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The Removal Act is titled an "ACT TO PROVIDE FOR AN EXCHANGE OF LANDS WITH THE INDIANS RESIDING IN ANY OF THE STATES OR TERRITORIES, AND FOR THEIR REMOVAL WEST OF THE RIVER MISSISSIPPI ."^[4] Its first section asserts "that it

shall and may be lawful for the President of the United States" to set aside specifically described and designated lands west of the Mississippi "for the reception of such tribes or nations of Indians as may choose to exchange the lands where they now reside, and remove there." As an act to provide for the exchange and removal of those Indians "as may choose " to exchange and remove, this legislation reproduces, in its very language, a number of paradoxes particular to the period, but, as well, paradoxes inherited from the broader context of Christian patriarchal culture.

Etymologically, that is, to provide is simply to see ahead, from Latin, pro-videre . The verb form makes its nominal appearance in the word providence , generally indicative of God's foreknowledge of events, with a strong implication of predestination. But this foreknowledge, in Christian doctrine, is also taken as compatible with free will, the human creature's ability to choose . As a pertinent literary example, consider John Milton's description of Adam and Eve, in Paradise Lost , as sufficient to stand yet free to fall. This is altogether paradoxical, in my view (although it may be a paradox that Milton exploits for antimonarchical effect). God knew, of course, that they would fall, but nonetheless—somehow—they were still sufficient to stand. Section I of the Removal Act both provides for an exchange, while it insists upon the free agency of the Indians. This paradoxical situation reproduces the paradox also central to pre-Christian classical tragedy where the protagonist cannot escape his fate yet nonetheless affirms his status as tragic

(rather than, say, merely pathetic) by taking responsibility for his fate: it is as if he chose it. The Indian, to the framers of this bill, must not be mere victims of civilization's providence but free agents who can voluntarily "choose" to exchange and remove—for all that, in point of actual fact, as we shall see, there was not very much of a choice at all.

More particularly, these paradoxes reflect such things as the determination of Jefferson and Monroe that Indians must not be allowed to act against the best interest of the United States (although Monroe, who had to face the issue more acutely than Jefferson, was against the use of force), as this confronts the determination of another former president, John Quincy Adams, that the government keep its original promises to the Indians, regardless of American self-interest. Historically central to these paradoxes is what Brian Dippie has called the "embarrassment of 1802 when the federal government, in exchange for Georgia's western lands, bound itself by compact to extinguish existing Indian title in the state, despite the 'solemn guarantees' previously made to the indigenous tribes" (56–7). The problem facing the framers of the Removal Act was, in Robert Berkhofer's phrase, how to reconcile national interest with national honor.

In his First Message to Congress, President Jackson explicitly denied the right of independent governments or states (like that of the Cherokee) to exist within the United States (in particular, Georgia; cf. Guttmann and Halsey 37–8), and clearly affirmed his commitment to Cherokee removal. Yet even Jackson could not avoid the "providential" Christian paradox, as he asserted that Cherokee "emigration should be voluntary , for it would be as cruel and as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land" (in Gutt-

mann and Halsey 39, my emphasis). Jackson's inflexible determination that the Indians choose to remove encountered the Cherokees' inflexible determination not to choose to remove, and the impasse was resolved by the use of, first, subterfuge and intrigue, and, finally, state violence, which sent the Cherokee westward on the "Trail of Tears" in 1838.

Section II of the Removal Act states

That it shall and may be lawful for the President to exchange any or all of such districts [newly created, in the west] . . . with any tribe or nation of Indians now residing within the limits of any of the states or territories, and with which the United States have existing treaties, for the whole or any part or portion of the territory claimed and occupied by such tribe or nation, within the bounds of any one or more of the states or territories, where the land claimed and occupied by the Indians, is owned by the United States, or the United States are bound to the state within which it lies to extinguish the Indian claim thereto. (My emphasis)

The language here, I believe, reflects Jackson's strong sense of the government's historical error in treating the Indians as sovereign nations in the past, offering, it appears (I am neither a lawyer nor a legal scholar), an interpretation of international and national law that would seek to remove the "embarrassment" of Article I, Section 4, of the Georgia Cession of April 24, 1802 (Guttmann and Halsey 10) simply by deciding the matter in Georgia's favor (e.g., "or ," above). This section of the Act, that is, seems to assert that all land "claimed and occupied by the Indians" is in fact if not in deed "owned by the United States" and thus, that Indian occupancy is simply at the sufferance of the United States in the person of the President. This, to be sure, is the inter-

pretation put forth by then Representative and, later, Governor of Georgia, Wilson Lumpkin in the House debate upon the subject, and it is consistent with the declaration of the Georgia Senate in 1827 "that the state might properly take possession of the Cherokee country by force, and that it was owing to her moderation and forebearance that she did not thus take possession " (1095 my emphasis). Here, the legal force of the federal government's past treaties with the tribes is simply abrogated in favor of the right of the states to regulate their internal affairs as they see fit, with Indians presenting no exception—something to which Chief Justice John Marshall would take exception in Worcester v. Georgia in 1832. Lumpkin's sense of the matter is that whatever Federal/Indian relations may be, Georgia/Indian relations are another matter altogether—with the effect, of course, that Indians be damned.

