"These
lands are ours. No one has a right to remove us because we
were the first owners. The Great Spirit above has appointed
the place for us, on which to light our fires, and here we
will remain."
Tecumseh, Native American chief, in a
message to Pres. James Madison, 1810
One
of the strategies developed to deal with the conflict between
white American settlers and Native Americans
was to negotiate treaties, in which the Native Americans
"voluntarily" exchanged their lands in
the east for lands
west of
the
Mississippi. The Cherokee, Creek,
Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminoles, also known as the “Five
Civilized Tribes,” negotiated approximately thirty treaties
with the
United States between 1789 and 1825.
At the
time Andrew Jackson became president in 1829, 125,000 Native
Americans
still lived east of the Mississippi River. Cherokee,
Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek Indians - 60,000 strong -
held millions
of
acres in what would become the southern Cotton Kingdom
stretching across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The
political
question
was whether these Indian tribes would be permitted to block
white expansion.
By 1840, Jackson
and his successor, Martin Van Buren, had answered this question.
All Indians east of the Mississippi had been uprooted from their
homelands and moved westward, with the exception of rebellious
Seminoles in Florida, the Poarch Band of Creek Indians in Alabama,
and small numbers of Indians living on isolated reservations in
Michigan, North Carolina, and New York.
In this
exploration, you will critically examine the assumptions
that defined American
Indian policies, why Jackson introduced the Removal Policy,
and the human meaning of removal.
