Indian Removal and the Trail of Tears

Cotton was spreading across the Deep South, and planters and speculators wanted the fertile land that the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations held. Georgia pushed hardest, passing laws that erased Cherokee sovereignty within its borders. In 1830 Congress answered the pressure with the Indian Removal Act, giving the president power to negotiate treaties trading Native land in the Southeast for territory west of the Mississippi, in what became Oklahoma. Andrew Jackson, who saw removal as both a states'-rights concession and a path to white settlement, pushed it through and signed it into law.

The Cherokee fought back in court instead of by force. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia's laws had no authority inside Cherokee territory, which was a legally distinct nation under federal, not state, protection. It was a clear legal victory, but the ruling meant nothing without enforcement, and Jackson's administration had no intention of stopping Georgia or the removal process. A faction of Cherokee leaders signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, ceding Cherokee land without the consent of the elected tribal government, and the federal government used it to justify forced removal. In 1838 the army marched roughly 16,000 Cherokee west; about 4,000 died of cold, disease, and starvation on what became known as the Trail of Tears. The Seminoles resisted differently, fighting a guerrilla war in the Florida swamps from 1835 to 1842, the longest and costliest of the removal conflicts, before most were forced west.