Urging of President Andrew Jackson

¶ … urging of President Andrew Jackson to Congress, he advocated that the Cherokees should be driven to lands west of the Mississippi because of two reasons:

The objectives of "civilizing" the tribes and driving them west contradicted each other.

Constitution did not provide the Federal government with the right to dismember an already existing state and to recognize a sovereign state within their boundaries without the consent of their legislature.

Jackson saw himself in a paternalistic role and the Cherokees and other Native American tribes as children that needed guidance in how to properly manage their affairs. By exiling the tribes to the lands over the Mississippi River, they would be free from the depredations of whites and would then be able to develop into an "interesting commonwealth." In other words, they would then resolve the contradiction that whites had forced on them between trying to assimilate and the continual pressure to move west and out of the way of white settlers. At this early time in American History, no one in the American government or intelligentsia foresaw the time when the "Great American Desert" west of the Mississippi would become attractive to white settlers as well (Erbach, "The Cherokee Removal Group a Readings").

Certainly this picture of "Old Hickory" does not square well with the much celebrated rise of Jacksonian Democracy that the Jackson administration supposedly ushered in with the presidential election of 1828. What does become apparent is that this commonwealth was available for white males only. Native Americans need not apply and needed to be moved out of the center of it with all possible speed.

Senator Peleg Sprague calls upon the United States government to honor their treaties (some 15 between 1783 and 1819) with the Cherokees. The fact that there have been 15 separate treaties would seem that the Federal Government and the American people it represents did not take their treaty obligations seriously to begin with (Erbach, "The Cherokee Removal Group B. Readings"). With any other nation that had overwhelming military power and was not in a continually weakening state, America would have been more meticulous in the observance of a treaty. The fact that it was with a Native American tribe that was sitting upon valuable land in the South sealed the fate of the Cherokees who were to be shipped to the far West with impunity. As the Senator pointed out, they were highly cultured and civilized by White and Indian standards. In fact, they were developing at an amazing and rapid pace. They were expected by Whites to go over the Mississippi to a strange land amongst hostile people and somehow miraculously survive. Certainly, this is why over 4,000 out of 15,000 of the Cherokees died on the way west to the territory that is now present day Oklahoma ("Historical Documents: The Trail of Tears").

The report from the Committee of Indian Affairs on the Removal of Indians delivered to the House of Representatives on February 24, 1830 states that "in the opinion of many of our statesmen, most distinguished for their justice and benevolence, as well as by their talents and experience, promised to increase their happiness, and to afford the best prospect of perpetuating their race ("Andrew Jackson and Indian Removal")." Somehow, the Committee is incensed that their position has been misrepresented to the American people and they can not understand how a portion of the white population can disagree with the providential wisdom of driving the Native Americans even further west than they already have been driven. When the Cherokees exercise the same common sense and claim the same rights of whites on their own territory, this is seen as radical and out of order. To further quote the Committee's work, they remark that "No respectable jurist has ever gravely contended, that the right of the Indians to hold their reserved lands, could be supported in the courts of the country, upon any other ground than the grant or permission of the sovereignty or State in which such lands lie (Erbach, "The Cherokee Removal Group C. Readings")." In other words, like slavery, oppression of the Native Americans is acceptable when done by the state governments and the U.S. government can do nothing to interfere. Such reasoning would haunt the country later as it went into the Civil War.