The Indian Removal Act of 1830: Injustice and Legacy

Introduction

The Indian Removal Act, signed by Andrew Jackson in 1830, was intended to establish peace in the nation and to give Native Americans their own territory where they could practice their traditions and culture without interference from the American government. However, the Act resulted in the forced migration of thousands of Native Americans from their traditional homelands to a region of the United States that did not suit their lifestyle or their culture. Many suffered and died during the march known as the Trail of Tears, from the Southern states westward. Though Jackson may have had what he considered good intentions at the time, the removal can now be viewed as an American tragedy that might have been prevented. In fact, it was just one example of human rights abuses in a long history of such abuses committed by the American government — from the era of slavery into the twenty-first century. This paper describes the history of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and examines why and how it became a disaster for the Native Americans.

The Origins of the Indian Removal Act

The removal of Native Americans was not actually President Jackson's original idea. George Washington had proposed it, and subsequent administrations had followed suit, forcibly removing the Choctaw and Cherokee from their native soil throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Washington and Jefferson had promoted the idea of having the Indians adopt American culture — practicing Christianity, speaking English, and adopting Western dress. Washington, however, had wanted to establish treaties with the Indian tribes. Jackson did not regard them as nations but rather as unwanted residents on land that Southerners could put to better use. Jackson wanted to employ the military to remove the Indians and give their land in the South to the Southern states, while dividing the territory west of the Mississippi into areas where the Indians could go to live. He did not intend for it to be a death march or an exile to a small and useless patch of land. Jackson's aim, however, was to fortify the South, and he did not consider the effect of this forced relocation on the Native Americans — on their heritage, their culture, their people, and their race.

Cultural Aims and Manifest Destiny

In the first half of the 1800s, a great deal of enthusiasm and optimism coursed through American society. A letter from a Methodist woman published in the Ladies' Repository magazine in 1850 captures this overwhelming spirit of progressivism well, as the author enthuses over the invention of the electric telegraph and what it could mean for the world: "This noble invention is to be the means of extending civilization, republicanism, and Christianity over the earth. It must and will be extended to nations half-civilized, and thence to those now savage and barbarous…" This sentiment was also expressed by John O'Sullivan, who coined the phrase "Manifest Destiny" to convey the idea that it was America's God-given mission to extend its borders and rule the continent. America in the first half of the 1800s was deeply race-focused and convinced that the WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) ethic was far superior to that of any other group, and that American public life should be directed by WASP ideas. Groups that did not conform to that way of being were conquered, vanquished, or pushed to the very margins of society — which is essentially what happened to most Native Americans following the Indian Removal Act of 1830, with the exception of a few Cherokee who managed to maintain some semblance of their old way of life in the South.

The idea behind the Indian Removal Act was straightforward. WASP leaders of the day believed that the South would be made stronger and more unified through the Act, and that contentions over land would be ended. In Georgia especially there was a significant dispute between the state authorities and the Cherokee nation over land, though the conflict was not limited to Georgia. Other states had their own disputes with the Cherokee as well. For instance, Tennessee Governor John Sevier wrote in 1803 a letter to the Cherokee asking their permission to build a road through their territory. The fact that American leaders needed to seek permission from the Cherokee to lay transportation infrastructure became an increasing irritant as the century progressed. In his letter, referring to President Jefferson's desire to commission the building of a road in the South, Sevier stated to the Cherokee:

"You have just now heard your Father's the President talk, sent to you and delivered by your brother Colonel Meigs. It is a request from your great Father that a road be opened for the good and benefit of all his children both red and white, and will be more so for our red brothers, as the road will be through their own land and they will have the benefit of the ferries, houses of entertainment and all oppertunities of selling and disposing of their corn meat and provisions of every kind. The road will be of the same use to yourselves to travel on, to market, and for every other advantage that it can be of to your Brothers the white people…"

There is a great deal of condescension and racial superiority in the letter. The Native Americans were openly referred to as "red" people and treated like out-of-touch children in a world now ruled by superior "white" people, whose leader the "red" people were expected to address as Father. American leaders would soon tire of this kind of diplomacy, and eventually the broader plan was simply to remove the Native Americans — thereby eliminating the need for such "politeness" whenever the government wanted to initiate some new project in the Southern lands inhabited by the Cherokee.

It is worth noting that this was not the only time American leaders proposed removal as a solution to a difficult political problem. The question of slavery and the freeing of African Americans was met with the same logic. Under Lincoln, a plan was drawn up to remove African Americans and resettle them in a new territory called Linconia, which would have been located in Latin America, had any host country agreed. Though the Republic of New Granada consented to the proposal, Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua all rejected it, and the plan never came to fruition. Had it succeeded, the Trail of Tears of the Cherokee nation would have been matched by a Trail of Tears of the African American nation — two tragic forced migrations revealing the utter racial hypocrisy at the heart of the American Dream.

