Saunt’s book is a major achievement, commendable for his candor about the horrors of expulsion and his illumination of the crucial role that Southern slaveholders—eyeing Indian lands to take over for themselves—played in shaping early 19th-century American Indian policy. This alone would make for an important study, but he also manages to do something truly rare: destroy the illusion that history’s course is inevitable and recover the reality of the multiple possibilities that confronted contemporaries ... Saunt does not belabor current-day parallels, but they are impossible to miss.

... a powerful and lucid account, weaving together events with the people who experienced them up close ... Saunt doesn’t try to smooth over the knottier parts of his narrative...He’s also aware that the documentary record overrepresents the voices of those who left a paper trail. His account acknowledges the diverse experiences within and across Indigenous communities.

... a damning synthesis of the federal betrayals, mass deportations, and exterminatory violence that defined the 1830s ... Saunt’s greatest contribution is to weld the narrative of deportation to new histories of capitalism that emphasize slavery’s centrality to national economic development: He follows the money, exhaustively researching company correspondence and government records to show how bankers in Boston and London financed the dirty work of dispossession in collaboration with southern speculators. The result is a haunting story of racialized cruelty and greed, which came to define a pivotal period in U.S. and indigenous history alike ... In forensic detail, Saunt exposes how investment bankers on Wall Street and beyond got rich not simply by financing slavery but also by financing deportation ... At times, Saunt’s pessimistic narrative of unchecked and racialized avarice operates in tension with his more hopeful emphasis on anti-expulsion activism, and with his broader insistence that expulsion wasn’t inevitable. He might have strengthened his case by analyzing Jackson’s Whig Party adversaries, whose opposition to deportation defined their coalition more than any other issue of the 1830s ... Above all, Saunt’s uneasy toggling between commercial greed and anti-expulsion activism raises the question of whether American capitalism will always represent an amoral pursuit of profits, or whether it can ever factor justice into its bottom line. Saunt doesn’t ask such questions, but he invites them.

...Mr. Saunt presents a passionate and provocative account of what he calls “one of the first state-sponsored mass expulsions in the modern world”; the 'U.S. counterpart of Europe’s ‘Jewish question.' ” He convincingly argues that the root cause of the expulsion of the Indian inhabitants of the South was a vile mix of racial antipathy, unbounded greed and the naive idealism of self-styled Indian experts ... Drawing on prodigious research into primary sources, Mr. Saunt offers the most detailed account to date of the mechanics of Indian expulsion ... Although Mr. Saunt does a highly commendable job in relating the plight of the Southern native peoples during the era of Indian Removal, he does not provide readers with a solid sense of who they were. The cultures of the tribes affected are not examined; neither are the long traditions of both intertribal and internal strife that prevented the Indians from uniting against the white onslaught. In this regard, occasional errors arise ... This aside, Unworthy Republic is a much-needed rendering of a disgraceful episode in American history that has been too long misunderstood.

Saunt’s book is both thoroughly researched and quietly outraged ... These events have been well documented but Saunt puts them in broader context ... The scope of Unworthy Republic is enormous ... Saunt so persuasively makes the case that events of the 1830s cost Native Americans a whole lot more than tears.

University of Georgia history professor Saunt...investigates the origins and repercussions of the 1830 Indian Removal Act in this eye-opening and distressing chronicle ... Saunt presents a stark and well-documented case that Native American expulsion was a political choice rather than an inevitable tragedy. This searing account forces a new reckoning with American history.

A powerful, moving argument that the state-sponsored expulsion of the 1830s was a horrendous turning point for the Indigenous peoples in the United States ... A significant, well-rendered study of a disturbing period in American history.

...a hard, clear look at the ways Natives were dispossessed of their land in the decade after the passage of the 1830 Indian Removal Act ... This valuable addition to the scholarship of Native American dispossession and extermination should be read by scholars and general readers alike.