1830 Indian Removal Act
President Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) was the 7th United States president. He served two terms (1829-1837). He had been a lawyer, US Army General, congressman, and senator. He was an acclaimed Indian fighter and was one of eight US presidents who owned slaves while in office. He was a Southerner by birth and lived in Tennessee at his well-known Hermitage.
For many years Georgia had unsuccessfully sought from the federal government the right to force the so-called five civilized Indian tribes to sell their lands and move west of the Mississippi River to open up the land to slave-owning white cotton plantation owners. When Jackson was elected President he was the leader of the new Democratic party. As a Southerner, he strongly supported states’ rights and supported Georgia’s desire to forcibly remove Indians from lands they had controlled for many centuries.
In 1830 President Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act he had strongly supported as a Southern advocate. Beginning with President Washington, presidents believed in assimilating Native Americans if they would agree to adopt Christianity and learn to speak and write the English language and adopt their American customs. The Cherokee and Choctaw were clearly moving in this direction. Native Americans also were to end non-marital sex and accept individual land and property ownership.
The Indian Removal Act obviously ignored these assimilation attempts and gave the southern states the lands of the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, Seminole, and the original Cherokee nations. Additional Native Americans to be forcibly removed included the Wyandot, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Shawnee, and the Lenape. The Removal Act was strongly opposed by missionary leaders, New Jersey Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen, and Tennessee Congressman Davy Crockett. President Jackson made the following statement:
“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?”
The stage was set for the removal of tens of thousands of Native Americans from east of the Mississippi to the west beyond the river. The long brutally forced removal of the Cherokee tribe alone caused the death of an estimated 3,000 tribal members and became infamously known as “The Trail of Tears.” It was the result of The Treaty of New Echota signed in 1835. The Seminoles did not leave peacefully and The Second Seminole War (1835-1842) ended with only a few allowed to remain in the swamplands of southern Florida. 3,000 were forcibly removed west.
Presidents Jefferson and Monroe wanted Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi. They did nothing to enforce the movement. The actual first southern forcible removal occurred in 1814 when then Major General Andrew Jackson led troops in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama against the Creek tribe. Defeating the Creeks, Jackson then forced them to sign a treaty giving up more than 20,000,000 acres of their homeland. Over the next ten years, Jackson led military victories against Native Americans leading to nine of eleven significant treaties in which more Indian lands were lost.
Well before Jackson signed his Indian Removal Act his mindset was clearly in favor of Indian Removal. Based upon Jackson’s military successes, the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw realized they were unable to defeat the American Army. The tribes attempted appeasement hoping that if they surrendered large portions of their land they could at least keep some of it. It proved to be another futile effort.
Jackson’s Indian Removal Act proved highly successful for Americans but was disastrous for Native Americans east of the Mississippi River. During his Presidency, he signed almost seventy Indian removal treaties moving an estimated 50,000 eastern Native Americans to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. There is a very long list of treaties between the United States and Native Americans that were eventually broken or summarily ignored.