The concept of the “white man’s chance,” assumes that white people need land and a few possessions to have a chance to make it – that makes sense. But the awful part is that, sadly, this concept assumes that if the only means white people have to achieve that security is to take it away from people of color, that’s O.K. In Georgia, white people had been given a chance by appropriating the labor of African-Americans for generations, then in the early 1800s, they used this excuse to take land and property away from the Cherokees so that the whites could have a chance. This book documents the way that the violence and intimidation by white people, coupled with the assent and often participation of authorities, allowed them to steal most of the Cherokee land in Georgia. These depredations also diffused opposition to Indian Removal - that took the form of The Trail of Tears - among both the whites and the Cherokees. The author is a professor of history at Scranton University.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020. 240 pages with an Index, Bibliography, Notes, maps, and illustrations. Hardback with a pictorial cover.