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Hello, and welcome to Beautiful Losers of History,Episode 3.  – The Dawn of the Other Nation

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Last episode, we witnessed the birth of the Cherokee Nation and discussed the rapid developments it experienced in the fields of politics, agriculture, law, and education. All of these changes had a centralizing effect on Cherokee society. Before, they had been loosely connected people, spread across towns over mountains and valleys, but now they are taking the first steps towards state-building.

The United States government encouraged these developments, hoping that the Cherokee and other Indian Nations would give up their traditional ways of life to establish farming-based communities like those in America and Europe. America’s Indian population was quite small, and once they all became farmers, it was hoped, they would no longer need the vast territories they possessed, which the United States government could then purchase, and, in time, the Indians could be integrated into American society. Or so the thinking went.

The Cherokee embraced these developments, but had the opposite goal in mind. They wanted to become richer and stronger, so that they could resist future American annexations. 

Looking backward from today, we know how all of this turns out. Indian Nations would adopt many developments that the American government encouraged, but were reluctant to sell more of their territories, so the United States passed the Indian Removal Act to force the Cherokee and other Indian nations to surrender their homelands and relocate west of the Mississippi River. The Act barely passed in Congress after a hard-fought fight against it, and this razor-thin victory is due to the seeds of change being planted now.

For this episode, though, I want to take a step back from our Cherokee narrative and look at what is happening in the United States during this time. American society was changing almost as fast as Cherokee society was in the years after its independence from Great Britain. 

It’s important to remember that the United States was also a young nation, and the American government was only a decade older than the Cherokee government.

Far from being a self-confident superpower, this young republic was riddled with anxiety over its identity and future. The United States’ early years are defined by tension and paradox, which will eventually come to a head when deciding the fate of the Cherokee and every other Indian Nation. 

So while I may be pausing our Cherokee narrative to explore these tensions, I’m doing it because ultimately this podcast is a story about two nations, Cherokee and American.

But first, I want to acknowledge my sources for this episode. I am relying heavily on Gordon S. Wood’s “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815” And Steve Inskeep’s “Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and A Great American Land Grab”.

With that being said, let’s get on with the show.

***

At the start of the 19th century, Washington Irving had become one of America’s first literary superstars. His most popular story was Rip Van Winkle, about a man in colonial times who slept for 20 years and missed the entire American Revolution. When he woke up, he was shocked at how radically different the world had become.

Some of the differences were superficial, such as a village pub replacing its portrait of King George III with a picture of George Washington. But mostly, Rip Van Winkle felt alienated at the radical social changes that had occurred. 

“The very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquillity,” Irving wrote.

Before, people were congenial and friendly, but now everybody was arguing and debating. 

Rip Van Winkle was popular with the public because it was so relatable. Irving may have romanticized colonial times a bit, but the lure of nostalgia was just as powerful in the 19th century as it is today in the 21st century.

The American Revolution didn’t just replace a king with a president. For nearly every American, becoming a Republic carried a deep moral significance.

Republics demanded far more from their citizens than monarchies did. In monarchies, people only had to follow the law, but in Republics, people created the law. And thus, they had a heavy responsibility to embody the greatest virtues possible so that the state would likewise be virtuous.

This begs the question, though: who determines what is virtuous? For George Washington and most Founding Fathers, the greatest sign of virtue was to sacrifice one’s own private interests for the public good. To these founders, a disinterested gentleman, usually an aristocrat, was the ideal arbitrator of virtue because he wouldn’t have to work for money and could think rationally and independently. 

But embedded in the Republican ideal was the belief that people were naturally good. Some went so far as to believe that common people were more moralistic than educated gentlemen.

Thomas Jefferson argued that a farmer would reach moral conclusions better than a professor because a farmer had not been led astray by artificial and abstract rules.

So, which was it? The educated gentleman or the common man who was the greater authority on Republican virtue?

This difference in perspective would be the most divisive subject in the early American republic. And though it will fade from prominence by the time of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, it is at the spiritual root of the debate over Indian Removal. 

