Difference between revisions of "Why did Indian Removal cause the Trail of Tears"

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[[File:Trails_of_Tears_en.png|left|thumbnail|300px|left|Map showing the trails that Native Americans were forced to follow during Indian Removal]]
 
[[File:Trails_of_Tears_en.png|left|thumbnail|300px|left|Map showing the trails that Native Americans were forced to follow during Indian Removal]]
The Trail of Tears was a series of forced Indian removals by the United States government during, but the removal of the Cherokee nation from Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama is the most famous of these forced marches. While the Cherokee removal is the relocation that is most often associated with the Trail of Tears, but it was not the only one. The Seminoles (1832), the Choctaw (1830), the Chickasaw (1832), the Creek (1832), the Fox (1832), the Sauk and the Cherokee (1835) were all removed from their ancestral lands. Each of these removals resulted an appalling loss of life.   
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The Trail of Tears was a series of forced Indian removals by the United States government during, but the removal of the Cherokee nation from Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama is the most famous of these forced marches. While the Cherokee removal is the relocation that is most often associated with the Trail of Tears, but it was not the only one. The Seminoles (1832), the Choctaw (1830), the Chickasaw (1832), the Creek (1832), the Fox (1832), the Sauk and the Cherokee (1835) were all removed from their ancestral lands. Each of these removals resulted an appalling loss of life.  
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====US Treaties with Native Americans====
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The U.S. Government used treaties as one means to displace Indians from their tribal lands, a mechanism that was strengthened with the Removal Act of 1830. 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.
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As the 19th century began, land-hungry Americans poured into the backcountry of the coastal South and began moving toward and into what would later become the states of Alabama and Mississippi. Since Indian tribes living there appeared to be the main obstacle to westward expansion, white settlers petitioned the federal government to remove them. Although Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe 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. Indeed, the first major transfer of land occurred only as the result of war.
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====Native Americans faced increasing pressure from Western Expansion====
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In 1814, Major General Andrew Jackson led an expedition against the Creek Indians climaxing in the Battle of Horse Shoe Bend (in present day Alabama near the Georgia border), where Jackson’s force soundly defeated the Creeks and destroyed their military power. He then forced upon the Indians a treaty whereby they surrendered to the United States over twenty-million acres of their traditional land—about one-half of present day Alabama and one-fifth of Georgia. Over the next decade, Jackson led the way in the Indian removal campaign, helping to negotiate nine of the eleven major treaties to remove Indians.
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Under this kind of pressure, Native American tribes—specifically the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw—realized that they could not defeat the Americans in war. The appetite of the settlers for land would not abate, so the Indians adopted a strategy of appeasement. They hoped that if they gave up a good deal of their land, they could keep at least some a part of it. The Seminole tribe in Florida resisted, in the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) and the Third Seminole War (1855–1858), however, neither appeasement nor resistance worked.
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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.” When Andrew Jackson became president (1829–1837), he decided to build a systematic approach to Indian removal on the basis of these legal precedents.
  
 
====Why Remove Native Americans?====
 
====Why Remove Native Americans?====
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Native Americans also held some of the farmlands in the Southeast United States. Several of these tribes had already begun to farm these lands and earnest and make them productive. Both states and settlers wanted to seize these agricultural lands from the Native Americans. The states, such as Georgia, cared little that Native Americans had placed farms on these lands, purchased slaves, or built homes. The tribes did not recognize the states authority over their lands, because they viewed themselves as independent nations.   
 
Native Americans also held some of the farmlands in the Southeast United States. Several of these tribes had already begun to farm these lands and earnest and make them productive. Both states and settlers wanted to seize these agricultural lands from the Native Americans. The states, such as Georgia, cared little that Native Americans had placed farms on these lands, purchased slaves, or built homes. The tribes did not recognize the states authority over their lands, because they viewed themselves as independent nations.   
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To achieve his purpose, Jackson encouraged Congress to adopt the Removal Act of 1830. 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. 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.
  
