Indian removal
The Indian removal was the United States government's policy of ethnic cleansing through the forced displacement of self-governing tribes of American Indians from their ancestral homelands in the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi Riverspecifically, to a designated Indian Territory, which many scholars have labeled a genocide. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, the key law which authorized the removal of Native tribes, was signed into law by United States president Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830. Although Jackson took a hard line on Indian removal, the law was primarily enforced during the Martin Van Buren administration, 1837 to 1841. After the enactment of the Act, approximately 60,000 members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands, with thousands dying during the Trail of Tears.
Indian removal, a popular policy among incoming settlers, was a consequence of actions first by the European colonists and then later on by the American settlers in the nation during the thirteen colonies and then after the revolution, in the United States of America also until the mid-20th century.
The origins of the policy date back to the administration of James Monroe, but it addressed conflicts which had occurred between the American settlers and Indigenous tribes since the 17th century and were escalating into the early 19th century. Historical views of Indian removal have been reevaluated since that time. Widespread contemporary acceptance of the policy, due in part to the popular embrace of the concept of manifest destiny, has given way to a more somber perspective. Historians have often described the removal of American Indians as paternalism, ethnic cleansing, or genocide.
Background
American leaders in the Revolutionary and early US eras debated about whether Native Americans should be treated as individuals or as nations.Declaration of Independence
In the indictment section of the Declaration of Independence, the Indigenous inhabitants of the United States are referred to as "merciless Indian Savages", reflecting a commonly held view at the time by the colonists in the United States.Benjamin Franklin
In a draft "Proposed Articles of Confederation" presented to the Continental Congress on May 10, 1775, Benjamin Franklin called for a "perpetual Alliance" with the Indians in the nation about to be born, particularly with the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy:Early congressional acts
The Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, calling for the protection of Native American "property, rights, and liberty"; the US Constitution of 1787 made Congress responsible for regulating commerce with the Indian tribes. In 1790, the new US Congress passed the Indian Nonintercourse Act to protect and codify the land rights of recognized tribes.George Washington
President George Washington, in his 1790 address to the Seneca Nation which called the pre-Constitutional Indian land-sale difficulties "evils", said that the case was now altered and pledged to uphold Native American "just rights". In March and April 1792, Washington met with 50 tribal chiefs in Philadelphia—including the Iroquois—to discuss strengthening the friendship between them and the United States. Later that year, in his fourth annual message to Congress, Washington stressed the need to build peace, trust, and commerce with Native Americans:In his seventh annual message to Congress in 1795, Washington intimated that if the US government wanted peace with the Indians it must behave peacefully; if the US wanted raids by Indians to stop, raids by American "frontier inhabitants" must also stop.
Thomas Jefferson
In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson defended Native American culture and marveled at how the tribes of Virginia "never submitted themselves to any laws, any coercive power, any shadow of government" due to their "moral sense of right and wrong". He wrote to the Marquis de Chastellux later that year, "I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman". Jefferson's desire, as interpreted by Francis Paul Prucha, was for Native Americans to intermix with European Americans and become one people. To achieve that end as president, Jefferson offered US citizenship to some Indian nations and proposed offering them credit to facilitate trade.On 27 February 1803, Jefferson wrote in a letter to William Henry Harrison:
In this way our settlements will gradually circumbscribe & approach the Indians, & they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the US. or remove beyond the Missisipi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves. But in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength & their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, & that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only.
Jeffersonian policy
As president, Thomas Jefferson developed a far-reaching Indian policy with two primary goals. He wanted to assure that the Native nations were tightly bound to the new United States, as he considered the security of the nation to be paramount. He also wanted to "civilize" them into adopting an agricultural, rather than a hunter-gatherer, lifestyle. These goals would be achieved through treaties and the development of trade.Jefferson initially promoted an American policy which encouraged Native Americans to become assimilated, or "civilized". He made sustained efforts to win the friendship and cooperation of many Native American tribes as president, repeatedly articulating his desire for a united nation of whites and Indians as in his November 3, 1802, letter to Seneca spiritual leader Handsome Lake:
When a delegation from the Cherokee Nation's Upper Towns lobbied Jefferson for the full and equal citizenship promised to Indians living in American territory by George Washington, his response indicated that he was willing to grant citizenship to those Indian nations who sought it. In his eighth annual message to Congress on November 8, 1808, he presented a vision of white and Indian unity:
As some of Jefferson's other writings illustrate, however, he was ambivalent about Indian assimilation and used the words "exterminate" and "extirpate" about tribes who resisted American expansion and were willing to fight for their lands. Jefferson intended to change Indian lifestyles from hunting and gathering to farming, largely through "the decrease of game rendering their subsistence by hunting insufficient". He expected the change to agriculture to make them dependent on white Americans for goods, and more likely to surrender their land or allow themselves to be moved west of the Mississippi River. In an 1803 letter to William Henry Harrison, Jefferson wrote:
In that letter, Jefferson spoke about protecting the Indians from injustices perpetrated by settlers:
According to the treaty of February 27, 1819, the US government would offer citizenship and of land per family to Cherokees who lived east of the Mississippi. Native American land was sometimes purchased, by treaty or under duress. The idea of land exchange, that Native Americans would give up their land east of the Mississippi in exchange for a similar amount of territory west of the river, was first proposed by Jefferson in 1803 and first incorporated into treaties in 1817. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 included this concept.
John C. Calhoun's plan
Under President James Monroe, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun devised the first plans for Indian removal. Monroe approved Calhoun's plans by late 1824 and, in a special message to the Senate on January 27, 1825, requested the creation of the Arkansaw and Indian Territories; the Indians east of the Mississippi would voluntarily exchange their lands for lands west of the river. The Senate accepted Monroe's request, and asked Calhoun to draft a bill which was killed in the House of Representatives by the Georgia delegation. President John Quincy Adams assumed the Calhoun–Monroe policy, and was determined to remove the Indians by non-forceful means; Georgia refused to consent to Adams' request, forcing the president to forge a treaty with the Cherokees granting Georgia the Cherokee lands. On July 26, 1827, the Cherokee Nation adopted a written constitution which declared that they were an independent nation with jurisdiction over their own lands. Georgia contended that it would not countenance a sovereign state within its own territory, and asserted its authority over Cherokee territory. When Andrew Jackson became president as the candidate of the newly-organized Democratic Party, he agreed that the Indians should be forced to exchange their eastern lands for western lands and vigorously enforced Indian removal.Opposition to removal from US citizens
Although Indian removal was a popular policy, it was also opposed on legal and moral grounds; it also ran counter to the formal, customary diplomatic interaction between the federal government and the Native nations. Author and critic John Neal wrote fiction in opposition to Indian removal policy. The short stories "Otter-Bag, the Oneida Chief" and "David Whicher" was his response to Jacksonian policy, as well as prevailing themes in American literature depicting white and Native Americans as irreconcilable enemies. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the widely-published letter "A Protest Against the Removal of the Cherokee Indians from the State of Georgia" in 1838, shortly before the Cherokee removal. Emerson criticizes the government and its removal policy, saying that the removal treaty was illegitimate; it was a "sham treaty", which the US government should not uphold. He describes removal assuch a dereliction of all faith and virtues, such a denial of justice... in the dealing of a nation with its own allies and wards since the earth was made... a general expression of despondency, of disbelief, that any goodwill accrues from a remonstrance on an act of fraud and robbery, appeared in those men to whom we naturally turn for aid and counsel.Emerson concludes his letter by saying that it should not be a political issue, urging President Martin Van Buren to prevent the enforcement of Cherokee removal. Other individual settlers and settler social organizations throughout the United States also opposed removal.