TRAIL OF TEARS

By the 1780s war, disease, and starvation had killed most American Indians living along the eastern seaboard of North America. As white settlers pressed further inland in the early 1800s, many of the indigenous groups resisted further encroachment. Some seized on the opportunity to side with Britain in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and again in the War of 1812 (1812–1814). But the Native Americans had picked the losing side, and after the latter war, General Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) devastated the settlements of the Creeks and other hostile Indian groups.

In contrast to the Creeks, the Cherokee had earlier accepted the U.S. presence as inevitable and adopted a peaceful policy of accommodation and coexistence. On the basis of a treaty signed with the United States in 1791, the Cherokee continued to live on their traditional lands in the hills of northwest Georgia and western North Carolina. During the early 1800s the Cherokee went through a remarkable period of cultural change. They adopted an agrarian economy in place of traditional hunting and gathering. Some Cherokee even became owners of plantations with slaves. Others became involved in commerce, managing stores, mills, and other businesses. Impressed with the benefits of reading and writing, a Cherokee silversmith, Sequoia, created a Cherokee alphabet that was quickly adopted. By the 1820s the Cherokee had established written laws and a constitution.

Between 1819 and 1829 the Cherokees developed an independent nation within U.S. boundaries. They adopted a constitution. As the Cherokees flourished, the white settlers grew resentful. The Georgia statehouse pressed the Cherokees to sell their land, which the Cherokee were reluctant to do. With the discovery of gold in Cherokee country in 1829 the State of Georgia increased the pressure on the Cherokee. President Andrew Jackson (1829–1837) signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that provided funds for removal of eastern Indians beyond the Mississippi River. The State of Georgia annulled the Cherokee constitution and ordered their lands seized.

The Cherokee hired a lawyer who argued the case all the way to the Supreme Court. In his ruling, Chief Justice John Marshall agreed that the State of Georgia had no right to enter Cherokee lands and to displace the indigenous people. Despite the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Cherokee v. Georgia (1831), acknowledging Cherokee's right to their lands and their sovereignty as a nation, Jackson continued to support Georgia's efforts at their removal. After Marshall's ruling Jackson remarked, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it."

Jackson persuaded Congress to grant the funds for the relocation of the Cherokee. Finally in 1835, after years of harassment and antagonism, a small group of Cherokee ceded by treaty all lands occupied by the Cherokee east of the Mississippi. The Cherokee peoples were given two years to vacate the transferred lands and move to a special Indian territory created by Congress in 1834 in what latter became Oklahoma.

Many Cherokee resisted removal. As the deadline approached in 1837, President Martin Van Buren (1837–1841) ordered federal authorities to force the Cherokee from their homes and place them in temporary detention camps. The Cherokee remained in the camps through the typically hot sweltering southeast summer and diseases began to spread. Suffering from dysentery, measles, and whooping cough, some two thousand died. Finally that October over fifteen thousand men, women, and children began a six-month, thousand-mile journey to the very unfamiliar country of Oklahoma. Most went overland from northwest Georgia, across central Tennessee, western Kentucky, southern Illinois, southern Missouri, and northern Arkansas, to Ft. Gibson in eastern Oklahoma. A smaller number were taken by flatboat down the Tennessee River to the Mississippi River and then up the Arkansas River. While en route, lacking adequate food, shelter, and clothing, another two thousand died from exposure, disease, and exhaustion. The Cherokee buried their dead along the route that became known as the "Trail of Tears." The forced march became one of the most tragic and dishonorable chapters in U.S.-Indian relations.

The Cherokee reestablished their agrarian society in the hills of northeastern Oklahoma. They soon setup a new government and signed a constitution in 1839. Tahlequah, Oklahoma became the capital for the displaced population. During the 1837 roundup, rather than leave for Oklahoma, a thousand or more Cherokee had fled into remote areas of the East including the Great Smoky Mountains. They later received federal recognition, also, as the Cherokee of the North Carolina Qualla Reservation.

Departure of the Cherokee population left only scattered indigenous groups in the Southeast. By 1842 most of the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—had been removed from their prosperous farms and plantations and resettled on the southeast to government-assigned lands in Oklahoma. The last of the Seminoles of Florida were removed in 1858.

The Cherokee's forced removal dramatized the fate of indigenous populations in the face of U.S. agricultural expansion. The tide of U.S. expansion eventually overwhelmed even those tribes with peaceful policies and firmly established economies. The Trail of Tears was later designated a National Historic Trail by Congress.

TRAIL OF TEARS

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