Indian Removal

Since Jefferson’s time, American leaders had imagined moving eastern Native nations west of the Mississippi, both to open their land to settlers and to create a buffer zone. Between 1816 and 1840, nations living between the original states and the Mississippi signed more than forty treaties ceding land. Many Southern nations, including the Cherokee, had adopted farming, written laws, and in the Cherokee case a constitution and a written language created by Sequoyah — yet they faced relentless demands for their land, sharpened in Georgia by the discovery of gold on Cherokee land in 1830.

White settlers and Southern state governments wanted Native land for cotton and gold. President Andrew Jackson, a veteran of wars against the Creeks and Seminoles, announced a policy of relocation in his first inaugural address in 1829 and argued that removal would “incalculably strengthen the southwestern frontier” and let Alabama and Mississippi “advance rapidly in population, wealth, and power.” Georgia passed laws extending its authority over Cherokee land, forbidding the Cherokee to conduct their own government or testify in court against whites, and distributing Cherokee land by lottery.

Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, and Jackson signed it on May 28, 1830. It authorized the president to negotiate treaties exchanging land in the East for land in the West. In practice, the government coerced treaties — sometimes with small factions lacking authority to sign — and used the army against those who resisted. Offered aid on one hand and the threat of subjugation on the other, the Chickasaws and Choctaws submitted, the Creeks under duress; an estimated 3,500 Creeks died in Alabama and on their westward journey, some of them transported in chains; the Seminoles resisted in Florida through the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) and the Third (1855–1858); Black Hawk’s band of Sauk and Fox was crushed in 1832; and the Cherokee, after winning a Supreme Court case in Worcester v. Georgia that the federal government refused to enforce, were rounded up by soldiers in 1838 and marched west on the Trail of Tears.

By the end of Jackson’s presidency, his administration had negotiated almost 70 removal treaties, relocating nearly 50,000 eastern Indians to Indian Territory and opening 25 million acres to white settlement — largely in the South, where it fueled the expansion of cotton and slavery. Overall, about 100,000 people were moved between 1830 and 1850. Deaths from disease, exposure, hunger, and violence numbered in the thousands.

Removal devastated Native societies, severed peoples from ancestral lands and burial grounds, and planted divisions within nations that lasted for generations. In Indian Territory the removed nations rebuilt governments, schools, and communities — only to face new waves of dispossession after the Civil War, the Dawes Act, and Oklahoma statehood. The policy is now widely understood as one of the gravest injustices in American history.