When Andrew Jackson became a president in 1829, 125,000 Native Americans still lived east of the Mississippi River. 60,000 of Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians held millions of acres in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The most crucial political issues at that time were if all of these Indians would be allowed to stop the expansion of white man and if the U.S. government would tolerate the previous treaties with Indians. Under Jackson’s presidency two solutions of this issue were possible: assimilation and removal. Assimilation meant that Native Americans would have to become similar to white people. They would have to adopt cultural and economic practices of white Americans. The Cherokee showed the ability to adopt. They opened schools, churches, started building roads, started to use printing press, and even adopted constitution. However, there was another policy concerning Native Americans – their removal. It was first introduced by Thomas Jefferson who believed that Indian removal is the only way to ensure the survival of Native American cultures. The main point of this policy was to encourage Indians to move voluntarily to the lands where they would be left alone and not harassed by the white men.
At first Jackson supported both policies but later favored the removal policy as the solution to the controversy. This shift happened partly because of the controversy between the Cherokees and the state of Georgia. Cherokees adopted their own constitution that protected the sovereignty of their land. However, when gold was found on the Cherokees’ land people rushed their looking for it. Of course, Cherokees were not happy about it and that resulted two most prominent cases Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia in 1831 and Worcester vs. Georgia. Cherokee Nation wanted to protect their land from the intruders using the court system. Both cases were won by Cherokees and the government had an obligation to exclude white intruders from the Indian land. Jackson became very angry with that decision and decided to implement the removal policy. However, the actual cause for implementation of this policy was simply a great desire by most white Americans to gain a control over the land of Native Americans and control over the resources that were on that land. Even if the government wanted to protect Indians it had a lack of resources and military to protect them from white farmers, traders, and speculators.
The main goal of Jackson’s policy was to encourage Indians to voluntarily sell their land in exchange for new land in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Doing this Jackson hoped that it would satisfy both parties. White farmers could get new farmland and Native Americans would get peace from disturbers. It was supposed to be voluntarily, however, those that did not want to leave Jackson simply promised to destroy. As the previous military leader Jackson and everybody knew what he was talking about.
During winter of 1831 the Choctaw tribe was the first one to start the Trail of Tears. The government failed its promises to help Indians moving and a lot of them died from epidemic diseases that were easy to get during the winter. Then, in 1836, the Creek faced difficulties during their removal. About 3500 of the tribe’s 15,000 members died along the westward trek. Those who resisted removal were bound in chains and marched in double file.
By 1837, the Jackson had removed 46,000 Native American people from their land east of the Mississippi. Most members of the five southeastern nations were relocated and that opened 25 million acres of land to white me. Jackson’s removal policy can only be appropriately comprehended if it is viewed as a part of a bigger course of the political and economic conquest of frontier regions by expanding nation states. At the beginning of 1800’s, all western nations were piercing into many new frontier areas, including the steppes of Russia, the pampas of Argentina, the veldt of South Africa, the outback of Australia, and the American West. In every region, national expansion was justified on the grounds of strategic interest (to anticipate settlement by other powers) or in the name of opening valuable land to white settlement and development. Almost in each case the expansion was carried through removal all massacring the whole native population.
|
