Civility, Colonization, and the Double Movement of Removal

This paper examines the relationship between programs for “civilizing” and removing Native Americans and endeavors for the Black colonization and emigration to Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. My... [ view full abstract ]

This paper examines the relationship between programs for “civilizing” and removing Native Americans and endeavors for the Black colonization and emigration to Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. My focus is on the purported beneficence of removal and how the threshold of assimilability and civility articulated with antiblack racism and the subsumption of Native sovereignty and territory. In his 1818 state of the union address James Monroe declared that “Experience has clearly demonstrated that independent savage communities can not long exist within the limits of a civilized population.” Further developing the imperatives introduced by Thomas Jefferson’s “Civilization Program” for Native peoples in 1801, Monroe concluded that “To civilize them, and even to prevent their extinction, it seems to be indispensable that their independence as communities should cease, and that the control of the United States over them should be complete and undisputed.” Monroe’s 1819 Civilization Act for Native peoples coincided with his administration’s linking funds for suppression of the slave trade to settlement of Africans illegally enslaved and transported to the United States in Liberia. The 1816 founding of the American Colonization Society likewise marked the ascendance of initiatives for Black removal and resettlement outside of the U.S. Focusing specifically on the context of the Seminole Nation and Black Seminoles between 1817 and 1858 as a lens through which to address violence and civility, removal and colonization, fugitivity and racialization, this paper considers Native and Black collectivity in relation to regimes of U.S. colonial and racial order.