Bind Us Apart

The final grievance of the Declaration of Independence castigated King George III for ‘exciting domestic insurrectionists’ and ‘bring[ing] on the merciless savages’ to destroy Americans. On 4 July 1776, the American Revolutionaries linked enslaved and native peoples as problems that threatened the future of the new, independent republic. As Nicholas Guyatt shows, these two groups never stopped being problems that nagged even those who wanted to promote the Declaration’s universalist language of all being ‘created equal’ and endowed with ‘inalienable rights’. How did enslaved African Americans and Native Americans fit in? They did not, or, rather, could not. According to Guyatt, by the 1830s American political leaders and opinion makers (whom he refers to as ‘liberals’ or ‘enlightened Americans’) learned that the only way they would be able to abolish slavery and treat Native Americans fairly was to banish them from the United States. They might have been created equal, but they would never be able to enjoy the blessings of American self-government

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