Indian Reblaion Agains Indian Removal Act

May 18, 2022 Post a Comment

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–country their ancestors had occupied and cultivated for generations. Past the end of the decade, very few natives remained anywhere in the southeastern Us. Working on behalf of white settlers who wanted to grow cotton fiber on the Indians' land, the federal government forced them to leave their homelands and walk hundreds of miles to a especially designated "Indian territory" across the Mississippi River. This difficult and sometimes mortiferous journey is known as the Trail of Tears.

The 'Indian Trouble'

White Americans, particularly those who lived on the western frontier, often feared and resented the Native Americans they encountered: To them, American Indians seemed to exist an unfamiliar, alien people who occupied country that white settlers wanted (and believed they deserved). Some officials in the early years of the American commonwealth, such every bit President George Washington, believed that the best mode to solve this "Indian problem" was just to "acculturate" the Native Americans. The goal of this civilization campaign was to brand Native Americans as much like white Americans as possible by encouraging them convert to Christianity, learn to speak and read English language and adopt European-way economic practices such as the private ownership of land and other property (including, in some instances in the South, African slaves). In the southeastern United States, many Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek and Cherokee people embraced these customs and became known as the "V Civilized Tribes."

Only their land, located in parts of Georgia, Alabama, Northward Carolina, Florida and Tennessee, was valuable, and it grew to exist more coveted as white settlers flooded the region. Many of these whites yearned to make their fortunes by growing cotton fiber, and often resorted to fierce 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.

State governments joined in this effort to bulldoze Native Americans out of the Due south. Several states passed laws limiting Native American sovereignty and rights and encroaching on their territory. In Worcester five. Georgia (1832), 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 and so, the maltreatment continued. As President Andrew Jackson noted in 1832, if no one intended to enforce the Supreme Courtroom'due south rulings (which he certainly did not), and then the decisions would "[autumn]…yet born." Southern states were determined to take ownership of Indian lands and would become to bully lengths to secure this territory.

Indian Removal

Andrew Jackson had long been an advocate of what he called "Indian removal." As an Army general, he had spent years leading cruel campaigns against the Creeks in Georgia and Alabama and the Seminoles in Florida–campaigns that resulted in the transfer of hundreds of thousands of acres of land from Indian nations to white farmers. Every bit president, he connected this cause. In 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act, which gave the federal government the power to exchange Native-held land in the cotton wool kingdom eastward of the Mississippi for land to the w, in the "Indian colonization zone" that the United States had acquired every bit office of the Louisiana Buy. (This "Indian territory" was located in present-mean solar day Oklahoma.)

The police required the government to negotiate removal treaties adequately, voluntarily and peacefully: It did not permit the president or anyone else to coerce Native nations into giving upwards their state. Nevertheless, President Jackson and his authorities frequently ignored the letter of the alphabet of the law and forced Native Americans to vacate lands they had lived on for generations. In the wintertime of 1831, under threat of invasion by the U.South. Regular army, the Choctaw became the first nation to be expelled from its country altogether. They fabricated the journeying to Indian Territory on foot (some "bound in chains and marched double file," one historian writes) and without any food, supplies or other help from the government. Thousands of people died along the fashion. Information technology was, 1 Choctaw leader told an Alabama newspaper, a "trail of tears and death."

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The Trail of Tears

The Indian-removal process connected. In 1836, the federal regime drove the Creeks from their state for the last time: 3,500 of the 15,000 Creeks who set out for Oklahoma did not survive the trip.

The Cherokee people were divided: What was the all-time way to handle the government'southward determination to become its hands on their territory? Some wanted to stay and fight. Others thought it was more pragmatic to agree to leave in commutation 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 eastward of the Mississippi for $5 million, relocation assistance and bounty for lost holding. To the federal government, the treaty was a done bargain, but many of the Cherokee felt betrayed; later all, the negotiators did not stand for the tribal government or anyone else. "The instrument in question is not the act of our nation," wrote the nation'south principal principal, John Ross, in a alphabetic character to the U.South. Senate protesting the treaty. "We are non parties to its covenants; information technology has non received the sanction of our people." Nearly xvi,000 Cherokees signed Ross'due south petition, but Congress approved the treaty anyway.

By 1838, only about 2,000 Cherokees had left their Georgia homeland for Indian Territory. President Martin Van Buren sent General Winfield Scott and vii,000 soldiers to expedite the removal procedure. 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 i,200 miles to Indian Territory. Whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera and starvation were epidemic forth the fashion, and historians estimate that more than five,000 Cherokee died as a result of the journey.

By 1840, tens of thousands of Native Americans had been driven off of their land in the southeastern states and forced to motion across the Mississippi to Indian Territory. The federal government promised that their new country would remain unmolested forever, but every bit the line of white settlement pushed westward, "Indian Country" shrank and shrank. In 1907, Oklahoma became a state and Indian Territory was gone for good.

Can Yous Walk The Trail of Tears?

The Trail of Tears is over 5,043 miles long and covers nine states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Northward Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Today, the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail is run by the National Park Service and portions of it are accessible on foot, by horse, past bicycle or by car.