 
====Andrew Jackson and The Removal Act 0f 1830====
 
====Andrew Jackson and The Removal Act 0f 1830====
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The first piece of legislation passed after Jackson took office was the 1830 Indian Removal Act. The 1830 Act was just a first step in a long process that forced Native American off their land to make way white settlers.  
 
The first piece of legislation passed after Jackson took office was the 1830 Indian Removal Act. The 1830 Act was just a first step in a long process that forced Native American off their land to make way white settlers.  
  
 
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In general terms, Jackson’s government succeeded. 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—defined as the region belonging to the United States west of the Mississippi River but excluding the states of Missouri and Iowa as well as the Territory of Arkansas—and open millions of acres of rich land east of the Mississippi to white settlers. Despite the vastness of the Indian Territory, the government intended that the Indians’ destination would be a more confined area—what later became eastern Oklahoma.
While there was some public opposition to Indian Removal, - Jackson ensured that Congress passed bills that removed Indians and gave Jackson the ability to set aside Western lands
 
Jackson believed that removal was “just and humane” because it would leave the Indians free from influence of the states
 
Jackson saw anti-removal movement as hypocritical considering the treatment of Indians in the North
 
Compared to Clay and others - Jackson was more humane regarding
 
Jackson was not a simple Indian hater, but he also did not believe that they should be assimilated like Jefferson
 
Jackson also believed that Indians were inferior and reinforced notions of racial supremacy
 
Jackson did little to compensate Indians for lost lands or homes (typically only received 10% to 20% of their value)
 
Jackson provided woefully insufficient funds to ensure a safe relocation - while Trail of Tears occurred after his administration he set the policies in motion
 
 
 
Jackson was also outraged by the claim by the Cherokees that they were a sovereign nation - unconstitutional and unrealistic
 
He believed that no new state could be created in the jurisdiction of a state
 
 
 
====Opposition to Indian Removal====
 
Triggered the creation of a reform movement -
 
Catherine Beecher (later Stowe) started a the largest petition movement at the that time.
 
“The William Penn Essays” was a anti-removal Treatise and became extremely well-known.
 
Martin Van Buren was surprised by the level of opposition.
 
Anti-removal reform movement led many activists to abolitionism.
 
  
 
====Cherokee Legal Opposition====
 
====Cherokee Legal Opposition====
In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Marshall found that the court lacked jurisdiction to hear the case because the Cherokee nation was a “domestic, dependent nation.”
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The Cherokee Nation resisted, however, challenging in court the Georgia laws that restricted their freedoms on tribal lands. 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. 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. This attempt faltered in 1838, when, under the guns of federal troops and Georgia state militia, the Cherokee tribe were forced to the dry plains across the Mississippi.  
Cherokee Nation was not sovereign authority under Article 3 of Constitution and were wards of the federal government
 
In Worcester v. Georgia, Marshall somewhat challenged his own ruling from a year before and held that Georgia laws violated Cherokee treaties, commerce clause, and sovereign authority of the Cherokee nation.
 
Georgia had created a law that required whites on Cherokee lands to register with state authorities
 
Seven missionaries were arrested for being in Cherokee lands and sentenced to 4 years hard labor
 
Marshall created a mess with his two contradictory rulings.
 
Did not require the law to be enforced
 
Best described as an effort by Marshall to avoid staining his legacy without creating a direct conflict with the Executive Branch
 
Jackson refused to accept the Worcester ruling and essentially ignored it.
 
Became moot when Marshall died and he was replaced by Jackson ally and pro-removal Roger Taney
 
Missionaries were freed after a few months
 
  
====Early Removal====
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====Cherokee Removal and the Trail of Tears====
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Cherokees had split on the issue of removal. Some members of the tribe left early and cherry-picked some of the best lands in Oklahoma while others resisted forced removal. Chief John Ross supported passive resistance, but it accomplished little. Martin Van Buren organized the removal of 18,000 Native Americans between 1838 and 1839. Anyone who resisted removal was imprisoned and then forcibly removed. Due to the lack of preparation and funding by the United States government, 4,000 Cherokees died from exposure, starvation, and disease on their way to Oklahoma. The Cherokees named this forced march "the trail on which we cried," aka the Trail of Tears.
  