Because at its core, it’s a debate over the fundamental nature of freedom. One side (the common man side) emphasized the freedom to pursue one’s interests and determine one’s morals. The other side (the educated gentleman side) emphasized that freedom came with responsibilities and that morals could be corrupted in the pursuit of self-interest. 

This is of course wildly over-simplistic, but this isn’t a philosophy podcast, it’s a history podcast, so I’ll leave it at that and say the pendulum in American politics and society will swing from one side to the other through the early Republic, the years of debate over Indian Removal, and up to the present day.

***

Almost immediately after the American Revolutionary War

 ended in 1783, the men who led the effort for independence began doubting whether the high-minded ideals of the revolution could ever be realized.

As the 1780s progressed, this anxiety only grew. Benjamin Rush, a founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote that the American people were on the verge of “degenerating into savages.”

Even the sober-minded George Washington was dismayed by the changes happening in the new country: “From the high ground we stood upon, the plain path which invited our footsteps, to be so fallen! So lost! It is really mortifying.”

But what was behind this anxiety? The population was growing faster than at any other time in American history. The economy was booming, and new settlements popped up seemingly overnight. 

The common people were jubilant, and expectations for the future were high. It was the “educated gentleman” that were wringing their hands.

At the time during and after the revolution, America was governed by the Articles of Confederation. But I use the word “govern” very loosely. Nearly all power lay with the states. The national government had no president and just one house of Congress. It couldn’t raise taxes, regulate trade, raise an army, or conduct foreign policy. Every state had only one vote in Congress. States could print their own money and levy tariffs against other states.

So, a tyrannical national government was not the source of these Founding Fathers’ anxiety. Instead, it was the state governments that they were concerned about.

After the Revolution, there was a radical expansion in democracy across the states. States expanded the voter rolls to most white men, and many instituted annual elections. Because of this high frequency, most state legislatures replaced more than half of their representatives every year

The aristocratic establishment was horrified to see the new republican state assemblies dominated by uneducated, ill-mannered men, only concerned with the local interests of the voters who elected them.

Special interests were everywhere. Merchants lobbied for high tariffs and taxes on land, Artisans lobbied for regulation of agricultural prices, Farmers lobbied for lower taxes and suspension of debt payments, entrepreneurs lobbied for legal privileges and corporate charters, and all legislators traded votes to gain support for their own bills. Disinterested Gentlemen, these were not.

I haven’t mentioned it yet, but the founders considered property rights among the most treasured rights won in the American Revolution, so they were most concerned by how these state representatives threatened the rights of creditors.

The vast majority of America, about 90% of the population, were farmers, and most small farmers had to take out loans to support themself until harvest time. Now, farming was hard work, and success wasn’t guaranteed. So when farmers had trouble paying back their loans, they went calling to these new-fangled state assemblies to seek relief. And if their local representative wasn’t helping them? Well, luckily we have annual elections, and every Tom, Dick and Harry, no matter their background, could run for office. So those representatives were keen to listen to these farmers. 

  In response to these pressures, state assemblies passed laws that canceled debts and printed paper money to cause inflation. Inflation caused the debt creditors held from their loans to farmers to be worth less, making it easier for the farmers to pay off.

I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that these so-called “disinterested” gentlemen founders were most concerned by the threats democracy posed to banks and moneylenders. Now, there’s no denying that these men were total elitists–I mean, they literally believed the elite of society should be in charge of government–but they weren’t entirely wrong about the unseemly, destabilizing effects of radical democracy. But they’d gotten themselves into a pickle. They had already handed power to the people, and they couldn’t well take it back from them. So instead, they invented a little thing called the US Constitution.

This episode is sprawling enough as is, so I’m not going to go into detail about the drafting of the Constitution. But all you need to know is that just about everybody, gentleman or commoner, realized there were problems with the current state of affairs. So every state, except Rhode Island, sent delegates to Philadelphia to produce a report recommending changes to the Articles of Confederation.