Jackson's Justification and the Effects of Removal

Jackson believed the Indian Removal Act would settle the dispute and resolve the question of what to do about the Cherokee in the South. Many Southerners agreed — they felt that by simply removing the Cherokee westward, the problem would be solved. They did not anticipate the issues that would plague the Native American community for decades as a result of the Act. Native Americans are among the most at-risk populations in the United States, suffering disproportionately from depression and substance abuse — conditions deeply connected to the historical trauma inflicted by episodes such as the Trail of Tears.

At the time, most Americans did not foresee these consequences. President Jackson, being from the South, felt that American life was moving in a civilized direction away from the frontier days that had defined early national life. He wanted a more uniform America, one in which there would be no cultural conflicts. The longer the Indians were allowed to live alongside white Americans, the more the conflict would worsen — so believed many WASPs in government and positions of social influence. The Indian Removal Act was thus Jackson's means of ending the perceived cultural conflict. He even convinced himself that by forcibly removing the Indians he would actually be saving them from destruction. Ironically, of course, destruction is precisely what occurred, as Native Americans were forced to migrate to a part of the country they had never before seen, in what became known as the Trail of Tears.

By forcibly segregating the Indians from white civilization, Jackson initiated a process that amounted to genocide, given the vast numbers of Native Americans who died on the Trail of Tears. The Native Americans lost their homes, their sense of pride and self-worth; vast numbers died, and many disappeared from the historical record altogether. Today, the Native American population suffers more than any other ethnic group in America from depression and suicide. They have lived separated from the broader American experience, as though exiles within their own country.

Jackson supported the Indian Removal Act because he viewed it as the natural course of progress. He imagined that Progress was like a slow-rolling train that could not be stopped, and that anything in its way would eventually be pushed aside or crushed. He viewed the Cherokee — with their way of life, their culture, and their land — as an obstacle to the American way of life, one that had to be cleared. His support of the Removal Act was, in his own mind, actually in their best interest: rather than being crushed by the train of progress, they would simply be relocated out of its path.

One-quarter of the Cherokee population perished as a result of the Indian Removal Act. Thus, the only "progress" achieved was the eradication of the Native American people — a continuation of a policy that had been in place since the frontier days, when the U.S. Cavalry was essentially at war with Native American tribes as the United States pushed its way across the prairies and plains toward the Pacific in pursuit of its "manifest destiny." The reservations to which the surviving Cherokee were relocated were not even in adequate condition, and those who survived the journey were neither pleased nor satisfied with what had been done to their way of life.

By enforcing the Indian Removal Act, the U.S. government denied the Native Americans the most fundamental of human rights: the right to self-determination. "Whites" would enjoy this right — but not "reds" — and that was precisely what the Act made clear. The racist ideology underlying the American Dream of prosperity asserted itself here in unmistakable terms. America's "manifest destiny" was, in practice, the manifestation of racism.

In a realistic historical sense, one must acknowledge that Jackson was correct about one thing: the "progress" of America had always been linked to the removal of Native Americans from their land. After the French and Indian War, the British had sought to sign treaties with Native American nations and to prevent colonists from advancing onto tribal lands, particularly those of the Iroquois. The Founding Fathers, however, did not want to be constrained by such agreements. They believed it was their destiny to rule the entire continent and to push all the way to the Pacific. They took Texas from Mexico and annexed it. They used enslaved people to build up their agricultural industry. They used Chinese laborers to lay the railroad westward. They used the perceived lack of "civilization" among Native Americans as a pretext to justify their expansion, and they justified that expansion by citing the spread of technological innovation and the Protestant ethic.

Conclusion

The Indian Removal Act was promoted as a natural step on the road of progress. The federal government wanted to take control of territory in the South, ensure that a "white" culture could prevail, and remove all obstacles to expansion, growth, and the laying of infrastructure for the coming industrialization. The authorities did not care that they were infringing upon the rights of the Native Americans. The Native Americans were "red" — not "white" — and to the WASPs, that made all the difference. Human rights and dignity were reserved for "whites"; that idea was embedded in the WASP system from the very beginning, so deeply that those who held it did not even recognize it as an ideology.

President Jackson thought it would actually be beneficial for the Cherokee to have their own separate land — an idea later echoed by Lincoln, who believed it would be a good idea to remove Black Americans from the United States and establish them in a colony in Central America. The fundamental weakness of both arguments, however, lies in the fact that there is nothing organic or humane about forced removal. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was a wholesale uprooting of the Native American people, forcing them to live on reservations where their spirit and way of life would be utterly destroyed. One could not have devised a more effective method — short of outright extermination — of controlling and destroying the Native American people and culture in the nineteenth century.

The outcome of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was the further erosion of America's moral compass and a genuine loss of the ideal of freedom — which is exactly how Davy Crockett saw it, and why it saddened him so profoundly. The Indian Removal Act stands as one of the clearest examples in American history of how the rhetoric of progress can be used to disguise and justify systematic racial injustice.