Most of the southern tribes gave up and moved west.
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The Trail of Tears is one of the most devastating disasters in American history. More people died on the Trail of Tears than from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, or the 1906 San Francisco fire.
Seminoles and fugitive slaves who lived with them - resisted the move.
 
Started the Second Seminole War (1835-1842).
 
Approximately 3,000 people (evenly split between Seminoles and US troops were killed).
 
3,000 Seminoles forced to move west - a small group remained in Florida.
 
 
 
====Cherokee Removal and the Trail of Tears====
 
Cherokees split on the issue of removal.
 
Some members of the tribe left early and cherry picked some of the best lands in Oklahoma
 
Chief John Ross supported passive resistance
 
Martin Van Buren forcibly imprisoned and then removed 18,000 Cherokees
 
In 1838-39, the 18,000 Cherokees were herded west and 4,000 died on the way
 
The Federal government never adequately funded removal
 
People starved and died of disease on the way west
 
  
 
====Conclusion====
 
====Conclusion====
The Cherokees were removed in 1835 despite a Supreme Court decision, <i>Worchester v. Georgia</i>, that found that Cherokee was a sovereign nation that had rights under existing treaties. Forcibly removing the Cherokees violated these treaties. Andrew Jackson ignored the courts rulings and pushed with Indian removal. Ultimately, over 4,000 Cherokees were killed during their march west.  
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With the exception of a small number of Seminoles still resisting removal in Florida, by the 1840s, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, no Indian tribes resided in the American South. Through a combination of coerced treaties and the contravention of treaties and judicial determination, the United States Government succeeded in paving the way for the westward expansion and the incorporation of new territories as part of the United States.
In a history full of civil rights violations - Indian Removal was one of the most egregious
 
Indians were removed simply because states wanted to take over productive farming operations created by Indians, especially Georgia
 
Numbers of Indians east of the Mississippi was minimal after removal
 

Revision as of 22:54, 24 May 2019

Map showing the trails that Native Americans were forced to follow during Indian Removal

The Trail of Tears was a series of forced Indian removals by the United States government during, but the removal of the Cherokee nation from Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama is the most famous of these forced marches. While the Cherokee removal is the relocation that is most often associated with the Trail of Tears, but it was not the only one. The Seminoles (1832), the Choctaw (1830), the Chickasaw (1832), the Creek (1832), the Fox (1832), the Sauk and the Cherokee (1835) were all removed from their ancestral lands. Each of these removals resulted an appalling loss of life.

US Treaties with Native Americans

The U.S. Government used treaties as one means to displace Indians from their tribal lands, a mechanism that was strengthened with the Removal Act of 1830. 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.

As the 19th century began, land-hungry Americans poured into the backcountry of the coastal South and began moving toward and into what would later become the states of Alabama and Mississippi. Since Indian tribes living there appeared to be the main obstacle to westward expansion, white settlers petitioned the federal government to remove them. Although Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe 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. Indeed, the first major transfer of land occurred only as the result of war.

Native Americans faced increasing pressure from Western Expansion

In 1814, Major General Andrew Jackson led an expedition against the Creek Indians climaxing in the Battle of Horse Shoe Bend (in present day Alabama near the Georgia border), where Jackson’s force soundly defeated the Creeks and destroyed their military power. He then forced upon the Indians a treaty whereby they surrendered to the United States over twenty-million acres of their traditional land—about one-half of present day Alabama and one-fifth of Georgia. Over the next decade, Jackson led the way in the Indian removal campaign, helping to negotiate nine of the eleven major treaties to remove Indians.

Under this kind of pressure, Native American tribes—specifically the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw—realized that they could not defeat the Americans in war. The appetite of the settlers for land would not abate, so the Indians adopted a strategy of appeasement. They hoped that if they gave up a good deal of their land, they could keep at least some a part of it. The Seminole tribe in Florida resisted, in the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) and the Third Seminole War (1855–1858), however, neither appeasement nor resistance worked.

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.” When Andrew Jackson became president (1829–1837), he decided to build a systematic approach to Indian removal on the basis of these legal precedents.

