As de Tocqueville observed with brutal clarity, the legal charades of property rights, treaties, and surveys allowed the United States to remove Indians from the land ‘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’. He was wrong about the bloodshed, but entirely right in his bitter conclusion: ‘It is impossible to destroy men with more respect to the laws of humanity.’
