The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

Chapter 7 focuses on the racist ideology of Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, and how his ideas shaped a formative period of federal Indigenous policy. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Jefferson outlines his growing fear of slave revolts, which was confirmed by the Haitian revolution in 1804. This fear would prove highly influential on Jefferson’s presidential policy, as he worked to prevent such an uprising from ever destabilizing his way of life as an enslaver. Under his influence, the formation of a white supremacist racial order in the United States was becoming increasingly paramount to perceived national security. Blackhawk writes that “lawmakers struggled to establish legible distinctions between ‘red, ‘white,’ and ‘black’ people. That struggle became ideological. It became social. It became political, and it eventually became legal” (297). As this quotation implies, Jefferson and other political leaders understood Native people to have an inferior place within their racial hierarchy alongside enslaved Black populations.

Blackhawk cites the dispossession and transformation of Indigenous homelands as an essential step in the formation of this white supremacist racial order. Land ownership united a variety of white communities within the same socioeconomic stratum. Acquisition of new territories necessitated Native American displacement.