1780s - The "Civilization Experiment"
When Americans and Native Americans came into contact during colonial times and the early United States, most Colonial Americans felt their civilization to be superior.
Their solution was to forcibly 'share' their civilization with the Native Americans, so they would adopt Western civilization.
This acculturation was originally proposed by George Washington.
First, they would have to convert to Christianity and abandon pagan practices, such as canabalism.
The Native Americans had to adopt monogamous marriage and abandon non-marital sex.
They would also have to learn to speak and read English, although there was some interest in creating a writing and printing system for a few Native languages.
Finally, they had to accept the concept of individual ownership of land and other property.
The "Civilization Experiment" was embraced by the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole, who willingly accepted the Western customs and were considerd the Five Civilized Tribes that had been established as autonomous nations in the southeastern United States.
Trade and intermarriage between the Americans and these Native Nations was becoming common.
Thomas Jefferson's policy was similar to Washington's:
respect the Indians' rights to their homelands, and allow the Five Civilized Tribes to remain east of the Mississippi provided that they adopted behavior and cultural practices that were compatible with those of the American Colonists.
Jefferson also believed in and promoted a society based on agriculture.
1823 - The Case of Johnson v. M'Intosh
In the 1823 case of Johnson v. M'Intosh, the United States Supreme Court decided that Indians could occupy and control lands within the United States, but could not hold title to those lands. However, by 1823, with James Monroe still president, The United States government had already begun "treaties" that would force the Natives to "trade" their land, be removed from the Southeast, and be sent to reservations in the midwest.
President Washington's Foreign Nations Policy
From a legal standpoint, the United States Constitution empowered Congress to "regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.”
In early treaties negotiated between the federal government and the Indian tribes, the latter typically acknowledged themselves “to be under the protection of the United States of America, and of no other sovereign whosoever.”
Although Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe later argued that the Indian tribes in the Southeast should exchange their land for lands west of the Mississippi River, they did not take steps to make this happen.
When democrat Andrew Jackson later became president (1829–1837), he decided to build a systematic approach to Indian removal on the basis of these legal precedents.
As an Army general, he had spent years leading brutal campaigns against the Creeks in Georgia and Alabama and the Seminoles in Florida that resulted in the transfer of hundreds of thousands of acres of land from Indian nations to American and British farmers.
As president, he continued his goal.
Andrew Jackson passionately opposed former President George Washington's policy of establishing treaties with Indian tribes as if they were foreign nations.
Thus, he believed that the creation of Indian jurisdictions was a violation of state sovereignty under Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution.
Jackson thought that either Indians lands comprised sovereign states (which violated the Constitution) or they were subject to the laws of existing states of the Union.
Jackson urged Indians to assimilate and obey state laws and felt that he could only accommodate the desire for Indian self-rule in federal territories, which required resettlement west of the Mississippi River on federal lands.
In 1829, Soon after Jackson the Indian fighter and leader of the Democratic Party became Andrew Jackson, the president of the United States, he pushed through Congress an Indian Removal Act.
In his 1829 State of the Union address, Jackson called for Indian removal.
1830 - President Jackson's Indian Removal Act
While slavery had coming to an end as was predicted, Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin had made the plantation and slave systems extremely profitable in the southern soil and climate.
As the 19th century began, many yearned to make their fortunes by growing cotton and the land-hungry Northern Americans, who wanted to grow cotton on the fertile Indian lands of the South, poured into the backcountry of the coastal South.
They often resorted to violent means to take land from their Indigenous neighbors.
They stole livestock; burned and looted houses and towns; committed mass murder; and squatted on land that did not belong to them.
Since Indian tribes living there appeared to be the main obstacle to westward expansion, white settlers petitioned the federal government to remove them.
At the beginning of the 1830s, nearly 125,000 Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida.
To this point, the U.S. Government had used treaties as a means to displace Indians from their tribal lands.
In cases where this failed, the government sometimes violated both treaties and Supreme Court rulings to facilitate the spread of European Americans westward across the continent.
To achieve his purpose, Jackson encouraged Congress to adopt the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which gave the federal government the power to exchange Native-held land in the cotton kingdom east of the Mississippi for land to the west.
The Act established a process whereby the President could grant land west of the Mississippi River to Indian tribes that agreed to give up their homelands.
As incentives, the law allowed the Indians financial and material assistance to travel to their new locations and start new lives and guaranteed that the Indians would live on their new property under the protection of the United States Government forever.
The law required the government to negotiate removal treaties fairly, voluntarily and peacefully; it did not permit the president or anyone else to coerce Native nations into giving up their land.
However, President Jackson and his government frequently ignored the letter of the law and forced Native Americans to vacate lands they had lived on for generations.
State governments joined in his effort to drive Native Americans out of the South.
Several states passed laws limiting Native American sovereignty and rights and encroaching on their territory.
The law authorized the president to 'negotiate' with southern (including Mid-Atlantic) Native American tribes for their removal to federal territory west of the Mississippi River in exchange for the American settlement of their ancestral lands.
The Act was supported by southern and northwestern democrat populations, but was opposed by Native tribes and the Whig Party (later Republican Party).
The Indian Removal Act was controversial.
Although many Americans favored its passage, there was also a significant opposition.
Many Christian missionaries protested against it.
Most notable of which was missionary organizer Jeremiah Evarts.
