REMOVALS, THE, the general administrative term for the series of treaties, provincial statutes, and Council of State orders, 1820s to 1850s, by which the native nations remaining within the settled bounds of the Chesapeake, Carolina, and the Lakes (q.v.) were removed to territory west of the existing lines of settlement, the greater part of the business being conducted through the Committee of the Plantations rather than through any single statute of general application. The Council's own returns treat the Removals chiefly as a question of appropriation and survey, and this contributor, whose office is the accounting rather than the policy, follows the returns' own emphasis.
The expenditure voted for removal, transport, and resettlement across the whole period totalled, by the Committee's own consolidated accounts, some one million four hundred thousand pounds, a figure that ran, in nearly every provincial case this contributor has examined, well beyond the original estimate laid before the Senate — the Chesapeake removals of the eighteen-thirties alone exceeded their appropriation by above two-fifths, the overrun being charged, in the Committee's own minute, to "the difficulties of transport in an unsettled season" rather than to any failure of the original survey. The mortality recorded among the removed populations during the transit years, particularly the western marches undertaken in the winter months of 1838 and 1839, exceeded the Committee's own actuarial projection for a comparable civilian movement by a margin this contributor's tables put at somewhere between two and three times, a shortfall in planning that the surviving correspondence of the transport contractors attributes variously to inadequate provisioning, to the season chosen for the marches, and, in one contractor's own phrase this contributor has not troubled to soften, to "a supply reckoned for the number removed rather than the number expected to arrive."
The lands vacated were surveyed and sold, in the ordinary course of the Commonwealth's land office business, at prices that recovered, across the whole period, rather more than the original removal expenditure had cost — a net return to the Treasury this contributor's own figures put at a modest surplus by the accounting of 1860, once survey and administration costs are set against the sale proceeds. The territories assigned in exchange, west of the settlement line, remain under the ordinary territorial administration of the provinces bordering them, whose returns this article has not had occasion to examine in the detail a fuller account of the matter would require. (M. S. W.)