On this day in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law. It was the first legislation to diverge from the previous official U.S. policy to respect Native Americans' legal and political rights. Jackson announced his policy by saying, "It gives me pleasure to announce to Congress that the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation." He also said, "Toward the aborigines of the country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further in attempting to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people."
The act has been referred to as a unitary act of systematic genocide, because it completely discriminated against an ethnic group, to the point of certain death of vast numbers of its population.
The Indian Removal Act was controversial. Many Americans during this time favored its passage, but there was also significant opposition. In Congress, New Jersey Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen and Tennessee Congressman Davy Crockett spoke out against the legislation. The Removal Act passed only after bitter debate in Congress.
The policy primarily affected five tribes: the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations of the southeastern United States. In 1823, the Supreme Court ruled that the white settlers' "right of discovery" superseded the Indians' "right of occupancy." The five nations resisted nonviolently at first, and tried to assimilate into Anglo-American practices of education, large-scale farming, and slave-holding, but to no avail, and about 100,000 Native Americans were forcibly marched thousands of miles — sometimes in manacles — to lands west of the Mississippi, most of which were deemed undesirable by white settlers. As many as 25 percent died en route.
The Cherokee nation battled the Removal Act in courts of law. In the case Worcester v. Georgia, Samuel Worcester, a missionary, had been arrested for violating Georgia law prohibiting any non-native from being present on native land without a license from the state. This was part of a plan between Worcester and the Cherokee tribe to fight white encroachment on their land by using the courts. They wanted to take a case to the US Supreme Court to define the relationship between the federal and state governments, and establish the sovereignty of the Cherokee nation. Their argument was that accepting the Georgia law was an infringement on the sovereignty of the Cherokee nation. He was convicted and sentenced to four years hard labor, but took his appeal to the Supreme Court. Georgia refused to have a legal counsel represent it, claiming that no Indian could drag it into court.
Chief Justice John Marshall laid out in this opinion that the relationship between the Indian Nations and the United States is that of nations. He reasoned that the United States, in the character of the federal government, inherited the rights of Great Britain as they were held by that nation. Those rights, he stated, include the sole right to deal with the Indian nations in North America, to the exclusion of any other European power. This did not include the rights of possession to their land or political dominion over their laws. He acknowledged that the exercise of conquest and purchase can give political dominion, but those are in the hands of the federal government, and individual states had no authority in American Indian affairs. Georgia's statute was therefore invalid.
Marshall's language in Worcester may have been motivated by his regret that his earlier opinions in Fletcher v. Peck and Johnson v. M'Intosh had been used as a justification for Georgia's actions. Joseph Story considered it similarly, writing in a letter to his wife dated March 4, 1832: "Thanks be to God, the Court can wash their hands clean of the iniquity of oppressing the Indians and disregarding their rights."
In a popular quotation that is believed to be apocryphal, President Andrew Jackson reportedly responded: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" This derives from Jackson's comments on the case in a letter to John Coffee, ". . . the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate."
The Seminoles of Florida battled it literally; Chief Osceola said: "You have guns, and so have we. You have powder and lead, and so have we. You have men, and so have we. Your men will fight and so will ours, till the last drop of the Seminole's blood has moistened the dust of his hunting ground."
Drawing on a population of about 4,000 Seminole and 800 allied Black Seminoles, he mustered at most 1,400 warriors (Andrew Jackson estimated they had only 900). They countered combined U.S. Army and militia forces that ranged from 6,000 troops at the outset to 9,000 at the peak of deployment in 1837. To survive, the Seminole allies employed guerrilla tactics with devastating effect against U.S. forces, as they knew how to move within the Everglades and use this area for their protection. Osceola was arrested (in a breach of honor) when he came under a flag of truce to negotiations with the US in 1837. He died in jail less than a year later. He was decapitated, his body buried without his head.
Other war chiefs, such as Halleck Tustenuggee and John Jumper, and the Black Seminoles Abraham and John Horse, continued the Seminole resistance against the army. After a full decade of fighting, the war ended in 1842. Scholars estimate the U.S. government spent about $40,000,000 on the war, at the time a huge sum. An estimated 3,000 Seminole and 800 Black Seminole were forcibly exiled to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi, where they were settled on the Creek reservation. A few hundred survivors retreated into the Everglades. In the end, after the Third Seminole War, the government gave up trying to subjugate the Seminole and left the estimated fewer than 500 survivors in peace.
In addition to the Five Civilized Tribes in the Southeast, the act also affected the Wyandot, the Kickapoo, the Potowatomi, the Shawnee, and the Lenape as well as a number of African slaves.
As far as I'm concerned, they can have all the goddamn casinos they can convince white people to lose their money in.
BTW, Jackson is Donald Trump's favorite president. Bigots of a feather and all that.
This is a list of all 15,000 of the Cherokee who were expelled. About 800 faded deep into the Smoky Mountains where they remain today in North Carolina and Tennessee.
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