Thomas Jefferson’s Unofficial (and Private) Letter

Thomas Jefferson was an expansionist. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) makes this clear.

Jefferson was also a proponent of Indigenous expatriation. As Francis Prucha argues, Jefferson birthed the idea of a trans-Mississippi relocating of the Indigenous communities throughout the now eastern United States. Prucha defends his claim by citing an “unofficial and private” letter Jefferson wrote to William Henry Harrison, Indiana’s territorial governor and infamous Indian fighter.

Consider how Jefferson begins his correspondence with Governor Harrison:

... from the Secretary of War you receive from time to time information and instructions as to our Indian affairs. These communications being for the public records, are restrained always to particular objects and occasions; but this letter being unofficial and private, I may with safety give you a more extensive view of our policy respecting the Indians, that you may the better comprehend the parts dealt out to you in detail through the official channel, and observing the system of which they make a part, conduct yourself in unison with it in cases where you are obliged to act without instruction.

In this passage, Robert A. Williams, Jr. notes, Jefferson communicates “in the tactical cadences of an armchair empire-builder.” And with the cover of an unofficial, private medium, Jefferson tells Governor Harrison that either the Indigenous peoples could relinquish their tribalism and assimilate in recognition of the inevitable victory of white civilization, or migrate across the Mississippi river (The Great Father of Waters) to escape extinction. Jefferson writes:

[O]ur settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi... As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing of the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our consolidation….

Jefferson’s rhetoric is chilling. But it isn’t new. It echoes how he spoke of Indigenous people in the Declaration of Independence. There he rails against England’s King for endeavoring “to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

See the irony? See who’s proved himself to be a merciless savage?

Of course, this revelation is unofficial…