A national shame: the 1830 Indian Removal Act

Portrayed by history as an enemy of the Indian, Andrew Jackson’s actual feelings on the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole) warrant deeper scrutiny. Like many politicians, he knew where and when to present his case with conciliatory language, and when to brashly lay his true intentions bare. The action of which he was the principal orchestrator, and which has compelled many tribes to hold him in infamy, is the 1830 Indian Removal Act, or more popularly known as, the Trail of Tears.

“…I informed the Indians inhabiting parts of Georgia and Alabama that their attempt to establish an independent government would not be countenanced by the Executive of the United States,” Jackson said in his 1829 State of the Union, “and advised them to emigrate beyond the Mississippi or submit to the laws of those States.”

Jackson’s State of the Union focused on tribal attempts to establish sovereign nations within the confines of the United States, and within the confines of a specific state.

“A portion, however, of the Southern tribes,” he said, “having mingled much with the whites and made some progress in the arts of civilized life, have lately attempted to erect an independent government within the limits of Georgia and Alabama. These States, claiming to be the only sovereigns within their territories, extended their laws over the Indians, which induced the latter to call upon the United States for protection.”

Jackson talked about how a tribe unwilling to transition to the white man’s culture was doomed, but then reasoned that a tribe which did adopt the arts of white civilization, and refused to surrender tribal identity and sovereignty, was equally doomed.

By acknowledging this “savage doom” for past tribes, Jackson used it as pretext for humanely protecting the Five Civilized Tribes from same: “That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the States does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity.”

Jackson does argue that a sovereign Indian nation cannot exist within the borders of a sovereign state, and history indicates this was his actual intent, to destroy any attempt by any tribe to establish a sovereign presence independent of state jurisdiction (especially one replete with a tribal government and constitution, and a viable tribally created economy, which the Cherokee had). But he shrewdly packaged this imperative as a logical consequence of a compassionate concern for the fate of these tribes, given the culture crushing pressure the government endorsed white encroachment was sure to produce. Jackson argued these tribes had to be removed west for their own good. He described what awaited them out west: “…I suggest for your consideration the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi, and without the limits of any State or Territory now formed, to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes as long as they shall occupy it, each tribe having a distinct control over the portion designated for its use. There they may be secured in the enjoyment of governments of their own choice, subject to no other control from the United States than such as may be necessary to preserve peace on the frontier and between the several tribes.”

A chain of events was now set in motion that would devastate these tribes, and produce acts of national shame hard to justify even liberally conceding the culturally crude tenor of that time. First up, the Indian Removal Act, signed into law by Jackson on May, 30, 1830. Although it passed the Senate easily, the House barely ratified it. In the battle line drawn over this Act, we see the fissure begin that would result in secession and Civil War some thirty years later.

All the Act initially did was empower the president to negotiate with tribes for their removal to Indian Territory, and it took almost a decade before the removal was critically complete. Once the tribes arrived in Oklahoma, they found members of their own tribes already established, having left decades before assuming this would be the ultimate outcome of the conflict back home. The established were not especially eager to welcome the newcomers. Worse still, the Indians who had already called Oklahoma home for centuries, were not happy to see any of these eastern tribes invading their hunting grounds. Among these Indians were the Comanche, one of the most militarily formidable tribes in American history. Even they did not have the power to drive the dispossessed from Oklahoma, but they spent decades terrorizing them in hit and run raids.

However, before any of this transpired came something much more terrible, the actual removal and relocation itself, the Trail of Tears.

The first tribe to be removed were 17,000 Choctaw, that removal beginning in 1831, and completed by 1833. About one third died along the way. Five years later, almost 17,000 Cherokee were removed, and about a third of them died along the way. By 1850 almost all had been removed and forced to relocate in Oklahoma. Most of these tribes were forced to pay for their own forced removal.

Obviously, grisly accounts of the suffering capable of killing ten thousand forcibly relocated people abound. It is hard for modern day Americans to comprehend the kind of calloused animosity it took to perpetrate such a barbaric act against a peaceably cooperating people. We look back at history as if history itself did these things, and not human beings, and not just any human beings, but our ancestors, in many cases, our heroes, like “Old Hickory.”

People of conscience were many at the time, and they put forth great effort to prevent the Act from ever being passed, or the removal from ever happening. And yet, we never see them praised as heroes of history; it is as if the calamity which befell these tribes was akin to an act of God, something that just happened, like a flood or a tornado. People didn’t do it, especially Americans. History did it.

We think that the sanctimony, the bigotry, the myopic self-interest that fueled such injustice is shackled in the past, and cannot express itself in our modern day hearts and minds, but Jackson was an intelligent and articulate man, and when sure of his power, when sure he had the ear of the majority, and was their champion, he wrote this: “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?”

The mentality of those arriving in the west, with millions of square miles there to be taken from whatever tribe called them home, needed to be refactored to justify the taking. After so many decades of rationalizing the reality about them, even an otherwise kind and decent man, like L. Frank Baum, creator of the Wizard of Oz, was moved to write these unforgettable words, following the murder of Sitting Bull: “The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.”

Never a better textbook example of how first dehumanizing an enemy frees a people to proceed however they wish against them.

A people can be caught up in a manifest destiny so unapologetically perverse they cannot even abide by the dictates of their own laws and morality, and in this, Baum was no isolated case. Not two years after the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Supreme Court, headed up by Chief Justice John Marshall, ruled (Worcester v Georgia) that states have no criminal jurisdiction in Indian Country. President Jackson’s reply, which many revisionist apologists today claim was apocryphal, speaks to the heart of how far a people can stoop to defend their self-interest over their own laws and honor: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”

The fate of Indian Territory, once a guaranteed sanctuary of self-governance by Jackson, illustrates again, how laws and morality are easily manipulated to advance the self-interest of the oppressor. In 1889, the Oklahoma Land Rush, 50,000 people madly scrambling to claim two million acres, ended any pretense that any tribes would ever be left with their own country. These stolen lands were called “the Unassigned Lands,” to give a proper legal sound to the legislative chicanery that created them, that took them from the land promised to tribes forever.

Boiled down, it comes to this: you tell a tribe to take up the arts of civilization if they want to keep their land, and when they do, you take their land for doing just that, march them thousands of miles from home, make them pay for the march, leave them at the mercy of the powerful tribes they find there, and when they do rebuild their land, take most of it back once again and give it to white settlers. This is the true history of the Indian Removal Act of May, 30, 1830.

(Contact James Giago Davies at skindiesel@msn.com)

The post A national shame: the 1830 Indian Removal Act first appeared on Native Sun News Today.

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