Rather than making some minor reforms, though, the delegates met in secret and drafted an entirely new form of government for the United States. They proposed to eliminate the de facto independence of the states and institute a much stronger national government. And though power would be shared with the states, they would no longer have the final word on every matter.

We Americans like to think of our Constitution as a semi-divine document, imparted with the wisdom of the founders, but its creation was extremely contentious. While drafting the Constitution, delegates fought and yelled over every article and proposal. And the end result was a compromise document that only 39 out of the 55 delegates could even stomach.

The controversy continued when the delegates returned to their home states. Over the next three years, state assemblies debated the constitution, and it was fiercely opposed by many who saw it as taking away the liberties that were just recently won in the Revolution.

Every state eventually ratified the Constitution (though again, Rhode Island was the last holdout), but for the sake of this episode, what you need to know is that supporters of the Constitution and the government it created came to be known as the Federalists. And the opponents of the Constitution were known as the antifederalists.

The anti-federalists won some victories, notably the Bill of Rights, but they ultimately lost the battle over the Constitution. 

Now, why am I telling you all this? Isn’t this a podcast about the Indian Removal Act? Well, I’ll tell you why: the division between Federalists and Anti-federalists, between those who wanted a strong, responsible government, and those who preferred the chaotic liberty that existed before the Constitution–these divisions would continue to persist. And when the battle over the Indian Removal Act occurs in the generation that follows the generation of the Founders, these divisions will remain beneath the surface.

They will go by different names. Instead of Anti-Federalist or Federalist, they will call themselves the Jacksonian Party and the Anti-Jacksonian Party. But at their core, they will still be debating whether the government should act responsibly, with the best interest of the nation in mind, or whether the national government should pipe down and get out of the way, and let the states do as they see fit.

This was the same debate that existed between Washington’s “disinterested gentlemen” philosophy and Thomas Jefferson’s “a farmer is wiser than a professor” philosophy. And it is still the same debate we are having to this day.

Still with me? I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect to spend half this episode talking about the origins of American government, but now that I have, I hope you see its value. For the rest of this episode, I’m gonna jump around a bit more. In the last two episodes, we examined the rapid developments happening in Cherokee society after the American Revolution. But as you’ll see, American society was experiencing its own meteoric changes.

***

When the Constitution came into effect in 1789, the public was exhilarated. Before, nobody was quite sure whether the American Experiment in republicanism would succeed. But it proved to the Old European Powers who were watching all of this unfold on the other side of the Atlantic that the United States was here to stay.

It also created a new identity for Americans, who did’t have a long and glorious history like the monarchies of the old world. Before the revolution, Americans who traveled to Europe were embarrassed to be from such a provincial, backwater place. London’s population was approaching one million people, Philadelphia, by contrast, America’s biggest city, only had a population of 40,000. All total, Just five American cities had populations above 10,000 people.

Americans felt they had been on the periphery of world affairs, but now, they could assure themselves they were at the center of a grand experiment, and all of history lay on their shoulders. No longer did they need to look East, across the Atlantic, for identity. Now they could look west, toward the wilderness of the frontiers and beyond. There was an entire continent into which they could expand, and apply their ideals to. And, other than a few pesky Indian tribes, it was all theirs.

America’s population rapidly grew as immigrants from Europe poured in. These immigrants had all sorts of identites: There were English and Irish, Germans and French, Swedes and Norwegians, Spanish and Dutch, and countless more nationalities that were forming this new American identity. 

And Americans celebrated their new nation for welcoming refugees from Europe. While the old world was backward and tyrannical, in the words of James Madison, the United States were “an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every Nation and Religion”

This was the during peak of the Enlightenment, a philosophical, intellectual, and cultural movement on both sides of the Atlantic that celebrated knowledge, rationality, and progress, and Americans thought of themselves as the embodiment of this Enlightenment.

And this wasn’t just blind nationalism. By 18th-century standards, the average American really did have a higher quality of life than the average European. Literacy levels were higher than just about anywhere else in the world. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “Ours are the only farmers who can read Homer.”

