| Reading Guide for Week 7 | |
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Tuesday In 1830 the U.S. Congress passed and President Andrew Jackson signed one of the most notorious acts in American History: the so-called Indian Removal Act, which unleashed the forcible expulsion of Native Americans from their homelands east of the Mississippi River to desolate new areas west of the Mississippi (where other Native American nations already happened to inhabit). With the assistance of some (not many) sympathetic Americans from the northern part of the United States, the Cherokees were the most prominent Native American nation to try to fight the passage and enforcement of the Indian Removal Act. The Cherokees had become the most ostensibly successful of the Native American nations in the southeast; for example, passing a constitution that resembled the U.S. Constitution, and developing a fairly prosperous economy which included their own slave plantations — resembling southern American society. Whatever their political and economic development, their lands were coveted short-term for supposed gold deposits and long-term for cotton plantations. The Georgia legislature summarily abolished the Cherokee Constitution (even though Georgia “law” was subordinate to federal law with respect to Native American relations, under the U.S. Constitution), and began to survey Cherokee lands to be parcelled out for sale to (white) Americans. In turn, the main faction of Cherokees appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and to the American public. In these two address, one before and one after passage of the Indian Removal Act, the Cherokee nation narrated their sense of history, their sense of crisis, their sense of reigning law, and their sense of abstract justice — in the face of vicious aggression on the part of Georgia residents and the Georgia legislature, aggression that would in 1830 gain the sanction of federal law and the support of a fiercely racist U.S. President. Thursday The historical record is unclear as to who coined the famous phrase “manifest destiny.” It had long been attributed to a magazine editor named John O’Sullivan, although recent textual analysis has attributed it to one of the magazine’s staff journalists, a woman journalist named Jane Cazneau. The phrase was coined amid public debate about potential annexation of Texas, at that time briefly an independent country, as well as public debate about potential war against Mexico. O’Sullivan’s United States Magazine and Democratic Review was a booster of both causes, taking one side in the debate. In this editorial, Cazneau deployed her rhetorical skills to claim a position that supposedly transcended political party dispute and debate, in the name of unified patriotism. She sought to elevate the annexation of Texas beyond dispute, thereby turning contested geographical space into sovereign national territory. In the spirit of serious imperial ambition, however, she undertook much more as she eyed the relative weakness of Mexico and the lure of California, then a province of Mexico. In this case, Cazneau did not invoke a supposedly non-partisan patriotism, but a demographic destiny as the American population continued to grow at its historically unprecedented rate, which seemed to require boundless territorial expansion. He imagined a future in which the United States — and neither Mexico nor Canada — stood at the fulcrum of “Empires of the Atlantic and Pacific.” In other words, an empire of not merely continental proportions, but of global ambitions. |