Samantha Seeley is Associate Professor of History at the University of Richmond. This interview is based on her new book, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States (Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2021).
JF: What led you to write Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain?
SS: I began working on this book in my first year of graduate school, when I followed a footnote in Elizabeth Varon’s Disunion! to a set of petitions written by free African Americans in Virginia in the early nineteenth century. They were seeking exceptions to a law that required the exile of newly-emancipated people out of the state after 1806. The petitioners used personal details and rich descriptions to make a case for belonging in the state, and their words made me think about all of the many ways that both African Americans and Native Americans, in particular, experienced the threat of removal in the decades after the American Revolution. As I learned more, I came to understand that removal was proposed as a solution to many of the major debates of the post-revolutionary period—debates over political disaffection, land hunger, war debt, and the limits of slavery, emancipation, and citizenship.
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain?
SS: The popular understanding of the post-revolutionary period is one of free movement—the movement of “settlers” to the “frontier”—but Race, Removal and the Right to Remain flips that understanding upside down to argue that removal, as much as free migration, made the United States by defining who should be part of it. Because removal was so common in the early republic, African Americans and Indigenous communities staunchly protected their right to remain in their homes and homelands.
JF: Why do we need to read Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain?
SS: I hope that you’ll read the book for a broader and deeper understanding of the early United States. The book does a bit of reframing, first of all. The term removal is usually applied to the antebellum period, but I show that antebellum experiences of expulsion like the Trail of Tears or the American Colonization Society did not emerge suddenly out of nowhere. Such projects proceeded rapidly and with devastating effects because they had been tried in more diffuse ways for decades beforehand. As a result, most people in the early national period did not want unfettered migration—they wanted the right to remain. Second, the book seeks to show that Indigenous people and African Americans were decisive participants in determining what kind of nation the United States would become. They argued that a permanent home lay at the crux of freedom, and they made abstractions like borders or sovereignty real through their own choices to move or to stay.
JF: Why and when did you become an American historian?
SS: I’m proud to come from a family of teachers. My dad taught high school history for forty-five years, and I’ve always loved studying the past as a result. My teachers let me run with that and get into the archives while I was still in high school (thank you to Linda Kaufman and to Special Collections in the basement of the Concord Free Public Library!), but it wasn’t until I was in college that I understood how historical research could be part of a career. I was lucky to figure that out with guidance from my professor, Michael Vorenberg, who hired me as a summer research assistant and showed me how to load reels onto a microfilm machine, and with the help of the Gilder Lehrman summer program for college students. I met lots of students at that program who had a much better understanding of PhD programs and college teaching than I did, and talking with them completely changed my trajectory.
JF: What is your next project?
SS: I’ve got two things in the works. The first is a project on slavery and diplomacy in the age of revolutions. Because territory in North America changed hands so often after 1763, diplomatic negotiations were also key sites for debating slavery’s jurisdiction. Anxious slaveholders wondered if property rights in people would be protected under new regimes. Meanwhile, enslaved people used international treaty-making to their advantage when they could, forcing military officials, Native leaders, and British public servants to be reluctant arbiters of slavery and freedom. The second is a project that will explore the cold fronts that swept the Atlantic coast in the summer of 1816 and the relationship between natural disasters and settler colonialism. Anecdotal accounts at the time suggested that the “Year without Summer” accelerated the migration of thousands of people from New England to the West as they fled crop failures. Those accounts made climate-related migration seem like an unstoppable force, but my project will detail how federal and state governments structured migration, laying out pathways to Native lands.
JF: Thanks, Samantha!