Most farmers in Europe were peasants who toiled away on land that belonged to some rich Duke, but in America, most farmers owned the land that they worked on and they reaped the rewards of their harvest.

No doubt, this exceptionally high opinion of themselves and the sense of their place in history made it easier for Americans to justify taking land from Indians, who many saw as hopelessly backward.

…

In the late 18th century, educated people in both America and Europe shared a widely held belief that the development of society could be organized into four stages. In order, these stages were: 1) Hunting and Gathering, 2) Pastoralism 3) Agriculture, and 4) Commerce.

It was believed that, as time passed and population grew, every society would pass through these four stages.

The Indians, were obviously at stage 1: Hunting and Gathering. Europe, was obviously at stage 4: Commerce. But at stage four, it was believed that society could no longer developm, and decay would set in as extreme wealth accumulated for the few at the top, while the masses lived in poverty.

This decay, in turn, would destroy societies.

Americans, people of destiny that they were, saw themselves at somewhere between stages three and four, that is, the agriculture stage, and the commerce stage. This was the ideal position to be in, they told themselves.

As a Massachussett’s minister said in 1787: “In the present age, our Country is in a medium between Barbarity and Refinement. In such an age, the mind of men are strong and vigorous, being neither enfeebled by luxury, nor shackled, by authority.”

Or, as Benjamin Franklin put it more bluntly: America during this time was “a general happy Mediocrity.” 

But not everybody was content with mediocrity. The educated gentlemen who fought for the Constitution quickly realized that it would not restore the traditional social order. They had hoped that with patience and time, America would climb from the third stage of social development into the fourth and final stage. 

They wanted America to become rich and powerful, like European kingdoms, only with a republican form of government. For this to happen, the growing population would need to be directed to cities, they thought, so that America could develop an industrial base that could compete with Europe. In their ideal society, the landed elite would govern, the middle class would develop industry, and the poor would farm or work in these industries. But this wasn’t happening.

The Constitution made for less chaos in government, but the common people were no less powerful than they had been under the Articles of Confederation. And the booming population wasn’t restricted to cities. To the dismay of the elites, the people were moving west, beyond the Appalachian mountains, where our main Cherokee narrative has been taking place.

In 1800, 90% of the population still lived east of the Appalachians, but the fastest-growing segments of the country were the frontier regions.

This gave the Eastern gentlemen anxiety because, in their eyes, westerners were even more crude and uneducated than the rabblerousing commoners east of the Appalachians.

A visiting Frenchman wrote that White Americans on the frontier were so ill-behaved that they were “worthy of their savage neighbors.”

There was virtually no system of government out West, and the law meant little, so men on the frontier often settled their disputes with no-holds-barred combat, using their hands, feet, and teeth until somebody gave up or was incapacitated. 

Nothing was off limits. A Kentuckian wrote that “scratching, pulling hair, choking, gouging out each other’s eyes, and biting off each other’s noses” was common in brawls.

Social violence still happened back East and in Europe, duels were embedded into culture, and mob violence sometimes broke out among the masses, but these were rare and short-lived. Necessary evils, it was thought, to blow off steam.

In the West, men weren’t ashamed of their violence, they were actually proud of it. Fighters became local heroes and men would boast about their exploits.

To the federalists and educated gentlemn, it looked like the further west Americans moved, the more social development faded and mankind reverted back to a savage state.

Even back East, civility and politeness seemed to fade away. Before the revolution, when aristocrats strolled down the street, it was customary for a lower class individual to step out of their way and tip their hat to their social betters. But now the masses abhorred such decorum and acknowledgment of hierarchy.

Vulgarity and violence spread to politics as well as more of the population became involved in deciding government. Traditionally in America and Europe, a man needed to own a certain amount of property to be able to vote in elections. But these requirements faded rapidly after the revolution.

