John Quincy Adams knew that this rotation—with Indians finding themselves inside, outside, then inside the boundary once more—couldn’t go on forever. The continent was vast but not infinite. “In the instances of the New-York Indians removed to Green Bay, and of the Cherokees removed to the Territory of Arkansas,” he wrote in his private diary in 1828, the last full year of his presidency, “we have scarcely given them time to build their wigwams before we are called upon by our own people to drive them out again.” The best policy, he confided to himself, would be assimilation, to make Native
...more
