Cherokee Removal of 1838-39
Cherokee Indians had been living in the southeastern states for centuries when they came into contact with Europeans led by the explorer, Hernando de Soto in 1540 who took the Indians as slaves (Cordes 132). European diseases spread through the villages. Europeans settled in and around Indian territory bringing along their customs and assumptions of superiority over all non-whites, especially Native Americans. As the Europeans settled on Indian Territory, the natives adopted some of the Europeans customs such as diet, dress and use of alcohol even though doing so risked the loss of Indian cultures.In the mid 1700�s the United States was formed and more white settlers came to push the Indians of their land. These white men and women had come to the United States to find a better life for themselves. The feeling of superiority among the settlers led them to believe that they had a right to Indian Territory, even though the Indians had been living there for years before the white men. The Indian�s did not want to give up their land and many tribes were prepared to fight to keep their homelands.
With the election of Andrew Jackson as President of the United States in 1828, the issue of Indian removal came to the forefront. More and more settlers were living in the United States and both the people and the administration felt that Indian Territory was essential for the country to expand. The Indian Territory would also serve as a safety zone between the lands held by the United States in the east and those held by the English and Spanish in the west. In order to avoid future conflicts, the Indians would be removed to this area of land. President Jackson did not believe at the time that the United States would be interested in these lands, past the Mississippi, because they were mostly desert and the US relied on agriculture.
In 1803, when the US made the Louisiana Purchase from the French, a national policy of removing the Indians went into effect (Cordes 132). The whites wanted something done about the Indians because they felt the Indians could not be civilized. Efforts to convert the Indians to Christianity were not as successful as the whites had hoped and the high failure of switching the Indians to an agricultural system encouraged the white settlers to believe that there was no hope in civilizing the Indians. The only thing left to do was to remove the Indians past the Mississippi so that the whites did not have to live with these �savages�.
The discovery of gold in 1829 on Cherokee land in Georgia only hastened the efforts of the white settlers to remove the Cherokees from their homelands. The Cherokee presence was preventing the whites from finding the gold that they believed rightly belonged to them because they were the superior race. In this same year Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. This Act allowed the administration to legally remove the Indians. The US wasted no time and in 1833 held a lottery for Cherokee lands. Any white man who had four dollars could bid for Cherokee land.The Cherokees were not quiet throughout this period of tension between the whites and their own Indian tribe. In 1831 they filed suit in the US Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Marshall in his decision in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia ruled that the Cherokee nation was a dependant of Georgia and that they had to abide by state laws. In the case Worcester v. Georgia Chief Justice Marshall decided that the Cherokees were an independent nation. President Jackson now needed a formal treaty with the Cherokee�s to take any of their land. After the decision, Jackson is said to have proclaimed that �John Marshall has rendered his decision, now let him enforce it� (Cordes 134). Jackson still intended on removing the Cherokees regardless of what the Supreme Court said.
Most Americans wanted the Cherokees removed because they considered this tribe to be just as uncivilized as other Indian tribes. However, some Americans did not agree and claimed that the Cherokees were civilized enough to keep their homelands. This group of Americans that supported the Cherokees realized that the Cherokees had their own language, newspaper and agricultural system. The Cherokees were not nomadic people contrary to popular thought among white settlers. Moving to the west would require the Cherokees to start from scratch and lose all of the hard work they had done in previous years. They had made a permanent home in the southeast and were being threatened with removal to unknown, uninhabited lands.
There were divisions between the Cherokees as well as the white settlers on the prospect of Indian removal. Major John Ridge led a group of Cherokees that favored removal to the west (McLoughlin 5). John Ross led the majority group that opposed removal. Ross, who was one-eighth part Cherokee, vehemently opposed a treaty that would remove the Cherokees from their homes (Cordes 135).
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