Who Must Go?: Drawing the Borders of White Supremacy in the Early Republic

In this finely crafted, deeply researched, and highly original work, Samantha Seeley makes an important addition to a growing body of scholarship that is revealing essential connections between Indigenous and Black history in the early republic. Much of this work has focused on relations between Indigenous and Black people, especially in the South, where Native nations enslaved and incorporated Black people and where Blacks enslaved to whites crossed paths with Natives.1 Other work has examined evolving ideas and policies concerning the place of Indigenous and Black people in an aggressively expansionist United States.2 Seeley makes a significant contribution to the second area of inquiry, while also providing rich accounts of how Indigenous and Black people contested efforts to remove them beyond the boundaries of national belonging by pursuing what she terms “the right to remain.” When historians think of removal in the early republic what usually comes to mind is the expulsion of Native nations following the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Seeley takes a considerably broader perspective, observing that “removal was a capacious term,” applying, for example, to poor laws which required “self deportation” and the “forced relocation” of people prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Acts. Most often, however, “state and federal officials . . . directed removal toward free African Americans and Native Americans,” using it to “draw the limits of belonging based on race” (p. 7). Seeley also proposes that removal has a deep history. Rather than seeing Indian removal as emerging in the mid to late 1820s, a commonplace in the scholarship, Seeley contends that it “moved as rapidly and with such devastation in the 1830s because its foundation had been prepared over the preceding decades” (p. 23). Similarly, although the American Colonization Society (ACS), which proposed to colonize (remove) free and emancipated Blacks to Liberia, was organized in 1816, this project “distilled a variety of ideas” that had circulated since the