As voting rights expanded, the people made clear they did not want to be ruled by aristocrats. “Does a nobleman know the wants of the farmers and mechanic?” one New Yorker campaigning for office asked. “If we give such men the management of our concerns, where is our INDEPENDENCE and FREEDOM?!”

It was clear that Washington’s ideal of a “disinterested gentleman” was a pipe dream. Government officials could no longer pretend to be umpires above the fray. 

Eventually, the Federalists realized that they had to–God Forbid–actually campaign for office to win elections. They even began copying their common folk opponents in these campaigns. When the landed gentry ran for office, they described themselves as humble farmers, rather than august gentlemen. These attempts often failed though. After all, why would a voter support a diet anti-federalist, when they could have the real thing?

…

Now, I’ve been talking about Federalists and anti-federalists as parties, but to clarify, they were nothing like modern political parties. There were no organizations called “The Federalist Party” or “The Anti Federalist Party”, like we have the modern Democratic and Republican parties. The word “party” was synonymous with the word “faction” back in the 18th century. So every candidate essentially ran as an independent but aligned themselves with other politicians who held similar ideological views.

Though politicians  were theoretically independent, the spread of democracy and equality generated intense partisan passions. One Massachusetts minister in 1809 said that “parties hate each other as much as the French and Enlish hate each other in time of war.”

Families broke up over partisanship, and employees were fired by their employers for having different political views. Partisanship even broke out into violence. In 1805, one  South Carolinian estimated that Three-fourths of all duels were caused by political disputes. But dueling requires the participants to see themselves as equals. Federalists still thought of themselves as aristocrats above their lower class opponents, so rather than duel, they preferred the much more condescending approach of beating their opponent with a cane.

But, just like today, most social violence occurred for no broader political reason. And violent crime skyrocketed compared to European countries. 

During the second half of the 18th century, Pennsylvania’s murder rate was twice that of London’s, and it rose the fastest after the revolution.

 During the 26 years between 1770 and 1796, New York City experienced just 17 homicides. In the following eighteen years between 1797 and 1815, the city experienced 80 homicides, including 11 in a single year. Suicide rates were increasing as well.  Between 1804 and 1808, 75 New Yorkers killed themselves.

These sound like low numbers compared to today, but the tota; US population was much smaller then. America’s population in 1800 was less than 2% of its population in 2024   

As we’ve seen in the previous two episodes, reciprocal violence between white settlers and Indians was commonplace on the frontier. And Americans were fascinated and disturbed to read about such violence in pamphlets and newspapers. 

Especially disturbing were new types of crime that the public wasn’t used to hearing about, crimes such as domestic violence and rape. The public was horrified to read about fathers raping their daughters, or beating their wives and children to the point of hospitalization. Out on the frontier, where families were even more isolated, stories would trickle back east about fathers murdering their entire families.

***

But what was the source of all of this violence?

One popular explanation, then as now, is alcohol. To put it bluntly: Americans were completely hammered at the turn of the 19th century.

Alcohol consumption skyrocketed after the Revolution. In 1790, the average American consumed two-and-a-half gallons of hard liquor annually, by 1820 this amount had risen to 5 gallons;nearly triple today’s alcohol consumption.

But this number conceals even higher rates of alcoholism. If you exclude enslaved people, who were mostly forbidden from drinking alcohol, as well as women women and children, this means that white men were consuming vast amounts of liquor. One New York senator estimated that some workers in the country consumed up to a quarter of a gallon of hard liquor a day. 

The abundance of alcohol stemmed from the country’s vast size. There were no railroads yet, which made transporting heavy cargo slow and prohibitively expensive. For grain farmers, this meant their harvest often spoiled before reaching distant markets. To avoid waste, many distilled their grain into spirits locally—which were far easier to transport and wouldn’t spoil on the journey. On the frontier, these spirits frequently served as a substitute for hard currency, which was in short supply.

The social consequence of all this alcohol was tremendous. In addition to all the violence I mentioned, you had accidental deaths, men abandoning their families, and absenteeism from work; Not to mention the negative impact on one’s health.

