THE TRAIL WHERE THEY CRIED: ANDREW JACKSON’S POLICY OF INDIAN REMOVAL “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. Two important tribes have accepted the provision made for their removal at the last session of Congress, and it is believed that their example will induce the remaining tribes also to seek the same obvious advantages.” Andrew Jackson Message to Congress 'On Indian Removal' (1830)
Andrew Jackson America’s Seventh President (1829-1837)
Along with European contact came Native American Slavery, which Europeans employed before and during African American slavery during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. European settlers along the coast embraced the Indian Slave trade, and in some instances provided the link between these two cultures, instead of agriculture. Native Americans faced deadly disease such as smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis and did not have the same immunities as Africans. Disease became one of the reasons that Europeans began to rely on African slaves instead of Indians. By the end of the nineteenth century only 250,000 Native Americans remained in the United States, when 6 million existed prior to European settlement.
Because of the transitional period where Europeans switched from utilizing indigenous slavery and African slavery, these two populations had a large amount of cultural mixing. The possible threat of an alignment between Native Americans and African slaves encompassed another reason for eliminating indigenous slavery. Europeans passed laws that prevented these two groups to marry, inhibiting the continuance of intercultural mixing. Andrew Jackson, the man on your twenty-dollar bill is most known for his policy of Indian Removal. Jackson did not conceive this concept; even our founding fathers did not have immunity to ideas of Indian removal. Thomas Jefferson developed ideas of “colonization” regarding both Indians and African Americans in the early 1800s. In 1827 Jackson set up the policy of removal to send Native Americans West of the Mississippi, just like during the era of indigenous slavery, Americans worried that Africans and natives could potentially form an alliance against them. Many abolitionists such as Angela Grimke, Arthur Tappan and William Lloyd Garrison started off in opposition to the racialized removal of Native Americans. The movement of Native Americans to Oklahoma became backed by the idea of Manifest Destiny, the idea that the American nation should spread from east to west and it was their fate to do so. 30,000 Native Americans died on the southeastern portion of the Trail of Tears, and numerous other casualties resulted from the mission of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion in the following years. Those Native Americans that remained in the eastern areas faced even more social disparity and marginalization.
Painting Called American Progress by John Gast (1872).
Trail of Tears Oil Painting at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian by Mary Lynn Duncan
"We, the great mass of the people think only of the love we have for our land, we do love the land where we were brought up. We will never let our hold to this land go, to let it go it will be like throwing away (our) mother that gave (us) birth." - Letter from Aitooweyah to John Ross, Principal Chief of the Cherokee. "We are now about to take our leave and kind farewell to our native land, the country the Great Spirit gave our Fathers, we are on the eve of leaving that country that gave us birth, it is with sorrow we are forced by the white man to quit the scenes of our childhood...we bid farewell to it and all we hold dear." - Charles Hicks, Tsalagi Cherokee Vice Chief speaking of the Trail of Tears, November 4, 1838