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/lp/university-of-pennsylvania-press/i-ethnology-and-empire-languages-literature-and-the-making-of-the-ptnINFdWmZ
- Publisher
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Copyright
- Copyright © Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.
- ISSN
- 1553-0620
Abstract
172 � JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Spring 2019) For example, Peterson mentions that Andrew Jackson wanted Silas Dinsmoor removed as U.S. agent to the Choctaws. But Jackson also threatened to kill Dinsmoor, specifically by burning him alive inside the customs house where the agent enforced federal rules about passports for whites and blacks. Likewise, we don’t get much of a sense of how John Quincy Adams’s administration alarmed Deep South leaders with its half-hearted gestures toward native peoples and South American republics. Yet they vehemently decried those gestures as “invasions” of their state and individual sovereignties; that is, their unbounded right to possess blacks and dispossess natives. Besides these minor quibbles, I only see one real absence in the book: the several thousand native men who fought alongside Jackson in the harrowing campaigns of 1813 and 1814. As far as I know, none of them were adopted into U.S. homes, but they may well have taken Redstick or black survivors back to their Choctaw, Cherokee, or Creek homes. They would add another, non-elite layer to the rich and tragic tale that Peterson has spun. J. M. Opal is associate professor at McGill University and the author of Avenging
Journal
Journal of the Early Republic – University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: Feb 28, 2019