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In 1830 under Andrew Jackson, Congress passed laws calling for Indian
Removal from the eastern United States to reservations in the west. The
laws called for negotiation of land swaps and authorized payments for
the transition. Jackson proceeded to negotiate treaties which many tribes
accepted, albeit reluctantly.
The Cherokee tribe through their elected government, rejected their
deal, the Treaty of New Echota, however the feds
found a faction of tribe members and obtained their signatures. The
Senate ratified the treaty and so it sat until 1838 when Martin van
Buren sent Gen.Winfield Scott to enforce the treaty.
The resulting incident known as the "Trail of Tears" resulted in the
deaths of 4,000 Cherokee Indians, primarily in interment camps while
they awaited transport west.
This quote from the Wikipedia article on Indian Removal seems
relevant to New Orleanians today: "The suffering which resulted from
Indian Removal was aggravated by poor
administration, inadequate measures taken to provide for the emigrants,
and failure to protect Indian legal rights before and after emigration.
Most American Indians reluctantly but peacefully complied with the
terms of the removal treaties, often with bitter resignation." Do you think some early version of FEMA was active in the 1830's?
Digging into the matter a little more shows that Andrew Jackson was a
fairly benign influence. Although he aggressively negotiated the removal
treaties, he did not force the Indians to move. It wasn't until his
successor Martin van Buren decided he had to enforce the letter of the
law that the greatest number of deaths occurred.
Once again the
relevance to New Orleans and the rest of the country is apparent as we see the federal
bureaucracy today continue to grind us down with unthinking adherence to laws and
regulations. The actions of the US Army Corps of Engineers being the
chief case in point with FEMA and the SBA running closely behind.
However the lesson could well be extended to the attacks on civil
liberties being made in the name of national security. Although the
current administration may be quite benign in its use of extended
powers of surveillance over domestic affairs there is no guarantee that
future administrations will be so inclined.
Just as RICO provisions
written to prosecute organized criminals are applied to other types of
cases today, we should expect that government will extend its use of domestic
surveillance over time. Today they use it to look for terrorists. Tommorrow they may be looking
for social misfits, ordinary criminals, drug kingpins, tax evaders and
communists. In the future they could well be looking for Democrats.
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