The United States was not yet a country when it executed its first treaty with an Indian nation. The Delaware treaty of 1778 was signed during the Revolutionary War by commissioners operating under the authority of the Continental Congress — a body that had no constitution, no ratification process, and no territory it could legally guarantee. The United States was promising land it did not control to secure a military alliance it needed to survive.
After the Constitution was ratified in 1789, the treaty relationship acquired formal legal standing. But the fundamental dynamic of the early republic period was scarcity of U.S. military capacity and the resulting need to negotiate rather than simply take. These instruments often reflect genuine bilateral negotiation — nations extracting real concessions, insisting on specific boundaries, conditioning alliance on specific U.S. obligations.
The protection formula — "under the protection of the United States and of no other sovereign whatsoever" — appears across this era. It served a specific purpose: after the Revolution, Britain, Spain, and France all maintained territorial claims and relationships with Indian nations along U.S. borders. The protection clause was the mechanism by which the U.S. legally foreclosed those relationships, asserting exclusive sovereign jurisdiction over each signatory nation's external affairs.
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled U.S. territory and created an immediate political problem: the United States now claimed sovereignty over vast territories occupied by nations it had no treaties with and no military capacity to displace. The treaty instrument became a tool for extending the legal framework of U.S. jurisdiction without the necessity of actual conquest.
The War of 1812 temporarily disrupted U.S. treaty-making. Post-war treaties in this period often carried punitive terms, treating former British allies as conquered parties rather than negotiating partners. The legal language shifted: earlier treaties had framed the protection relationship as mutual; post-1815 treaties increasingly framed it as the nation receiving the benefits of U.S. protection in exchange for specific obligations.
The annuity system also became more elaborate during this period. Annual payments in goods or cash, typically running 20 years, were the primary consideration in land cession treaties. These payments were administered by U.S. Indian agents whose discretion over disbursement was nearly absolute.
By 1817, U.S. military capacity had surpassed that of most eastern Indian nations. The character of treaty negotiation shifted accordingly. Nations that had been able to insist on specific terms in the 1780s were now operating under explicit military pressure. The word "treaty" still appeared at the top of the instruments, but the bilateral character of the process was increasingly formal rather than substantive.
This period saw the introduction of the individual allotment mechanism — treaty articles granting specific parcels to named individuals, often mixed-race residents or interpreters who had influence with tribal leadership. Allotment articles were a mechanism for fragmenting communal land title and creating a class of individual landholders who could be pressured or purchased out.
The annuity consideration also began to shift from goods and services to cash payments, which were more easily captured by traders who extended credit to tribal members against future annuity receipts.
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized the President to negotiate removal treaties with Indian nations east of the Mississippi. The Act did not authorize forced removal — it authorized negotiation. What followed was not negotiation.
The instruments in this period are legally and factually distinct from those that came before. The instruments called treaties were often executed with minority factions, disputed delegations, or under conditions of direct military coercion, then presented to the Senate as consensual agreements of the entire nation.
The Choctaw Dancing Rabbit Creek treaty of 1830 is the first removal treaty and contains provisions that read as genuine concessions — explicit guarantees of self-governance, protection from state law, and perpetual territorial security west of the Mississippi. None of those provisions were ultimately honored.
By the Cherokee New Echota treaty of 1835, the U.S. negotiated with a faction of approximately 300 to 500 people — out of a nation of 17,000 — and in the preamble explicitly stated that those who did not attend the council were deemed to have given their "assent and sanction" to whatever was agreed. Principal Chief John Ross, who represented the elected leadership of the Cherokee Nation, was in Washington during those proceedings. The Senate ratified New Echota by a margin of one vote.
The instruments in the final period of this volume are largely administrative — supplemental articles, boundary corrections, and annuity modifications attached to existing removal treaties. The major eastern removal was complete by the late 1830s.
The treaty relationship itself ended in 1871, when Congress attached a rider to an appropriations bill that prohibited the United States from entering into any further treaties with Indian nations. Existing treaties remained in force — and remain in force — but no new ones could be made. The rider did not go through the treaty process. It required no Indian consent. It was not submitted to any Indian nation for review. Congress declared the treaty relationship over, unilaterally, by statute.