A Duty to Protect and Respect: Seneca Opposition to Incorporation during the Removal Period

When pressured to remove after the 1830 Indian Removal Act, some from among the Seneca appealed to the federal government to prevent displacement. In these letters and petitions, their authors periodically invoked the notion of protection, an instrument of cross-cultural diplomatic encounters of the previous century. Seneca authors sought to defend their tribe against settler takeover by invoking two different kinds of protection, external and internal. They further drew upon a civil right, petitioning, although originally it had been a method of exclusion from full political rights, and rejected the legal incorporation forced upon American Indians through the “domestic dependent nations” ruling.

Sentimental Diplomacy

Chapter 3 explores instances of “sentimental diplomacy” in the literary aftermath of the US–Mexican War and Indian Removal. It opens by arguing that the heroines of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885)—who seek to counter the violence and dispossession of late-nineteenth-century Californios—stand as unrecognized heirs to the women in John Rollin Ridge’s 1854 novel of Mexican banditry, Joaquín Murieta. Amidst the sensational violence of Joaquín Murieta, the first Native American novel, Mexican and Anglo-American women engage in a sentimental diplomacy that resists rampant racialized violence. In both The Squatter and the Don and Joaquín Murieta, sentimental diplomacy offers local possibilities for peace, but in neither novel can it overcome the war’s brutal legacy or the racism and systemic corruption that followed.

Democrats and Whigs

The rivalry between the Whig and Democratic Parties, often called the “Second American Party System,” first emerged in Andrew Jackson’s administration (1829–1837). Democrats organized to secure Jackson’s 1828 election, then united behind his program of Indian removal, no federal funding of internal improvements, opposition to the Bank of the United States, defense of slavery, and the “spoils system” that used patronage for party building. Whigs supported Henry Clay’s pro-development American System, sympathized with evangelical reform, and reluctantly accepted Democratic techniques for popular mobilization and party organization. The mature parties competed closely in most states and briefly eased sectional conflict, before splitting in the 1850s over slavery in the territories. Whigs made no presidential nomination in 1856, and the Second Party System disintegrated. As it did, Northern Whigs and antislavery Democrats merged in the Republican Party, southern Whiggery steeply declined, and Democrats survived as the only national party.

State Preventive Medicine: Public Health, Indian Removal, and the Growth of State Capacity, 1800–1840

Despite growing awareness of the American state's active role in the early nineteenth century, scholars have tended to ignore the early republic's public health apparatus. The few studies that do chronicle antebellum health initiatives confine themselves to programs intended to directly reward citizens—and particularly those who contributed politically or economically to the nation's founding and expansion. As this detailed study of the Indian Vaccination Act of 1832 makes clear, however, antebellum policymakers saw value in providing medical care to those outside their settler citizenry. Blending liberal, republican, and ascriptive ideas, the vaccination program joined two competing political logics: one emphasizing the humanity of indigenous people and the importance of providing for their welfare, and the other prioritizing the state's interest in an efficient “removal” process. Evidencing far more autonomy and administrative capacity than the average nineteenth-century bureaucracy, the War Department played a pivotal role in petitioning Congress for, and ultimately administering, the vaccination program. Unwilling to cede regulatory power over indigenous health to more proximate local governments or private parties, the War Department preferred its own military manpower—a decision that would profoundly shape the design and reception of subsequent Native health programs.