mekko

Schools make it seem that Indian removal was unanimous in the early United States, but it wasn’t. There was a large opposition movement against it. “Anti-removalism” among whites was made up of Christian churches, missionaries, radical reformers, and Whigs like Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and even Davy Crockett, whose No vote made him lose his next election in Tennessee and move to Texas, where he later died at the Alamo. Jeremiah Evarts was a Christian reformer from Vermont who wrote “Essays on the Present Crisis in the Condition of the American Indians” under the name William Penn in 1829, which argued the Indian tribes were sovereign nations with rights to their ancestral lands, and that treaties with them must be morally and legally honored. Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey basically filibustered the Senate on this bill: “God, in his providence, planted these tribes on this Western continent, so far as we know, before Great Britain herself had a political existence. I believe, sir, it is not now seriously denied that the Indians are men, endowed with kindred faculties and powers with ourselves; that they have a place in human sympathy, and are justly entitled to a share in the common bounties of a benignant Providence. […] Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin? Is it one of the prerogatives of the white man, that he may disregard the dictates of moral principles, when an Indian shall be concerned? No, sir.” Totally forgotten history