Saunt’s book is a major achievement, commendable for his candor about the horrors of expulsion and his illumination of the crucial role that Southern slaveholders—eyeing Indian lands to take over for themselves—played in shaping early 19th-century American Indian policy. This alone would make for an important study, but he also manages to do something truly rare: destroy the illusion that history’s course is inevitable and recover the reality of the multiple possibilities that confronted contemporaries.

... a powerful and lucid account, weaving together events with the people who experienced them up close.

... a damning synthesis of the federal betrayals, mass deportations, and exterminatory violence that defined the 1830s.

...Mr. Saunt presents a passionate and provocative account of what he calls “one of the first state-sponsored mass expulsions in the modern world”; the 'U.S. counterpart of Europe’s ‘Jewish question.' ” He convincingly argues that the root cause of the expulsion of the Indian inhabitants of the South was a vile mix of racial antipathy, unbounded greed and the naive idealism of self-styled Indian experts.

Saunt’s book is both thoroughly researched and quietly outraged.

University of Georgia history professor Saunt...investigates the origins and repercussions of the 1830 Indian Removal Act in this eye-opening and distressing chronicle.

A powerful, moving argument that the state-sponsored expulsion of the 1830s was a horrendous turning point for the Indigenous peoples in the United States.

...a hard, clear look at the ways Natives were dispossessed of their land in the decade after the passage of the 1830 Indian Removal Act.