Indian Removal Dbq

When America looks back on the years of Andrew Jacksons presidency, they may think of many things about his tenure as the leader of our nation. They may think of his ample use of the veto power or perhaps they remember him as “the people’s president.” However, the thing all modern Americans should remember and attribute to him is the signing of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. This act would set the stage for, and be one of the direct causes of, one of the great atrocities in American history.
The Indian Removal Act gave power to President Jackson to remove Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River from their home lands and resettle them1 in what is present day Oklahoma.
These “treaties” focused in particular on removing the Cherokee,

Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes from their land to make room for white settlers in the state of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. By the end of his presidency Jackson was responsible for the relocation of up to 50,000 Native Americans across more than 25 million acres of land.2
As one might suspect, the Native Americans were not eager to give up their lands and move. However, the government forced them from their lands by using the Indian Removal Act to coerce many Native America’s to sign these relocation treaties.
Those who did relocate, like the Choctaw people, found the government lacking in

keeping their promises of providing relocation assistance.

This failure caused the death of many Choctaw people, who died of malnutrition, exposure or disease while being forced to travel with insufficient supplies.
Some peoples, like the Seminole, resisted the relocation and tried to defend their land. When the majority of the Seminole nation resisted it started a conflict that would be known as the Second Seminole War. This war would last from 1835 to 1842 and ultimately ended with a large portion of Seminole people being relocated.
The Cherokee Nation had been an earlier adopter of the new American culture. They learned English, many had converted to Christianity, and individuals owned slaves like the majority of the white male land-owners. Perhaps it is because of their assimilation to the new world culture that they tried to resist in a different way.
The Cherokee Nation sued the U.S. Government and two cases were brought before the Supreme Court. The first case, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, claimed that they should be treated as an independent foreign nation. The second case, Worcester v. Georgia, fought for the right of non-natives to live on land held by Native Americans. In both of these cases the Supreme Court made it clear that it did not see the Cherokee Nation as its own independent

nation.3
Despite the rulings of the Supreme Court, many Native Americans did not leave their land. Seeing the land as now rightfully theirs, the U.S. military was called in to begin to forcibly remove the native peoples and relocate them to their new lands.
These forced migrations mostly happened in the winter months. Subjected to the elements, exhausted and lacking supplies it is estimated that up to 4,000 people died from the

Cherokee Nation alone.
One of the main reasons that these relocations were so deadly was because the U.S. Government had been unprepared logistically to handle the relocation, which drove roughly 15,000 Cherokee across the 1,200 miles between their homeland and their new territory. The other nations faced similar issues.
These series of forced marches spanned the 1830s and would become known as the “Trail of Tears” due to the suffering and death inflicted upon the Native Americans as they were evicted from their homelands and forcibly relocated further west.