Indian Removal (United States)
1828 CE to 1842 CE
Indian Removal is a nineteenth century policy of the government of the United States that seeks to relocate Native American tribes living east of the Mississippi River to lands west of the river.
The reasoning behind the removal of Native Americans is Americans' hunger for land (stemming from Andrew Jackson’s talk of “agriculture, manufacture, and civilization”), though not all Americans support the policy as many poor white frontiersmen are neighbors and often friends to the Native Americans.
Principally, it is the result of Americans who envision a cultivated and organized nation of prospering cities and productive communities which fueled the forces of removalThe growth of populations, cities, transportation systems, and commerce in the decades following the American Revolution has created demand for agricultural development.
President Jackson and his followers, recognizing the Native Americans are in their way, set out to civilly and gently move them out of the way.
This results in numerous treaties in which lands are purchased from Native Americans.
Eventually, the U.S. government begins encouraging Native American tribes to sell their land by offering them land in the West, outside the boundaries of the then-existing U.S. states, where the tribes can resettle.his process rapidly increases with the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which provides funds for President Andrew Jackson to conduct land-exchange treaties.
An estimated 100,000 American Native Americans eventually relocate in the West as a result of this policy, most of them emigrating during the 1830s, settling in what was known as the, "Indian territory" or the present state of Oklahoma.
Those native Americans who choose to produce and prosper are, of course, free to purchase as much of the land as they wish.However, the Removal Act does not directly force Native Americans from their land.
Many Native Americans do not have the food or means of transportation to make a journey west of the Mississippi, so the Removal Act is a way to enable Native Americans to move west.
According to the federal laws that are put in place to oversee the expedition, the government is to provide food and transportation for the Native Americans, and if they stay, then they will no longer be protected or given funds.To most Native Americans, the problems with leaving their land are more than just lack of resources.
Native Americans’ land is their heritage and their history.
The Native Americans’ way of life is already greatly disrupted by the white society, with its formal government, ideas of private property ownership, and their notions that a man's mind is the source of his power and his productivity its expression.
What little the Native Americans can retain of their past, and the very meaning of their lives is now being taken away.
The Jackson administration puts great pressure on tribal leaders to sign removal treaties.
This pressure, plus the added shame of seeing themselves reduced to obstacles for men of great achievement, creates bitter divisions within Native American nations, as different tribal leaders advocate different responses to the question of removal.
Sometimes, U.S. government officials ignore tribal leaders who resist signing removal treaties and deal with those who favor removal.
The Treaty of New Echota, for example, is signed by a faction of prominent Cherokee leaders, but not by the elected tribal leadership.
The terms of the treaty are enforced by President Martin Van Buren, which results in the deaths of an estimated 4,000 Cherokees (mostly from disease) on the Trail of Tears.Regrettably, the mass exodus of Native Americans are unable to provide themselves with proper provisions of food and transportation, and are reduced to limping off the land which they once proudly occupied.
The Choctaw tribe also suffers greatly from disease during removal, and are unable to keep themselves clean and fed enough to prevent the decimation of their numbers due to these illnesses.
The Choctaws are very much against removal, but their fifty delegates ware easily bribed with money and land to sign the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, which cedes their land east of the Mississippi to the United States.
The army that leads the thirteen thousand Choctaws on their journey is disorganized, and because of their ineptitude, but through no fault of the Native Americans, their food quickly runs out and their children begin to starve.
Many die of pneumonia in the winter, and of cholera in the summer.
The seven thousand Choctaws left behind see the conditions of the trek and refuse to go, choosing to accept the subjugation that has become their nature, over the certain death of vacating, while left to their own devices.
Some groups, however, go to war to resist the implementation of removal treaties.
This results in two short wars (the Black Hawk War of 1832 and the Second Creek War of 1836), as well as the long and costly Second Seminole War (1835–1842).
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They surrender the Little Platte territory in Missouri in 1836.
Other Missouri lands had been ceded in 1824.
By 1837 most are relocated to a reservation along the Kansas-Nebraska border, led by their chief Chief Mahaska ("White Cloud").
They settle in a strip of land in Kansas, south of the Big Nemaha River, along with the Sauk and the Fox, tribes with which they have long had friendly relations, though speaking unrelated Algonquian languages.
Its goal is primarily to remove Native Americans, including the "Five Civilized Tribes", from the American Southeast; they occupy land that settlers want.
Jacksonian Democrats demand the forcible removal of native populations who refuse to acknowledge state laws to reservations in the West; Whigs and religious leaders oppose the move as inhumane.
Thousands of deaths result from the relocations, as seen in the Cherokee Trail of Tears.
The Trail of Tears results in approximately two thousand to eight thousand of the sixteen thousand five hundred and forty-three relocated Cherokee perish along the way.
Many of the Seminole Indians in Florida refuse to move west; they fight the Army for years in the Seminole Wars.
The United States is occupied during this era with such internal conflicts as the Black Hawk War (1832), the forced removal of the Cherokee tribe to Indian Territory, and the long and costly second Seminole War (1835-42), while a border dispute with Canada flares up as the Indian Stream ”War”.
By 1825, more than thirty-six percent of all the enslaved people in the New World were in the southern United States.
Although slavery had been a divisive issue in the United States for decades, never before had sectional antagonism been so overt and threatening as it was in the Missouri crisis, but compromise measures appear to have settled the slavery-extension issue.
