U.S. Government & Military

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Andrew Jackson, about 1860. Courtesy of the Library of Congress."That those tribes cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and in continual contact with our citizens is certain. . . . Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear."

President Andrew Jackson, Fifth Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1833

 

From the late 1700s, when the United States won its independence from Great Britain, through the 1900s, U.S. leaders focused on westward expansion. A system was created  to assimilate or remove Indian peoples from their homelands in order to aid American territorial expansion. Chief Justice John Marshall, in an 1823 Supreme Court ruling, declared that, "based on the Doctrine of Discovery, the European states, and the United States as their successor, secured a superior legal title to Indian lands." 

The government created new federal offices, agencies, and posts to control trade and relationships between the United States and Indian nations, as well as those between Indian people and settlers. 
 
The government's policy of assimilation would drastically alter traditional Indian cultural identities. Many historians have argued that the U.S. government believed that if Indians did not adopt European-American culture they would become extinct as a people.
 
This paternalistic attitude influenced interactions between Indian nations and the U.S. government throughout the first half of the 1800s, and its effects continue to be felt today.
 
 
Theme: 
Shared History
Topics: 
Military
U.S. Government
Bibliography: 

Anderson, Gary Clayton. Kinsmen of Another Kind: Dakota-White Relations in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1650-1862. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1984.

Newcomb, Steve. Five Hundred Years of Injustice:The Legacy of Fifteenth Century Religious Prejudice. Shaman's Drum. Fall 1992, p. 18-20.

Prucha, Frances Paul. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994.

Prucha, Frances Paul. Documents of United States Indian Policy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. Abridged Ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

Sheehan, Bernard W. Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973.

Spicer, Edward H. A Short History of the Indians of the United States.  New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1969.

Wallace, Anthony F. C. Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Resources for Further Research: 

Websites

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

Rickert, Levi. U.S. Presidents in Their Own Words Concerning American Indians. Native News Network. 2012. 

Primary

Northwest Ordinance, July 13, 1787; (National Archives Microfilm Publication M332, roll 9); Miscellaneous Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789; Records of the Continental and Confederation Congresses and the Constitutional Convention, 1774-1789, Record Group 360; National Archives.

Richardson, James D.  A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. U.S. Congress, 1897.-or-The Project Gutenberg Ebook online compilation.

Tales of the Territory. Minnesota Historical Society.

Secondary

Anderson, Gary Clayton. Kinsmen of Another Kind: Dakota-White Relations in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1650-1862. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1984.

Kiernan, Ben. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007.

Meyer, Roy W. History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

Newcomb, Steve. Five Hundred Years of Injustice:The Legacy of Fifteenth Century Religious Prejudice. Shaman's Drum. Fall 1992, p. 18-20.

Prucha, Frances Paul. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994.

Prucha, Frances Paul. Documents of United States Indian Policy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. Abridged Ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

Sheehan, Bernard W. Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973.

Spicer, Edward H. A Short History of the Indians of the United States. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold., 1969.

Stannard, David E. American Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992

Wallace, Anthony F. C. Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.

Glossary Terms: 
American Indian Policy
Andrew Jackson
Indian Agent
Fort Snelling
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