Panic, State Power, and Chickasaw Dispossession

Abstract (Lang: English):

Historians of the early republic all too often overlook how Indigenous peoples figured in the nation’s political economy. The artificial isolation of Native history from accounts of fiscal policy and economic development is all the more glaring in President Andrew Jackson’s era: In scholarship, survey courses, and textbooks, Jackson’s infamous Bank War and his protracted Indian Wars, especially Indian removal, appear as discrete units. By tracing the interwoven histories of federal fiscal policy, state banking, and Chickasaw dispossession, this essay examines the critical role of governments in claiming Indigenous homelands and engineering the speculative markets that spun out from the treaty process. It situates the Panic of 1819 – along with the later Panic of 1837 – as crises rooted in the characteristically extensive expansion of a settler economy.