Indian Removal: the Broader Picture

The episode known in history as the Trail of Tears is primarily associated with the Cherokee, although the phrase itself was used by a Choctaw leader to describe an earlier eviction of his people.  In fact, from 1831-1838, the Five Southeastern Tribes, as well as people from smaller tribes and bands in the South, were systematically relocated with tragic results.  Nor were they the only ones.  In the North, the remaining Natives in the Ohio Valley were also pressured to remove, leading to the Black Hawk Revolt of 1832.  Further up the coast, lands of the Iroquois in New York were seized preparatory to their being removed before those plans were scrapped.  Today's post focuses on the wider picture of this terrible policy toward Native people.

During and after the Revolution, American leaders were conflicted about what to do with the Native populations.  Benjamin Franklin advocated for respect of Natives' property rights.  During early Administrations, Indian Affairs were handled by the War Department.  Washington was in favor of treating the tribes as sovereign nations and negotiating with them to surrender lands where White settlement had occurred.  Jefferson went a step further and urged that Natives be encouraged/required to assimilate to White society.  Several tribes did this successfully, such as the Cherokee, creating a system of writing, and several other Southeastern tribes, establishing court systems and centralized government similar to that of the Whites.  These tribes adopted White clothing, farmed, sent their children to school and tried to blend in.  However, as we know from other posts, conflicts between Whites and Settlers, such as the Creek War (1813-14) and the First Seminole War (1816-1818) continued to happen.

In the North, tribes in the Ohio Valley were more resistant to assimilation, preferring to keep their traditional lifestyle, which included hunting.  In doing so, they were competing with Settlers for game, and for property.  As Whites pushed past treaty boundaries and settled Native land, the Natives were forced onto smaller and smaller parcel of property, where game was scarce.  Faced with this inevitable, some tribes chose to move.  Some, such as the Kickapoo and Shawnee, drifted further West and South, some ending up as far from their original ranges as Texas and Mexico.  More Iroquois fled to Grand River and other reserves in Canada while some, such as the Seneca, also moved West.  Other tribes, however, adamantly stayed in their original ranges in the Ohio Valley and elsewhere.  To accommodate the influx of Natives moving west, the Monroe Administration drew up plans to create an Indian Territory out of what is now the states of Kansas and Oklahoma and tried to pressure the tribes to relinquish Eastern lands and "voluntarily" remove.  The Supreme Court gave the Natives a partial victory in the case of Johnson v. McIntosh, in 1823, holding that Natives could occupy their accustomed lands although they could not hold legal title.  Thus, the second Adams Administration also followed the policy of piecemeal treaties with tribes in order to gradually move them West.

United States Indian policy drastically changed with the election of Andrew Jackson, whose campaign platform involved removal of all Natives East of the Mississippi.  He called for a bill granting this in his State of the Union message in 1829.  In 1830, Congress passed and Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, providing for complete removal of all Natives East of the Mississippi.  Removal in the South took on added urgency in Georgia, where large plantation owners needed more land in order to cultivate cotton and other cash crops, and where gold was discovered in the 1830's, leading to a minor gold rush on what was then Cherokee land.  Beginning in 1831 and continuing throughout 1838, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Creek signed treaties, arrived at embarkation points such as Little Rock and Memphis, and began the slow trek toward Oklahoma.  Tribes who cooperated with the process received some payment for their lands in the South and were allowed to chose their land assignment in Oklahoma.  What this meant in reality were long journeys for men, women, children and elderly, who often took with them only what they could carry or load into a wagon or on horseback.  Rations were scarce along the route, and they were not allowed off the trail to hunt.  They arrived in Oklahoma with no seed or farm implements to begin a new life, so the harsh conditions of near starvation and rampant sickness continued even in Oklahoma.

While the government treated with Natives in the South to give up their land, Natives in the North tried to forestall the inevitable as best they could.  Kenekuk of the Kickapoo, a noted medicine man as well as war leader, made one excuse after the other to put off removal until the Kickapoo were threatened with armed retaliation.  They left Illinois in 1835.  Their Sac and Fox allies tried a time-tested method, revolt.  In 1832, Black Hawk, a Sac leader, raised a band of 1500 warriors known by Americans as the British Band for suspected ties with British agents.  After two battles with armed troops, the Americans agreed that the Sac and Fox need relocate only to what is now Iowa.  Upon hearing of the harsh conditions the Southern tribes were facing on the Trail of Tears, Northern newspapers began calling out Southerners and the Jackson Administration, arguing that the true motive for Indian Removal was not to prevent conflicts between Whites and Natives, but to gain more land for plantation slaves to farm.  Faced with the public backlash in the North, plans to remove the Iroquois were scrapped, though more lands in New York and Ohio were seized.

The Cherokees tried a different type of resistance, through the Federal court system.  The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall in Worcester v. Georgia, reaffirmed the internal sovereignty of the tribes and declared the forced removals illegal.  Jackson, furious, said, "John Marshall has made his ruling, let him enforce it.  Burn them out and they'll go!"  Despite the efforts of Cherokee leaders to stall for time, Jackson's edict prevailed.  Forcible removals began in 1838, with Cherokee evicted from their homes and placed into stockades for deportation to Oklahoma.  John Ross, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, bargained for the right to supervise his people's removal and tried to organize the process as best he could.  He divided the people into groups under the command of leaders he could trust and pooled resources to buy wagons for those too old to travel on foot or by horseback.  Cherokee who were wealthy enough bought passage on ships to take them as far as New Orleans by water before embarking on foot the rest of the way to Oklahoma.  Still, 4000 Cherokee never made it to Oklahoma, but died along the trail.  William Holland Thomas, who later became Principal Chief of the Eastern Band Cherokee, donated land, pooled resources to buy land, and established the Qualla Boundary, allowing Eastern Band Cherokee to remain in North Carolina.

The Seminole also fought to stay on their land.  Promised a reservation in Central Florida by the 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek, they had relocated to land considered useless for plantation agriculture.  However, as Seminole bands frequently left the reservation area to hunt, and sometimes stole livestock in desperate need, the outcry increased to remove them entirely from Florida.  Under Osceola, Coacoochee, John Horse and other leaders, they chose to fight, retreating further and further into the swamps of the Everglades.  From 1835-1842, groups of Seminoles were rounded up piecemeal and sent West.  This process was particularly demeaning where Black Seminoles were suspected of hiding.  Troops used bloodhounds to penetrate the thick swamps and literally drag them forth.  After more outcry in the newspapers, the War Department issued orders that the bloodhounds were to be muzzled and on a leash when hunting the Natives.  Over fifteen hundred US soldiers lost their lives in combat or by the harsh conditions of campaigning in Florida, but by 1842, a few scattered bands of Seminoles remained in the Everglades.  The Federal government had simply given up. 

By that time, there was little need to press the issue.  Only a few hundred Natives, either individually or in groups remained East of the Mississippi.  These included the Iroquois in New York, the Sac and Fox in Iowa, the Eastern Band Cherokee in North Carolina and scattered individuals through the Eastern portion of the country.  Some had simply refused to move and been overlooked or allowed to stay.  Others passed for White and tried to blot out all traces or remembrance of their Native ancestry.  Still others deserted the Trail of Tears or left Oklahoma to return to more familiar areas.  With the country on a rapid path toward Civil War, the government had other matters to tend to.