Under Andrew Jackson’s notorious watch, plans were drawn up for a “twelve-hundred-mile military cordon would eventually run from present-day Minneapolis to the Gulf Coast.” And the father of our country was not alone. “George Washington had even spoken of building a ‘Chinese wall’ between the United States and the Cherokee,” Saunt writes. But Saunt also connects it to the Holocaust, family memories of which inspired him to write “Unworthy Republic,” as well as to what’s going on in our country today, when politicians still meet in Washington, D.C., dreaming up ways to keep classes of people out. He argues that the deportation of Native Americans was tied to slavery - and, specifically, to the fear that Native people might organize an uprising that included African-Americans.

These events have been well documented but Saunt puts them in broader context. That’s when, with the support of all three branches of government, we forced bands of people in the South on an arduous, disease-filled journey to uncharted lands west of the Mississippi River. He focuses on the 1830s, the years leading up to and including the Trail of Tears. Saunt’s book is both thoroughly researched and quietly outraged. In “Unworthy Republic,” he prefers “deportation,” “expulsion” or, in the case of thousands of people, “extermination.” “Removal” or “relocation” are terms commonly used to describe what happened to more than 100,000 Native Americans in the 1830s, but Claudio Saunt doesn’t think those words cut it.

Claudio saunt unworthy republic