Indian Policy

Sources

Removal. In the early 1830s there were still 125, 000 Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River. The United States had two conflicting policies toward this population: assimilation and removal. Assimilation encouraged Native Americans to conform to European- American ways to survive. The federal government even funded missionaries to Christianize and educate native people. The Cherokees, who occupied land in the Southeast, had successfully assimilated by the 1830s. They had created written alphabet, ratified a republican constitution with a bicameral legislature, learned to farm, and built one of the better public school systems in the South. But the government’s second policy, removal, dismissed the possibility of assimilating Native Americans. It sought to make Indians leave whatever land they had in the East and relocate west of the Mississippi River. Some proponents of removal believed that separation was the only way to protect Indians from white abuse; others were simply interested in opening more land to. white settlement. Andrew Jackson initially supported both policies, promising small plots to individuals who took up farming and granting land in the West to those tribes who relocated. However, Jackson increasingly came to favor removal as a “just, humane, liberal policy toward Indians.” In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act and appropriated $500, 000 to remove Indians to the West. Jackson’s administration negotiated ninety-four removal treaties, and all the Indians in the East were removed by 1840.

THE CHEROKEE REPUBLIC

The experience of the Cherokee Indians in the 1820s and 1830s demonstrated that assimilation and civilization were no guarantees against white encroachment or forced removal from their lands. In the late eighteenth century the Cherokees, one of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, relocated to seventy-two hundred square miles of land primarily in northwestern Georgia. The land was guaranteed them by federal treaties. By the 1820s the Cherokees had given up an existence based on seminomadic hunting and gathering, and had settled into a pattern of European American-style agriculture. The fifteen thousand and Cherokees occupying the area had come to, think of themselves is an. independent nation; In 1827 they ratified a republican constitution with an elected representative government, a bicameral legislature, a court system, and a governmental bureaucracy. One of them, Sequoyah, created an eighty-six-letter phonetic alphabet, which they used to translate the Bible and to issue a bilingual newspaper. They also opened a public school system that was among the best in the South. Like their white neighbors, they raised cash crops, especially cotton, and by 1833 they owned fifteen hundred black slaves. None of this mattered to white Georgians who coveted Cherokee land for themselves. When gold was found within the Cherokee boundaries; Georgia intensified its efforts to get them removed. Eventually the Cherokees sued in federal court to halt the flood of white settlement on their land They won two cases, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Giorgia (1832). In both cases the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall held that they were entitled to the land. But Marshall had no power to enforce the decisions, and by 1838 federal troops had evicted the Cherokees and sent them on, .a “Trail of Tears” toward new land in present-day Oklahoma.

Source: Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Long Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993).

Resistance. Native Americans generally accepted removal as preferable to assimilation. However, there was some resistance. In 1832 Sauk and Fox Indians under Black Hawk took up arms in Illinois and Wisconsin and tried to reoccupy land they had surrendered the previous year: Illinois militia and federal troops vigorously put down Black Hawk’s people, chasing them into the Wisconsin Territory and massacring nearly five Thundred men, women, and children who tried to escape across the Mississippi River (which was where they were supposed to go, according to treaty). The Black Hawk War became more famous in later years because both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln had participated in this campaign to evict the Native Americans. Many Seminole Indians in Florida also refused to resettle and put up an even more spirited resistance. From 1835 to 1842, under Osceola, they fought a successful guerrilla war that cost the United States $20 million and fifteen hundred casualties. Eventually, federal troops captured Osceola (tricking him into capture under a flag of truce), but they proved unable to inflict a final defeat. In 1842 the federal government ended the hostilities, but it was hardly a victory for the native survivors, who consisted of only a few hundred Seminoles hiding in Florida’s swamps.

Trail of Tears. Americans in the Southeast were happy with the removal policy, though some thought it was proceeding too slowly. Georgians especially coveted Cherokee land in the northwest corner of their state and refused to abide by federal treaties guaranteeing the natives their land. The situation was exacerbated by the discovery of gold on Indian lands in 1829. The Cherokees sued to protect themselves from white encroachment, and the Supreme Court eventually heard two cases. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832) the Court held that the Cherokees, though not an independent nation, did have legal rights to their land. The Court, however, had no power to enforce its decision. Instead, Presidents Jackson and Martin Van Buren used federal troops to remove the Cherokees. Forced to cede their land in exchange for territory in Oklahoma, four thousand Cherokees died on the march to their new home. The Cherokees thus repeated the experience of those who had gone before them: in 1831 the Choctaws moved west with a promise of assistance that never materialized, and the Creeks lost thirty-five hundred people in 1836. Even the new lands of the West did not provide safety, as America continued to expand. Removal would give way, in 1851, to a new policy of concentration on reservations.

Sources

John R. Finger, The Eastern Band of Cherokees, 1819–1900 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984);

Michael D. Green, The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982);

Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973).