 And if you were out West getting black-out drunk and looking for some enemy to release your pent-up aggression on, who better than those savage Indians?

…

Excessive drinking may have exasperated America’s problems, but many observers believed the source of this public disarray lay at the family level.

As John Adams put it: “The source of revolution, democracy, and Jacobism, has been a systematic dissolution of the true family authority. There can never be any regular government of a nation without a marked subordination of mother and children to the father.”

It was theorized that fathers, husbands, ministers, and magistrates; patriarchy everywhere felt its authority slipping away. Men were unsure of their place in this new society and this anxiety was released through violence.

Now, you may be wondering, how could Men, in such a patriarchal society like early America, feel like they were the losers?

Well, I’ll tell you.

Traditional patriarchal roles responsible for social order, such as church ministers and landed gentry, were fading away, with no clear replacement. Every man was his own king in this new republic, sure, but what is a king if he does not have a domain to rule?

Children were abandoning their families as soon as they became adults, moving out west to stake a claim on their own land to set up their own families and their own miniature kingdoms. As I’ve said, travel over long distances was nearly impossible for the average person, so most of these children never saw their parents again.

So many men moved west, that in some older New England states, the population was majority female. But even in New England, daughters were asserting their limited rights more defiantly. They rejected traditional courtship and insisted on choosing their own partners for marriage, not their parent’s choice. These daughters got married later in life than their parents had, and some were, heaven forbid, refusing to get married at all. 

There were even ideas beginning to develop that women were the equals of men. Jeremiah Everts, an influential pastor who will play an important role later in this podcast as an ally of the Cherokee, wrote about the subject og gender equality in an 1801 essay titled: “Are the Abilities of Females Inferior to Those of Males?”

Everts and other learned men proposed the radical idea that–at birth and through childhood–the two sexes were equally intelligent. It was only because society put such little emphasis on women’s education, and gave them so few opportunities, that they were seen as inferior, not because of something biological or innate. 

On top of all of this social change, there was a spectacular movement of people. Nobody seemed to be rooted in the place where they were born. And it wasn’t uncommon for farmers to move four times throughout their lives. This meant that people weren’t just leaving their families behind, they were also leaving their communities behind too, which weakend social cohesion and order.

All of these developments meant that men–though now free from aristocratic authority–could not hope to receive the same respect that used to be the domain of the social betters. Nobody was stepping out out of their way to tip their hats to them. So as a class, men were still at the top of the social hierarchy, but as individuals, they were unrooted and anxious about their role in a changing world.

And if you think about it, it’s not that hard to see how men could have such anxiety despite living in a patriarchal society. In America today, men often express anxiety and resentment over not being appreciated enough, and of being unsure of their place in a changing culture. 

…

With all of this change happening, there was one part of the country that remained conspicuously the same: The South. 

In the North, slavery existed, but on a much smaller scale than in the South. Most Northern farmers worked their lands and grew crops to feed their families or sell for profit. Men who weren’t farmers were artisans in industries like textiles, shoe making, and metalwork. This self-sufficiency meant that, if you were ambitious and worked hard, you could grow richer over time.

These dynamics didn’t exist in the South, where you got far richer by owning slaves and making them grow cash crops, like cotton or tobacco, rather than working your way up in some factory or on your own small farm. It made for a more leisurely life as well, for the owners anyway. But you needed slave labor to accomplish this, and slaves were expensive.

This meant that poor immigrants often chose to live up north, or in the new lands out west, rather than the south, where much more startup capital was needed to become rich. So population growth in the South was much slower than in the North, and manufacturing was rare. These dynamics meant the traditional view of aristocracy was stronger in the South than in the North, where aristocracy was quickly fading away.

To be sure, slavery had existed in every British colony before the Revolution, but after independence, the mid-Atlantic States and New England began abolishing slavery outright, or in a controlled process of gradual emancipation over time. Some slaveholders even freed their slaves after American independence, citing their Revolutionary ideals and clinging to the fading aristocratic notion of noblesse oblige. This happened either immediately, or through their wills upon their deaths. So, at least some founding fathers recognized the hypocrisy between slavery and the belief that “all men were created equal.” 