Why Remove Native Americans?

Why was Jackson so committed to removal? Jackson fundamentally believed that Native Americans represented a serious security risk to the United States. Jackson had taken part in the United States campaign against members of the Creek nation who followed Tecumseh in 1814. Tecumseh believed that the United States represented an existential threat to not only Creek tribe, but all Native Americans in the United States. Tecumseh lead a revolt against the United States to push back the advance of American settlers. Tecumseh's revolted was defeated at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, but Jackson had already decided that Native Americans and US settlers could not live together peaceful. As a result the Tecumseh's defeat, Jackson imposed terms on the entire Creek nation that removed them from their ancestral lands.

Native Americans also held some of the farmlands in the Southeast United States. Several of these tribes had already begun to farm these lands and earnest and make them productive. Both states and settlers wanted to seize these agricultural lands from the Native Americans. The states, such as Georgia, cared little that Native Americans had placed farms on these lands, purchased slaves, or built homes. The tribes did not recognize the states authority over their lands, because they viewed themselves as independent nations.

To achieve his purpose, Jackson encouraged Congress to adopt the Removal Act of 1830. 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. 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.

Andrew Jackson and The Removal Act 0f 1830

Jackson strongly favored removing the 60,000 Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Creek and Seminole (the Civilized Tribes) from North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi. Indian Removal was one of Andrew Jackson's most important goals. It was so important that during Jackson’s first message to Congress, he asked for a bill and funds to move these tribes west of the Mississippi. Jackson's message was clear, Indians needed to permanently removed west of Louisiana.

In Jackson's 1830 message to Congress he stated:

"The consequences of a speedy removal will be important to the United States, to individual States, and to the Indians themselves. The pecuniary advantages which it promises to the Government are the least of its recommendations. It puts an end to all possible danger of collision between the authorities of the General and State Governments on account of the Indians. It will place a dense and civilized population in large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters...Rightly considered, the policy of the General Government toward the red man is not only liberal, but generous. He is unwilling to submit to the laws of the States and mingle with their population. To save him from this alternative, or perhaps utter annihilation, the General Government kindly offers him a new home, and proposes to pay the whole expense of his removal and settlement."

The first piece of legislation passed after Jackson took office was the 1830 Indian Removal Act. The 1830 Act was just a first step in a long process that forced Native American off their land to make way white settlers.

In general terms, Jackson’s government succeeded. 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—defined as the region belonging to the United States west of the Mississippi River but excluding the states of Missouri and Iowa as well as the Territory of Arkansas—and open millions of acres of rich land east of the Mississippi to white settlers. Despite the vastness of the Indian Territory, the government intended that the Indians’ destination would be a more confined area—what later became eastern Oklahoma.

Cherokee Legal Opposition

The Cherokee Nation resisted, however, challenging in court the Georgia laws that restricted their freedoms on tribal lands. 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. 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. This attempt faltered in 1838, when, under the guns of federal troops and Georgia state militia, the Cherokee tribe were forced to the dry plains across the Mississippi.

Cherokee Removal and the Trail of Tears

Cherokees had split on the issue of removal. Some members of the tribe left early and cherry-picked some of the best lands in Oklahoma while others resisted forced removal. Chief John Ross supported passive resistance, but it accomplished little. Martin Van Buren organized the removal of 18,000 Native Americans between 1838 and 1839. Anyone who resisted removal was imprisoned and then forcibly removed. Due to the lack of preparation and funding by the United States government, 4,000 Cherokees died from exposure, starvation, and disease on their way to Oklahoma. The Cherokees named this forced march "the trail on which we cried," aka the Trail of Tears.

The Trail of Tears is one of the most devastating disasters in American history. More people died on the Trail of Tears than from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, or the 1906 San Francisco fire.

Conclusion

With the exception of a small number of Seminoles still resisting removal in Florida, by the 1840s, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, no Indian tribes resided in the American South. Through a combination of coerced treaties and the contravention of treaties and judicial determination, the United States Government succeeded in paving the way for the westward expansion and the incorporation of new territories as part of the United States.