Purchase and/or Conquest

Eric Foner

• How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier by Stuart Banner
  Harvard, 344 pp, £18.95, November 2005, ISBN 0 674 01871 0

‘They fell upon their own knees, and then upon the Aborigines.’ The old quip about the Puritans who settled colonial New England offers a succinct and not inaccurate summary of white-Indian relations in the United States. Despite the twists and turns of official policy – from Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to assimilate Indians by teaching them to farm (even though they had been doing so for centuries), to Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal, Grant’s ‘peace policy’ and Roosevelt’s Indian New Deal – the fact is that whites from the outset coveted Indian land and eventually succeeded in acquiring almost all of it, sweeping aside periodic resistance with brutally effective violence.