“HERE THEY ARE IN THE LOWEST STATE OF SOCIAL GRADATION —ALIENS—POLITICAL—MORAL—SOCIAL ALIENS, STRANGERS, THOUGH NATIVES”: REMOVAL AND COLONIZATION IN THE OLD NORTHWEST, 1815-1870

Abstract

This dissertation examines African colonization and Native removal colonization schemes and their relationship to the development of states carved out of the Northwest Territory. Colonization advocates sought to expunge the nation of slavery, free blacks, and native peoples to make a white republic. This research contends that colonization promoted racial nationalism by campaigning for a safe and homogenous nation free of slavery, ‘degraded’ free blacks, and dangerous Native Americans. It explores the execution and afterlives of American projects for African colonization, through the American Colonization Society, and Native Removal in the Old Northwest. It examines the rhetoric and procedures related to the colonization of Native Americans in the West and free blacks to Liberia in which government officials, journalists, settlers, businessmen, missionaries, and clergy in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois traded in fears of racial degradation and national security as a means to generate fiscal support and positive public opinion for legislation and policies that attempted to create a white republic. Colonizationists appropriated imperial relocation solutions to the domestic problems of black freedom and Native sovereignty that they construed as prohibitory to national expansion and development. Ventures to deport Native Americans and African Americans successfully constructed them as dangerous aliens within the nation that validated their exclusion. In their resistance African Americans, Native Americans, and their allies adapted, fled, petitioned, ridiculed, and negotiated with colonizationist endeavors to maintain residence in the Midwest. The fictions of colonization, driven by its rhetoric, required new constructions about black and Native degradation to justify the calls for their removal.