What God Hath Wrought: From Papal Bull to the Trail of Tears

Before the United States claimed a continent, it inherited an older idea: that discovery by a Christian power could turn inhabited land into empire.

Image: Tenskwatawa, The Open Door, Known as The Prophet, Brother of Tecumseh, Shawnee Chief. Portrait by George Catlin, 1830/1832. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

This is the first essay in a three-part series examining how sacred narratives, legal doctrine, and historical memory have been used to authorize claims over land, labor, and sovereignty.

If you missed Part II, read Ham’s Children: How Scripture Was Made to Serve Slavery---and How the Enslaved Read It Otherwise.

If you missed Part III, read The Lords of the Land: Israel in Caanan.

These histories are not identical, but each reveals how power seeks legitimacy through story.

PART I: THE FIRST AMERICANS

The first Europeans who sailed along the Atlantic coast of North America saw forests that seemed endless. Pines and oaks stretched inland beyond the horizon. Rivers moved slowly through wetlands and marshes. To the newcomers the land appeared vast and thinly settled, though in reality it was already mapped by older human rhythms—seasonal migrations, trade routes, planting grounds, burial sites, sacred places known by memory rather than by survey lines.

Long before European ships appeared on the horizon, the continent was home to complex societies: the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Cherokee Nation, the Choctaw Nation, and hundreds of others. These societies possessed their own systems of diplomacy, agriculture, territorial governance, and spiritual traditions tied intimately to the land. Fields of maize, beans, and squash surrounded villages. Trade networks linked communities across enormous distances.

But when Europeans arrived, they brought with them more than muskets and ships. They carried a worldview formed within centuries of Christian imperial expansion—a worldview that already contained assumptions about who possessed legitimate authority over land.

In the late medieval and early modern periods, European Christian powers had developed a theological framework that justified territorial expansion into lands inhabited by non-Christians. Papal decrees such as Inter Caetera articulated the idea that Christian monarchs could claim dominion over territories encountered during exploration. The underlying assumption was that Christian civilization possessed a universal authority that superseded the sovereignty of non-Christian peoples.

From these ideas emerged what scholars later called the Doctrine of Discovery.

Image: The Papal Bull “Inter Caetera,” issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493,Pope Alexander VI’s Demarcation Bull, May 4, 1493. (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC04093). https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/doctrine-discovery-1493

The doctrine did not say that Indigenous people did not exist. Europeans could clearly see villages, fields, and trading communities. What it said was something more subtle and ultimately more powerful: that the political authority of those societies did not count in the same way as Christian sovereignty. Indigenous nations could occupy land, but ultimate dominion belonged to the discovering Christian power.

This theological assumption gradually hardened into legal practice across the colonial world. English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese empires all adopted variations of the principle. Colonial charters issued by European monarchs routinely granted land that was already inhabited by Indigenous societies.

When English settlers founded colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, they often framed their expansion in religious terms. In the seventeenth century many Puritan settlers believed they were building a “New Israel” in the wilderness. Sermons described the American landscape using biblical imagery drawn from the Hebrew Bible: a promised land, a chosen people, a divine mission unfolding across history.

Yet the land they imagined as wilderness already contained established nations.

As English settlements expanded, conflict with Indigenous societies intensified. Some colonists argued that Native peoples possessed legitimate property rights and negotiated treaties accordingly. Others insisted that Indigenous land could be taken if it was not cultivated according to European agricultural practices. In these arguments, biblical and civilizational language blended together: Christians bringing civilization to lands supposedly unused or underused.

By the early nineteenth century the United States had inherited these colonial assumptions and translated them into national law. The legal turning point came in the Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh.

The dispute itself concerned competing land claims between private American citizens. But resolving the case required the Court to determine who possessed ultimate authority over land originally inhabited by Indigenous nations.

Chief Justice John Marshall looked to the history of European colonial practice and concluded that discovery had given European nations—and later the United States—ultimate title to Indigenous land. Native nations retained only a right of occupancy. They could live on the land, but they could not sell it except to the federal government.

In a single opinion the Court embedded centuries of Christian imperial doctrine into American property law.

Once written into the legal framework of the United States, the doctrine shaped federal policy for generations. As American settlers pushed westward, Indigenous land claims could be extinguished through treaties, purchase, or conquest. The federal government positioned itself as the sole authority capable of acquiring Indigenous land and transferring it to settlers.

The consequences became devastatingly clear in the 1830s. President Andrew Jackson championed a policy that would relocate Native nations from the southeastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, setting in motion a vast program of forced displacement.

The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations were compelled to abandon ancestral lands that had been cultivated for generations. Entire communities were marched west under military supervision. Thousands died from exposure, disease, and starvation during the journey later known as the Trail of Tears.

Throughout the nineteenth century similar patterns repeated across the continent. Treaties were negotiated and broken. Military campaigns pushed Indigenous nations onto reservations. Settler towns and railroads spread across lands that had once been controlled by Native societies.

Missionaries often accompanied this expansion. Some sought sincerely to protect Indigenous communities from exploitation, while others believed they were participating in a civilizing mission. In missionary writings and sermons the language of Christian providence frequently appeared alongside the language of American progress.

The result was a moral narrative that framed territorial expansion as part of a divine historical process. The United States was imagined as a nation unfolding across a continent under the guidance of Providence. Indigenous resistance, within that framework, appeared as opposition to an inevitable and divinely sanctioned transformation of the land.

Yet Indigenous communities did not passively accept this interpretation. Native leaders engaged in diplomacy, legal battles, and cultural adaptation to defend their sovereignty. Some Indigenous nations adopted elements of Christianity while interpreting the faith in ways that preserved their own traditions and political autonomy.

The struggle over land therefore became not only a military and political conflict but also a struggle over the meaning of history itself: whether the continent’s transformation represented the fulfillment of a providential destiny or the displacement of peoples whose relationship to the land predated the arrival of Europeans by centuries.

Across the forests, plains, and river valleys of North America, the evidence of that struggle remains visible—in treaty lines, reservation boundaries, abandoned village sites, and legal doctrines that still shape federal Indian law today.

And behind those legal doctrines lies an older idea, carried across the Atlantic centuries ago: the belief that discovery by a Christian power could transform inhabited land into property available for empire.

Read Part II:

Read Part III:

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Intellectual Map

Primary Sources

Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823). Source: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep021/usrep021543/usrep021543.pdf

“Inter Caetera,” in Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917.

https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/inter-caetera-by-pope-alexander-vi-may-4-1493/

Marshall, John. The Papers of John Marshall. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. https://archive.org/details/papersofjohnmars0000mars/page/n8/mode/1up

United States. Indian Removal Act, 4 Stat. 411 (1830). https://www.loc.gov/resource/llsalvol.llsal_004/?sp=459

United States. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Pet.) 1 (1831). https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep030/usrep030001/usrep030001.pdf

United States. Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 515 (1832). https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep031/usrep031515/usrep031515.pdf

Core Secondary Works

Banner, Stuart. How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Calloway, Colin G. One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. https://archive.org/details/onevastwintercou00call/page/n3/mode/1up

Hurt, R. Douglas. The Indian Frontier, 1763–1846. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.

Hurt, R. Douglas. The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.

Miller, Robert J., Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg. Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Perduew, Theda, and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. New York: Viking, 2007.

Robertson, Lindsay G. Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Saunt, Claudio. Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. New York: W. W. Norton, 2020.

Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Watson, Blake A. Buying America from the Indians: Johnson v. McIntosh and the History of Native Land Rights. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012.

Williams Jr., Robert A. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.