![]() ![]() “The instrument in question is not the act of our nation,” wrote the nation’s principal chief, John Ross, in a letter to the U.S. Most Cherokee people considered the Treaty of New Echota fraudulent, and the Cherokee National Council voted in 1836 to reject it. Importantly, the negotiators did not represent the tribal government or anyone else. To the federal government, the treaty (signed in New Echota, Georgia) was a done deal, but a majority of the Cherokee felt betrayed. 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 - roughly 7 million acres - for $5 million, relocation assistance and compensation for lost property. Others thought it was more pragmatic to agree to leave in exchange for money and other concessions. The Cherokee people were divided: What was the best way to handle the government’s determination to get its hands on their territory? Some wanted to stay and fight. 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. It was, one Choctaw leader told an Alabama newspaper, a “trail of tears and death.” They made the journey 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. Army, the Choctaw became the first nation to be expelled from its land altogether. In the winter of 1831, under threat of invasion by the U.S. 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. 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 ancestral lands. This “Indian territory” was located in present-day Oklahoma. ![]() In 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act, 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, in the “Indian colonization zone” that the United States had acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Indian Removal ActĪndrew Jackson had long been an advocate of what he called “Indian removal.” As an Army general, he had spent years leading brutal 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.Īs president, he continued this crusade. As President Andrew Jackson noted in 1832, if no one intended to enforce the Supreme Court’s rulings (which he certainly did not), then the decisions would “…still born.” Southern states were determined to take ownership of Indian lands and would go to great lengths to secure this territory. Supreme Court objected to these practices and affirmed that native nations were sovereign nations “in which the laws of Georgia can have no force.”Įven so, the maltreatment continued. Several states passed laws limiting Native American sovereignty and rights and encroaching on their territory. State governments joined in this effort to drive Native Americans out of the South. They stole livestock burned and looted houses and towns committed mass murder and squatted on land that did not belong to them. Many of these whites yearned to make their fortunes by growing cotton, and often resorted to violent means to take land from their Indigenous neighbors. In Illinois and Wisconsin, for example, the bloody Black Hawk War in 1832 opened to white settlement millions of acres of land that had belonged to the Sauk, Fox and other native nations.īut the Native Americans’ land, located in parts of Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Florida and Tennessee, was valuable, and it grew to be more coveted as white settlers flooded the region. In the southeastern United States, many Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek and Cherokee people embraced these customs and became known as the “Five Civilized Tribes.”ĭid you know? Indian removal took place in the Northern states as well. ![]()
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