In 1818, Thomas McIntosh purchases 11,000 acres (!) of land in Virginia from Congress. The land had already been purchased by Thomas Johnson, a British citizen, in 1775. Johnson had purchased it from a local Native American tribe under a 1763 proclamation by the King of England.<\/p>\n
In 1823, Chief Justice John Marshall rules that Native Americans don’t have the right to sell land to individuals, a responsibility solely allotted to the federal government or to private (white) owners.<\/p>\n
In brief, the combination of the Doctrine of Discovery and the lack of “proof” that Native Americans “own” the land where they have lived since before the arrival of settler colonialists also<\/em> means that with this decision, Native Americans only have a right of occupancy to that land.<\/p>\n Land that is not yet private property belongs to the US government, who can also determine whether Native Americans can keep<\/em> their right of occupancy to the land where they live (this will get even uglier, very soon).<\/p>\n The other big thing that happens is that on December 2, 1823, President James Monroe gives his seventh annual message to Congress, making a historical foreign policy stance that will eventually become known as the Monroe Doctrine. In less words, it’s a message to all European powers to cease any meddling in the affairs of the western hemisphere. This will also give people looking westward some more ideas…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 1818, Thomas McIntosh purchases 11,000 acres (!) of land in Virginia from Congress. The land had already been purchased by Thomas Johnson, a British citizen, in 1775. Johnson had purchased it from a local Native American tribe under a 1763 proclamation by the King of England. In 1823, Chief Justice John Marshall rules that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5006,"featured_media":80,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-westward-expansion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/itsjusthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/itsjusthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/itsjusthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/itsjusthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5006"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/itsjusthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/itsjusthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":162,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/itsjusthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions\/162"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/itsjusthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/itsjusthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/itsjusthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/itsjusthistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}