Trail of Tears: Indian Removal, Racism, and Slavery

President Andrew Jackson built his political and military career on an aggressive approach to Native Americans. His exploits began well before 1838–39, when his Indian Removal Act signaled the deplorable state of affairs in North America. Around 4,000 Cherokee died during the forcible removal program aptly dubbed the "Trail of Tears," as many more Indians were displaced and deprived of rights that had previously been guaranteed by federal law. The Indian Removal Act violated several tacit and explicit agreements between tribal governments and their American counterparts.

By the time the Indian Removal Act was passed, five tribes in the Southeastern United States — the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole (technically and historically a branch of the Creek) — had been assimilating into colonial European society. Yet mastery of the English language and active participation in the colonial economy failed to enable these Southeastern tribes to stave off the sinister deceit that characterized Jackson's policy of Indian removal. The informal and formal agreements between Native Americans and the federal government systematically fell apart due to increasing demand for land within the plantation economy of the American South. Greed and a white supremacist ideology laid the groundwork for the Indian Removal Act of 1830, revealing stark connections between the Trail of Tears and the legacy of slavery in the United States.

Sheer greed prompted nearly all of the Indian removal policies, which followed from broken treaties and ultimately resulted in the forced exile of Indian communities. Burgeoning numbers of settlers into the lands now part of Georgia and Alabama pressured the federal government to support their endeavor to expand cotton plantations. A European colonial mentality undermined any genuine commitment to the rights, freedoms, and liberties outlined in the American Constitution. As military resistance proved futile for the Native Americans, several tribes opted for a policy of appeasement (United States Department of State Office of the Historian). Several tribes tried to negotiate with the settlers, offering large swathes of land in exchange for the right to live harmoniously alongside them. Their efforts proved futile, as white land grabbers viewed Native Americans as obstacles to their business enterprises as well as to their sense of cultural superiority.

The cultural assimilation of the Cherokees in particular proved to be ironically disastrous to the tribe, because "the more literate, prosperous, and politically organized the Cherokees made themselves, the more resolved they became to keep what remained of their land and improve it for their own benefit" (Howe 345).

Moreover, several Native tribes — and particularly the Seminole — advocated on behalf of runaway slaves, actively aided and sheltered them, and traded with free blacks (Howe 342). Their strategic allegiances underscored the value of uniting with other tribes and disenfranchised groups in opposition to slavery, disempowerment, and discrimination. Whereas the Monroe administration acknowledged the legality of treaties and legal claims to Native-held land, the Jackson administration flagrantly ignored the law and the underlying values of the Constitution.

Most notably, in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall ruled, if not strongly then at least tacitly, in favor of Cherokee sovereignty. The case featured an unusual alliance between some missionary Christian groups — including those headed by Samuel Worcester — working on behalf of the so-called "civilized" tribes. When the government of the state of Georgia recognized how politically powerful a Christian-Native alliance might become, the governor ousted the missionaries. Worcester and several others were arrested for remaining on tribal land and eventually brought the matter to the Supreme Court. The case was argued on the grounds that the state of Georgia could not exercise legal jurisdiction over what transpired on Native land, even if those lands fell within the geographic boundaries of the state. Essentially, the case highlighted the tension between states' rights advocates and federalists. Marshall ruled that the Cherokees were legally sovereign and that the state of Georgia had no jurisdiction over them.

Andrew Jackson blatantly refused the ruling and proceeded to effectively break the law, inciting anti-Indian sentiment throughout the South (Miles 519). Jackson arrogantly and famously declared, "Well, John Marshall has made his decision: now let him enforce it!" (cited in Miles 519). In this way, Jackson became a leading figurehead of pro-white sentiment in the South — an attitude that would foment the tensions eventually leading to the Civil War. Jackson and other anti-Indian activists paradoxically supported the right of the federal government to forcibly remove Indians while denying the federal government's right to intervene on their behalf. The very same hypocritical ideology underwrote pro-slavery politics, in which the federal government would continually revert to states' rights when it came to allowing slave economies to prosper, while simultaneously passing federal legislation such as the Fugitive Slave Act.

A perceived sense of white cultural and moral superiority over all non-whites, coupled with self-righteousness, underwrote the Indian Removal Act and other harmful legislation. Andrew Jackson viewed Native Americans as "savages who threatened American settlers and republican virtues" (Manning and Wyatt 203). Racism was a deep-running current in Southern white culture. For example, the Monroe administration heard and acknowledged arguments put forth by an 1824 Cherokee delegation to Washington. The delegation urged the Monroe administration to uphold land treaties and Cherokee sovereignty. Monroe agreed — to his political demise. Politically powerful racists in the South criticized Monroe and later celebrated the rise of Jackson, who was unabashedly racist in both policy and demeanor (Howe 345). Those very same racists who supported Jackson grew in number and political power throughout the South, their clout skyrocketing after Jackson came to power and promoted encroachment onto lands belonging to the Cherokee nation.

Thus, white supremacist ideology permeated American law by the time the Indian Removal Act was passed. Racist policymakers gradually recognized the political expediency of anti-federalism and began working more closely with state governments such as Georgia's. Just as "states' rights" became the rallying cry of pro-slavery advocates throughout the nineteenth century, so too did states' rights become the argument in favor of Indian removal. Although Chief Justice Marshall supported Cherokee sovereignty, it became increasingly difficult to determine whether the federal government truly had jurisdiction over land-use issues in Georgia.

In his 1831 ruling on Cherokee Nation v. the State of Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that Indian nations' "relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian." The discourse had clearly and irreversibly shifted. No longer did the federal government engage the governments of aboriginal nations as equals in stature and power — as it had engaged England or France. With Cherokee Nation v. the State of Georgia, the Supreme Court ruled that the Cherokee, and hence all other Native nations, were subordinate to the United States. Gone was any pretense of mutual respect or mutual benefit. The Native Americans had done everything possible to create mutually beneficial arrangements, but it was painfully clear where they truly stood: both they and African Americans were systematically denied legal or political standing in the United States. Cherokee Nation v. the State of Georgia was the nail in the coffin for Native peoples, as the federal government determined it would not support sovereignty and would cease protecting the rights and freedoms of Native people.

The successive Marshall decisions paved the way for the Indian Removal Act. After the Supreme Court's decision in Cherokee Nation v. the State of Georgia, Native peoples essentially had no rights at either the state or the federal level. The federal government had been their last hope against an increasingly racist and greed-driven South, and once the federal government divested itself of its legal, political, and ethical responsibility, tribes like the Cherokee had no allies at either level of government. The Marshall decisions rested on the principle of "right of discovery" — the legal counterpart to Manifest Destiny. A "right of discovery" was held to override a "right of occupancy," at least when the "right of discovery" was claimed by whites. Hypocritically, the Marshall decision in Cherokee Nation v. the State of Georgia simultaneously claimed that the federal government had no jurisdiction over Indian affairs because Indian nations were not "foreign," while in practice providing the federal government with the real authority to enforce the Indian Removal Act.