Low-level sectional conflict arises again, however, in response to the so-called Tariff of Abominations (1828).
The institution of slavery remains the nonpareil reform issue in the United States, however, and fuels such conflicts in Texas as the Fredonian Rebellion (1826-27) and the Texan War of Independence (1836).
In 1831 occurs the only effective, sustained slave rebellion in U.S. history, led by an enslaved African-American named Nat Turner (widely popularized by William Styron in his 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner).
In the aftermath of the terror, a new wave of unrest spreads through the South, accompanied by corresponding fear among slaveholders and passage of more repressive legislation directed against both slaves and free blacks.
These measures are aimed particularly at restricting the education of blacks, their freedom of movement and assembly, and the circulation of inflammatory printed material.
Increased vigilance on the part of Southern authorities prevents the success of such bizarre episodes as Murrel's Uprising (1835).
The national financial panic of 1837 creates even greater unrest among U.S. farmers and workers, setting the stage for a new round of rebellion.
European Americans have been illegally mining gold for nearly a decade near the Cherokee town of Sixes, but Frank Logan “discovers” gold on Cherokee-controlled lands in North Georgia’s Habersham County in 1828.
At least two mines are constructed that year.
The Georgia legislature, almost immediately after the “discovery,” begins plotting the removal of the Cherokee.
Jefferson Davis, the future and sole president of the Confederate States of America, graduates West Point in 1828.
The Mississippi native is commissioned as a second lieutenant with the 1st Infantry Regiment, and is stationed at Fort Crawford, Wisconsin.
As the flood-prone site of the fort is deemed no longer inhabitable, the army decides to build a new fort on higher ground.
Major Stephen W. Kearny, commanding officer at this time, surveys the area and chooses a site for the new fort upon a hill near the Mississippi River's eastern bank.
The nonnative population of Illinois has increased rapidly following the War of 1812, exceeding fifty thousand in 1820; a development that has sharpened previous disputes about land ownership, especially in the lead-mining region north of the Rock River, an area claimed by the close allies of the Sauk, the Fox.
In 1828, the U.S. government liaison, Thomas Forsyth, informs the tribes that they should begin vacating their settlements east of the Mississippi.
Sauk warrior and leader Black Hawk (or Black Sparrow Hawk: Makataimeshekiakiak), finally forced from Sauk and Fox tribal lands in Illinois, tries gamely but without success to enlist neighboring Kickapoo, Potawatami and Winnebago tribes in an anti-American coalition.
Sam Houston, governor of Tennessee, plans to stand for reelection in 1828 but resigns after marrying eighteen-year-old Eliza Allen.
The marriage, which had been forced by Allen's father, Colonel John Allen, never blossoms into a relationship and the two separate almost immediately, for unexplained reasons, though the 35-year-old Houston reportedly had charged his wife with infidelity.
The influential Allen family pressures Houston to resign from office.
Houston abandons his office and wife to live with his Cherokee friends in the Indian Territory.
John Ross, also called Coowescoowe, leads the Cherokees against the Creek confederacy in the War of 1812.
Ross (also known by his Cherokee name, Guwisguwi) was born in Turkeytown, Alabama, along the Coosa River, near Lookout Mountain, to Mollie McDonald, a Cherokee woman of partial Scots ancestry, and Daniel Ross, a Scots immigrant trader.
Born to a Cherokee mother, John Ross was considered born into her Bird Clan.
Ross' mother and grandmother were of mixed Scots-Cherokee ancestry.
His great-grandmother Ghigooie, a "full-blood" Cherokee, married William Shorey, a Scottish interpreter.
Their daughter Anna married John McDonald, a Scots trader.
In 1786 Anna and John's daughter Mollie McDonald married Daniel Ross, a Scots trader who had begun to live among the Cherokee during the American Revolution.
Ross spent his childhood with his parents in the area of Lookout Mountain.
He saw much of Cherokee society as he encountered the full-blood Cherokee who frequented his father's trading company.
As a child, Ross participated in Cherokee events, such as the Green Corn Festival.
The elder Ross was determined that John also receive a rigorous classical education.
After being educated at home, Ross pursued higher studies with the Reverend Gideon Blackburn, who established two schools in southeast Tennessee for Cherokee children.
Classes were in English and students were mostly of mixed race, like Ross.
The young Ross finished his education at an academy in South West Point, Tennessee.
Business activities At the age of twenty, having completed his education and with bilingual skills, Ross was appointed as US Indian Agent to the western Cherokee and sent to their territory in present-day Arkansas.
During the War of 1812, he served as an adjutant in a Cherokee regiment.
He took part in fighting under General Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend against the British-allied Upper Creek warriors, known as the Red Sticks.
Ross began a series of business ventures.
He derived the majority of his wealth from cultivating one hundred and seventy acres (0.69 square kilometers) tobacco in Tennessee worked by twenty slaves.
In 1816 he founded Ross's Landing (now Chattanooga, Tennessee), served by a ferry crossing.
In addition, Ross established a trading firm and warehouse.
In total, he earned upwards of one thousand dollars a year (thirteen thousand seven hundred in today's terms).
After Ross and the Cherokee are removed to Oklahoma, European-American settlers will change the name of Ross's Landing to Chattanooga.