INDIAN REMOVAL, CHEROKEE TRAIL OF TEARS, CHEROKEE
INDIAN NATION OKLAHOMA INDIAN TERRITORY HISTORY
INDIAN REMOVAL
In the first four decades of the nineteenth century, the United States
cajoled, bribed, arrested, and ultimately removed approximately seventy thousand American Indians out of their ancestral lands
in the American South. Although President Andrew Jackson is often deemed the architect of this program, the removal of the Chickasaw, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole began
years before the 1830 Indian Removal Act and Jackson's subsequent use of the military to relocate
the Indians.
In 1802 the state of Georgia agreed
to cede its westernmost lands to the federal government, and in return the government vowed to extinguish the Indian title
to lands within Georgia as soon as possible. In the following years the United
States made only a few serious efforts to live up to that promise. After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, President Thomas Jefferson pressured the Cherokee and other Indian nations to exchange their eastern domains voluntarily
for regions in the newly acquired western territory. Only a few tribes accepted the offer. After the War of 1812 the United States obtained thousands of acres of Creek lands in Georgia
and Alabama, but the acquisition did not accompany a larger
plan for Creek removal.
Finally, in the 1820s, Georgians began to demand that the United States extinguish the Indian title to lands within their state. President
James Monroe determined that arranging the exchange of acreage in the East for areas in the West was the best means to accomplish
this goal. While the federal government tried to create inducements to convince the Southeastern Indians to leave their homes,
the discovery of gold in Georgia led to
more aggressive demands for immediate removal.
The election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828 encouraged Georgia and its
land-hungry settlers. Jackson made his position
clear in his first message to Congress. He told the Cherokees that they had no constitutional means to resist and that it was in their best interest voluntarily to move west. Staying would lead to their destruction.
As Congress debated the issues, several Cherokees negotiated a removal agreement with the United States. Major Ridge, a Cherokee planter and soldier, his son John Ridge, and his nephew Elias Boudinot conducted these
negotiations with the United States despite
the expressed wishes of the majority of their nation. Most Cherokees, including Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation John Ross, protested and tried to stop Ridge and his so-called Treaty Party.
On May 28, 1830, while Ridge and his supporters negotiated terms of removal with
the United States, Congress passed the
Indian Removal Act. This law provided the president with $500,000 to establish districts west of the Mississippi
River, to trade eastern tribal lands for those districts, to compensate the Indians for the cost of their removal
and the improvements on their homesteads, and to pay one years worth subsistence to those who went west. Armed with this authority,
President Jackson authorized agents to negotiate and enforce treaties.
Chief John Ross hired former attorney general William Wirt to represent the Cherokee
in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and then in Worcester v. Georgia (1832). In each case the U.S. Supreme
Court recognized the sovereignty of the Cherokee tribe. The latter determined that Georgia could not make laws for the Cherokee people. The Supreme Court's rulings,
however, could not prevent forced removal. Georgia and the United States ignored the ruling and refused to recognize
Cherokee sovereignty.
President Jackson embraced Ridge and the Cherokee minority, and together they signed
the Treaty of New Echota in 1835. Ridge ceded all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi in return for territory in present
northeastern Oklahoma, five million dollars, transportation
west, and one year of subsistence. Amid a chorus of protests by Cherokees and their American supporters, the U.S. Senate ratified
the treaty. Nearly two thousand Cherokees moved west in accordance to the agreement, but most of the nation remained. They
still hoped that their Constitutional victories and the illegalities of the treaty might be recognized. In 1838 the United States sent armed soldiers to enforce the law. The
federal troops confined the Cherokees in disease-ridden camps for several months before forcing them to proceed west. Death
and hardship was common, and nearly one in four Cherokees died.
The other southeastern Indian nations experienced similar stories of upheaval and
dislocation. Although each resisted, the Choctaw (1831-32), the Chickasaw (1837-38), the Creek, and the Seminole too found
their ways westward on Trails of Tears. Divisions within the Creek Nation led to the execution of William McIntosh, one if
its prominent chiefs, for signing the 1825 Treaty of Indian Springs. Ironically, McIntosh was killed in accordance to a law
that he had created only years earlier. Despite their continued opposition, most of the Creek Indians trekked west in 1836.
Hundreds of Seminoles moved to Indian Territory in 1832, but many more refused to leave the swamps of Florida. Instead, they fought the Second Seminole War (1835-42), and some moved further
into the Everglades.
Recommended
Reading: The Cherokee Removal:
A Brief History with Documents (The Bedford
Series in History and Culture) (Paperback). Description: This book tells the compelling story of American ethnic cleansing
against the Cherokee nation through an admirable combination of primary documents and the editors' analyses. Perdue and Green
begin with a short but sophisticated history of the Cherokee from their first interaction with Europeans to their expulsion
from the East to the West; a region where Georgia, North
Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama
connect. The reader is directed through a variety of documents commenting on several important themes: the "civilizing" of
the Cherokee (i.e. their adoption of European culture), Georgia's leading role in pressuring the Cherokee off their land and
demanding the federal government to remove them by force, the national debate between promoters and opponents of expulsion,
the debate within the Cherokee nation, and a brief look at the deportation or forced removal. Continued below...
Conveyed in
the voices of the Cherokee and the framers of the debate, it allows the reader to appreciate the complexity of the situation.
Pro-removal Americans even made racist judgments of the Cherokee but cast and cloaked their arguments in humanitarian rhetoric.
Pro-emigration Cherokee harshly criticize the Cherokee leadership as corrupt and possessing a disdain for traditional Cherokee
culture. American defenders and the Cherokee leadership deploy legal and moral arguments in a futile effort to forestall American
violence. “A compelling and stirring read.”
Recommended Reading: Indian
Removal (The Norton Casebooks in History). Description: This casebook traces the evolution of U.S. Indian
policy from its British Colonial origins to the implementation of removal after 1830. Placing Indian removal in political
and social contexts, the editors have selected contemporary primary-source documents that reveal the motives and perspectives
of both whites and Indians and cover the complicated influences of Jacksonian Democracy and the early stirrings of what would
later be referred to as Manifest Destiny. Continued below...
Letters, treaties, and journal entries give readers a sense of the ordeal of removal for American Indians.
Recommended Reading: Indian
Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (423 pages) (University of Oklahoma Press)
Recommended
Reading: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Description: 1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question
of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed
the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused
territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans.
For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann
brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come
over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the
Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians,
rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that
even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention. Continued below...
Mann is well
aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise
scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening
revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were
there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later
and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and
unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest
epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity,
which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that
held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. Includes outstanding photos and maps.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Grant
Foreman, Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1932). Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American
Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, ed., The Cherokee Removal:
A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1995). Andrew K. Frank, © Oklahoma Historical Society.
Indian Removal Act, Trail of Tears 1838, Treaty of New Echota 1835, History Forced Removal of Cherokees
West, Oklahoma Territory, Cherokee Indian Nation, Principal Chief John Ross Cherokee Nation Oklahoma
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