Although the Act has six more sections, we have already, by Section II, reached the climactic moment of our story, the tragic epiphany of the law which reveals a president in the position of god or fate, possessor in the name of the United States of all lands far and wide, who can remove or allow to be removed any Indians, as he sees fit, with the providence of this act—and this independent of those Indians' desire, for all the fact that they must be presumed to have a choice in the matter. What follows is largely denouement, the president and the United States offering financial payment or otherwise unspecified "aid and protection" to the forced exiles, as if to say, as typically with tragedy, that all is, if not well, at least as it should be: that the world represented here, however painful, is, nonetheless, just.

Thus Section III of the Act makes it "lawful for the President solemnly to assure" the Indians that "the United States will forever secure and guaranty to them, and their

heirs or successors" the new lands to which they have removed, a very curious assurance, even in regard to a commander-in-chief with powers over the territories, inasmuch as the preceding section of the bill has just reneged on all previous such assurances as guaranteed by treaty "forever." The Cherokee in their "Memorial" to Congress of July, 1830 (I look at this again just below), were quite clear that were they to remove and "make themselves comfortable in their new residence, they [would] have nothing to expect hereafter but to be the victims of a future legalized robbery!"^[5] (Guttmann and Halsey 59)

Section IV announces "That if, upon any of the lands now occupied by the Indians, and to be exchanged for, there should be such improvements as add value to the land," the president is to determine the value of these improvements and pay for them—once more, an ironic provision in light of the fact that capacity to improve the land had always been a touchstone of civilization, the Indians now to be removed for their inability to be civilized, yet paid for any improvements. One wonders at the spectacle of President Jackson, who had said of Cherokee lands in his First Message to Congress that these were "tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements " (in Guttmann and Halsey 39, my emphasis), charging the Treasury for just these nonexistent improvements.

Section V specifically offers "the emigrants" such "aid and assistance as may be necessary for their support and subsis-

tence for the first year after their removal." Section VI promises the exiles protection "at their new residence, against all interruption or disturbance from any other tribe or nation of Indians," and as well "from any other person or persons whatever." However sincere the government may have been in wishing to protect the removed Cherokee from further white encroachment and in preventing intertribal warfare (as, for example, with the Osage), its record in regard to the former was consistently abysmal, and its capacity in regard to the latter—considering that the Cherokee were being relocated to areas where there were already Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw, and Osage—was modest at best. Thus I find a certain irony in this provision as well; and the Cherokee "Memorial" cited above once again may be consulted for the Indians' own understanding of the meaning of federal protection.

Section VII seems to me oddly placed and difficult to understand from the text alone; it would seem to respond, again, to the government's concern to prevent the setting up of sovereign states in the new territories to which Indians were removed, and, again, to prevent intertribal warfare. But the language is curious. Section VII states

That it shall and may be lawful for the President to have the same superintendence and care over any tribe or nation in the country to which they may remove, . . . that he is now authorized to have over them at their present places of residence: Provided , that nothing in this act contained shall be construed as authorizing or directing the violation of any existing treaty between the United States and any of the Indian tribes.

Two matters especially strike me here. First, for all the blandly paternalistic benevolence of the phrasing, granting

to the president the "same superintendence and care over"—the preposition seems telling (i.e., idiomatic usage would seem to permit "care for " as well as "care over ")—the Indians he has had heretofore, there is something ominous in the assertion that there is no "world elsewhere," not "another country" in which the Indians, should they so choose, might escape presidential "superintendence and care." To read this phrase as ominous, let me say, is not a matter of a presentist perspective only; for many in the age of Jackson understood perfectly well the kind of "care" he would have "over" the Indians, the Indians included.

Second, since everything in this act is based upon a view that "existing treaties between the United States and . . . the tribes" misconstrued the claims of Indian title, the United States purchasing what might simply have been claimed by right of conquest, by eminent domain, or by the doctrine of domicilium vacuum , thereby rejecting the basis for all existing treaties between the United States and the tribes, it seems appropriate to read these words as offering an ironic sense of history—or else a deep hypocrisy.

Section VIII is the conventional appropriations section, concluding the matter by appropriating "the sum of five hundred thousand dollars" for "the purpose of giving effect to the provisions of this act." Thus, ironically or not, money has the last word.

The Removal Act was passed in the Senate by a vote of 28 to 20, and then, in the House, by a vote of 103 to 97. For want of four votes, in the words of Henry Storrs, Whig of New York, we might now "break up [the Indians'] society, dissolve their institutions, and drive them into the wilderness" (in Washburn 1057). Jackson signed the bill into law immediately, on May 28, 1830. As Alexis de Tocqueville summed up the matter:

The Spaniards by unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, did not succeed in exterminating the Indian race and could not even prevent them from sharing their rights; the United States Americans have attained both these results with wonderful ease, quietly, legally, and philanthropically, without spilling blood and without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect to the laws of humanity. (339)

The "primary premise" of the imagery in which the Indian is depicted in the Removal Act, in Robert Berkhofer's phrase, "is the deficiency of the Indian as compared to the white" (113). As the published debate over the Removal Act makes clear, the bill denies to the Indian sovereignty over land and person; as "noble savage" the Indian is oxymoronically depicted; as "murderous savage," "embarrassment" (e.g., in the remarks of Wilson Lumpkin, Democrat of Georgia), encumbrance or nuisance, he is figured by catachresis (misuse, absurdity, anachronism, etc.) or antiphrasis, as negation of the civilized person, its antithesis or zero degree. Ultimately, inasmuch as it remains unclear at this time whether the Indian would indeed "civilize" himself or "vanish," no statement about him can quite have determinate meaning: the figure for such indeterminacy is the figure of aporia or doubt. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 set the terms of discussion for the "Indian Question" for more than half a century.