That being said, some leading men in the South began emancipating their slaves too. Overfarming had depleted the soil in the southern states making slavery less economical than it once was, and for a brief moment, it looked like slavery in America would gradually fade away over time. 

This fantasy would prove to be short-lived. In 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. Before this, an individual, almost always an enslaved person, had to physically remove cotton seeds out of the tufts of cotton they had just harvested. This was done by hand which made for a slow, arduous process. Cotton couldn’t be woven into textiles with the seeds still in it, so it couldn’t be sold for profit until this time-consuming separation occurred.

Whitney’s invention used a combination of a wire screen and metal hooks to separate cotton fibers from their seeds. The only manual labor involved was turning a hand crank. This process was exponentially faster than the old method by hand and made cotton production much more profitable. So just as slavery looked like it was on the way out, the cotton gin gave it a new lease on life and Southerners shut the door on emancipation.

The cotton gin didn’t solve the problem of soil depletion though. Plantation owners could process cotton faster, but as time passed, their cotton yields still shrank. Since land is a finite resource, Southerners had to look past the original states to find fresh soil that would allow them to expand their budding cotton empires. And where would they find this new land?

Well, west of Georgia lay some of the finest soil on earth. And the only people there were some backward Indian tribes, only in the first stage of social development. These tribes where the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Muscogee (which American’s called the Creek), the Seminoles, as well as the biggest tribal nation of all: The Cherokee.

…

Before I wrap up, I want to explain why I took a detour from our friend the Ridge and our main narrative centered on the Cherokee nation. In this episode, we examined the social and cultural developments occurring in the young American republic. I hope you’re starting to see how all of these dynamics will play a role in encouraging the United States to pursue a policy of expansion at the expense of Native Americans, a policy that will culminate in the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

The decline of the aristocracy and George Washington’s ideal “disinterested gentleman” politician, combined with the growth in popular democracy centered on local interests, will lead to governments that are less interested in pursuing policies that serve the greater good and instead lead to policies that are popular with certain segments of the voting public.

A booming population will lead to White Americans expanding west, beyond the borders of the original 13 colonies. 

Increasing rates of alcoholism and the breakdown of traditional social orders will lead to a more violent, aggressive society.

And a southern economy based on slavery and cotton will require new lands to make up for the depleted farmlands back East.

There will be some checks on these forces, most notably the constitution, as well as the remaining Federalists, who will continue to exert influence in culture and politics, though this influence will weaken over time.

But all of this is ahead.

Next episode, we’ll return to our main narrative centered on the Cherokee Nation and The Ridge, who will travel to Washington DC as part of a Cherokee embassy. Meanwhile, the United States will increase pressure on the Cherokee to abandon their lands, and the first trickle of Cherokee will begin to move west on their own accord to get as far away as possible from the growing influence of the United States.. 

Until, I would really appreciate it if you could like and review this podcast on your podcast app. This is the best way for Beautiful Losers to reach a wider audience and tap into that oh-so-powerful algorithm. And while you’re doing that, why not spread the word? Tell your friends about this show, and share it on social media. I may be biased, but I think this is an incredibly important chapter of American History that often goes overlooked, and together, maybe we could correct that oversight.

You can find more information, including transcripts, pictures, and maps on the show’s website: BeautifuLosersofHistory.com, and as always, you can contact me directly via email at beautifullosersofhistory@gmail.com, or on BlueSky, where my handle is nathanmcdermott.bsky.social. Feel free to let me know if I’ve made any mistakes or if you want to discuss anything about the show.

Beautiful Losers of History is written and narrated by me, Nathan McDermott. Logo design is by Nicole Stallings-Blanche, and the theme music and transition sounds are from the Four Seasons, by Vivaldi, under a Creative Commons license. Background Audio is courtesy of Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com. Thanks again, and until next time, this has been Beautiful Losers of History.