Indigenous people along the coastal plain. By the early seventeenth century, he was engaged in a campaign to incorporate Algonquians around the Chesapeake Bay to add to the chiefdoms he had inherited along the James and York Rivers. Those who resisted were subject to reprisals. In 1608, Powhatan sent a party to attack and disperse the Piankatanks after they skirted him by sending their own diplomatic mission to the English. He settled the Kecoughtans and more loyal followers in Pianka...