In Congress, New Jersey Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen and Tennessee Congressman Davy Crockett spoke out against the legislation.
After a bitter debate in Congress, The Removal Act was passed.
On April 24, 1830, the Senate passed the Indian Removal Act by a vote of 28 to 19.
On May 26, 1830, the House of Representatives passed the Act by a vote of 101 to 97.
On May 28, 1830, the Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson.
The Indian Removal Act agreed to divide the United States territory west of the Mississippi River into districts for tribes to replace the land from which they were removed.
With the advancement of settled life and the decline of tribal nations in the American northeast, Jackson saw the demise of Indian tribal nations as inevitable.
He called the Northern critics hypocrites, given the North's history regarding tribes within their territory.
Jackson stated that:
"progress requires moving forward.
Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country and philanthropy has long been busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth...
But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another...
In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated or has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes...
Philanthropy could not wish to see this continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our forefathers.
What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?"
According to historian H. W. Brands, Jackson sincerely believed that his population transfer was a "wise and humane policy" that would save the Indians from "utter annihilation".
Jackson portrayed the removal as a generous act of mercy.
With the Act in place, Jackson and his followers were free to persuade, bribe, and threaten tribes into signing removal treaties and leaving the Southeast.
The Removal Act was strongly supported in the South, especially in Georgia, that was involved in a jurisdictional dispute with the Cherokee.
President Jackson hoped that removal would resolve the Georgia crisis.
The Cherokee Nation resisted, however, challenging in court the Georgia laws that restricted their freedoms on tribal lands.
1831-1832 - Georgia Court Cases
In his 1831 ruling on Cherokee Nation v. the State of Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that “the Indian territory is admitted to compose a part of the United States,” and affirmed that the tribes were “domestic dependent nations” and “their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.”
However, the following year the Supreme Court reversed itself and ruled that Indian tribes were indeed sovereign and immune from Georgia laws.
Again in 1832, during the case Worcester v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court objected to these practices and affirmed that native nations were sovereign nations “in which the laws of Georgia [and other states] can have no force.”
Even so, the maltreatment continued.
President Jackson nonetheless refused to heed the Court's decision.
He obtained the signature of a Cherokee chief agreeing to relocation in the Treaty of New Echota, which Congress ratified against the protests of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay in 1835.
The Cherokee signing party represented only a faction of the Cherokee, and the majority followed Principal Chief John Ross in a desperate attempt to hold onto their land.
In response, Jackson ordered military action in 1838.
Under the guns of federal troops and Georgia state militia, the Cherokee tribe made their trek to the dry plains across the Mississippi.
The best evidence indicates that between three and four thousand out of the fifteen to sixteen thousand Cherokees died en route from the brutal conditions of the "Trail of Tears."
By the end of his presidency, he had signed into law almost seventy removal treaties, the result of which was to move nearly 50,000 eastern Indians to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River and open millions of acres of rich land east of the Mississippi to American settlers.
Despite the vastness of the proposed Indian Territory, the government intended that the Indians’ destination would later be reduced to a more confined area.
By the end of the decade, very few natives remained anywhere in the southeastern United States.
Besides the Five Civilized Tribes, additional tribes affected included: the Wyandot, the Kickapoo, the Potowatomi, the Shawnee, and the Lenape.
1835 - Native Revolt
and The Second Seminole War
The Indian Removal Act was strongly enforced under Jackson's administration and that of his successor, Martin Van Buren, which extended until 1841.
Most tribes began signing the treaties and moving West.
The Cherokee people were divided.
Some wanted to stay and fight, while others thought it was more pragmatic to agree to leave in exchange for money and other concessions.
In 1835, a few self-appointed representatives of the Cherokee nation negotiated the Treaty of New Echota, which traded all Cherokee land east of the Mississippi for $5 million, relocation assistance and compensation for lost property.
To the federal government, the treaty was a done deal, but many of the Cherokee felt betrayed; after all, the negotiators did not represent the tribal government or anyone else.
By 1838, only about 2,000 Cherokees had left their Georgia homeland for Indian Territory.
President Martin Van Buren sent General Winfield Scott and 7,000 soldiers to expedite the removal process.
Scott and his troops forced the Cherokee into stockades at bayonet point while his men looted their homes and belongings.
Then, they marched the Indians more than 1,200 miles to Indian Territory.
Whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera and starvation were epidemic along the way, and historians estimate that more than 5,000 Cherokee died as a result of the journey.
In 1836, the federal government drove the Creeks from their land for the last time: 3,500 of the 15,000 Creeks who set out for Oklahoma did not survive the trip.
The Seminoles and other tribes did not leave peacefully, as they resisted the removal, along with fugitive slaves.
This led to the Second Seminole War, which lasted from 1835 to 1842 and resulted in the government allowing them to remain in the central and south Florida swamplands.
Around 3,000 were removed in the war and only a small number remained.
By 1840, tens of thousands of Native Americans had been driven off of their land in the southeastern states and forced to move across the Mississippi to Indian Territory.
The federal government promised that their new land would remain unmolested forever, but as the line of American settlement pushed westward, “Indian Country” shrank and shrank.
In 1907, Oklahoma became a state and Indian Territory was gone for good.
The Trail of Tears is over 5,043 miles long and covers nine states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee.
[Contributors: Jason Brown]
Next Article: 1830s-1870s - The Swamp Fox of Okahumpka and Bugg Spring