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.
Samantha Seeley is assistant professor of history at the University of Richmond.
"A remarkable history of migration, removal, and how these ideas and policies intersected in the experiences of Indigenous peoples and free African Americans in early America. . . . [T]his book helps us recognize that [removal, belonging, and migration] are a part of a longer history in the matrix of Indigenous sovereignty, Black freedom, and attempts at exclusion."--Journal of African American History "Highlights important issues to consider as further research on Indian Removal is tied to historiographies on slavery and the rights of free people of color in antebellum America."--North Carolina Historical Review "In, Samantha Seeley studies, in tandem, the efforts by United States politicians and reformers to push Native Americans farther west and expel free African Americans from specific states or the nation as a whole."--Indiana Magazine of History "Recommended. . . . This work demonstrates the central role removal occupied in the creation of the American Republic."--CHOICE "Seeley's work reminds us that, from its origin, the United States has been a multiracial society, a project built by hands of many colors. There was no all-white founding of the nation. In our current fraught political moment, this book is a timely and meticulous documentation of this fact."--American Indian Culture and Research Journal "This fine study shows that removal, as a set of foundational ideas and policies, has made a deep imprint on the United States in ways that we are only beginning to fully appreciate."--H-Net "Timely and essential. . . . Cross-Border Cosmopolitans is convincingly driven by a premise, that of the need to 'excavate, recover and reconstruct' the history of the African diaspora in North America which Adjetey argues is an important part of the history of the Atlantic world."--Ethnic and Racial Studies
