Our Lasting Dishonor

Rebecca Onion, history writer at Slate.com, recently wrote of 60+ amazing women from Ohio who, in 1830, organized and actively protested Andrew Jackson's efforts to relocate indigenous people of the American South. Cotton was king, and immigrants and early citizens saw great promise in cheap Alabama and Georgia land, much of which had been cleared of timber by Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes. (Except in northern Georgia where Scarlett O'Hara's Irish "pa" worked long to prepare the soil for cotton planting, ahem.) Years of negotiation had obtained only feeble promises from our government to protect natives from a greedy land grab. By 1835 the decree went forth: abandon your homes. 

"As historian Mary Hershberger writes, the fight against Native American removal was the first time that American women became politically active on a national scale." These Ohio ladies petitioned Congress, their "constitutional protectors of the Indians" to honor past contracts and "save this remnant of a much injured people from annihilation, to shield our country from the curses denounced on the cruel and ungrateful, and to shelter the American character from lasting dishonor."

Source: Memorial from the ladies of Steubenville, Ohio, protesting Indian removal on February 15, 1830. 

Postscript: This writer longs for the day Andy Jackson is removed from the $20 bill.