Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain

Reviewed by: Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States by Samantha Seeley Andrew Denson (bio) Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States by Samantha Seeley University of North Carolina Press, 2021 in race, removal, and the right to remain, historian Samantha Seeley explores the politics of migration and exclusion in the United States during the early national period. Focusing on the Upper South, Middle Atlantic, and Ohio River Valley, she examines a series of “removal projects,” (10) in which state and federal governments sought variously to deport Indigenous Peoples, restrict the movement of free African Americans, and promote Black “colonization,” the emigration of free African Americans away from the United States. Together, she argues, these projects formed crucial steps in how early American political leaders defined the new United States as a white republic, creating a nation in which race determined who could enjoy the benefits of citizenship and political participation. In the literature on United States history, the term “removal” most often refers specifically to the Indian removal policy of the antebellum era. As Seeley notes, however, that policy was just one of many efforts by early American governments to exclude or expel nonwhites. Earlier, in the years immediately following the Revolution, American leaders tried to treat Native nations as conquered enemies, demanding vast cessions of territory from Great Britain’s former allies, and they defined the rapid opening of new lands to white settlement as essential to the well-being of the republic. The deportation of Native Americans, Seeley writes, was a “founding project” of the new nation (56). The later removal policy, she suggests, represented a revival of those older principles, rather than a new turn in Indian affairs. During this same period, state governments sought to restrict the movement of free African Americans. States in the Upper South and Ohio River Valley tried to close their borders to free Black migration, and Virginia passed a law requiring newly freed African Americans to leave the state within a year of manumission. These laws, Seeley suggests, followed a racist logic similar to that of Native American removal. In both cases, American politicians defined the very presence of nonwhite communities as dangerous to the republic, while making whiteness a condition for enjoying freedom and citizenship. [End Page 115] That reasoning also informed white support for Black colonization, an idea that allowed white Americans to reconcile misgivings about slavery with a commitment to maintaining white supremacy. As Seeley explains, the architects of these removal projects often employed the language of civilization and improvement. Colonization advocates argued that free African Americans could never advance while they remained in the United States, which they insisted would always prove a hostile environment for former slaves. Emigration, by contrast, would provide opportunities for Black improvement, while those participating in colonization would help to bring civilization to less advanced parts of the globe. That reasoning, Seeley observes, echoed the “humanitarian” argument for Indian removal, which held that Native Americans would not survive if they continued living alongside white communities within existing states. One of the great strengths of Seeley’s work is the way in which she brings these different strains of early American racist thought into conversation with one another. Readers come to see these subjects, usually treated separately in the literature, as elements of the same process, in which white elites drew boundaries around belonging in the new republic. In a similar fashion, Seeley draws together histories of Black and Native American resistance to these various removal projects. For example, she describes the multitribal unity movement that sought to prevent the United States from seizing the Ohio River country in the 1780s and 1790s and invites readers to compare that movement with growing Black opposition to colonization during the same period. Native and Black resistance took very different forms, but in both cases, critics of the new United States articulated a “right to remain” (3). In a particularly strong chapter, Seeley examines Black petitions requesting exemptions from the Virginia law requiring the newly manumitted to leave the state. These petitions, she suggests, represent a literature of freedom

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