Lecture Notes – Indian Removal – Displacement and Marginalization

Thomas Jefferson never removed any Native Americans. However, in private letters he did suggest
various ideas for removing tribes from enclaves in the East to their own new lands in lands west of
the Mississippi. Indian Removal was passed by Congress in 1831, long after he died. Before and during
his presidency, Jefferson discussed the need for respect, brotherhood, and trade with the Native
Americans, and he initially believed that causing them to adopt European-style agriculture and
modes of living would allow them to quickly "progress" from "savagery" to "civilization". In contrast
to his views about blacks, Jefferson believed that Indians and whites could live peacefully together if
the Indians abandoned their hunting and nomadic ways and took up farming. If they farmed, they
would need less land. Jefferson and Madison insisted that the Indians be compensated fairly for ceded
land and that only those Indians with a claim to the land they were ceding be allowed to conclude
treaties with whites. Beginning in 1803, Jefferson's private letters show increasing support for the idea
of removal. Jefferson maintained that Indians had land "to spare" and, he thought, would willingly
exchange it for guaranteed supplies of food and equipment.

Acculturation and assimilation

Andrew Jackson is often credited with initiating Indian Removal, because Congress passed the Indian
Removal Act in 1831, during his presidency, and also because of his personal involvement in the
forceful removal of many Eastern Indian tribes. Congress was implementing suggestions laid out by
Jefferson in a series of private letters that began in 1804, although Jefferson did not implement the
plan during his own presidency. The rise of Napoleon in Europe, and rumour of a possible transfer of
the Louisiana Territory from the Spanish empire to the more aggressive French, was cause for
consternation amongst some people in the American republic. Jefferson advocated for the militarization
of the Western border, along the Mississippi River. He felt that the best way to accomplish this was to
flood the area with a large population of white settlements.

Still recovering from the American Revolutionary War, the U.S. federal government was unable to risk
starting a broad conflict with the powerful tribes that surrounded their borders. They were worried
that this would cause a broader Indian War, and which would perhaps be joined by Britain, France or
Spain. In his instructions to Meriwether Lewis, Jefferson emphasized the necessity for treating all
Indian tribes in the most conciliatory manner.

Jefferson wanted to expand his borders into the Indian territories, without causing a full-blown war.
Jefferson's original plan was to get native women pregnant to give up their own cultures, religions,
and lifestyles in favour of western European culture, Christian religion, and a
sedentary agricultural lifestyle. Jefferson's expectation was that by assimilating the natives into a
market-based, agricultural society and stripping them of their self-sufficiency, they would become
economically heavily dependent on trade with white Americans, and would thereby be willing to
give up land that they would otherwise not part with, in exchange for trade goods or to resolve
unpaid debts.

In an 1803 private letter to William Henry Harrison, Jefferson wrote:

To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries,
which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and
influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond
what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.... In this way
our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either
incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is
certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it
is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is
now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our

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Lecture Notes – Indian Removal – Displacement and Marginalization

liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough
to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across
the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our
final consolidation.

Jefferson believed that this strategy would "get rid of this pest, without giving offence or umbrage to the
Indians". He stated that Harrison was to keep the contents of the letter "sacred" and "kept within
[Harrison's] own breast, and especially how improper for the Indians to understand. For their interests and their
tranquility, it is best they should see only the present age of their history."

Forced removal

In cases where Native tribes resisted assimilation, Jefferson believed that to avoid war and probable
extermination they should be forcefully relocated and sent west.[6] As Jefferson put it in a letter to
Alexander von Humboldt in 1813:

You know, my friend, the benevolent plan we were pursuing here for the happiness of the aboriginal
inhabitants in our vicinities. We spared nothing to keep them at peace with one another. To teach them
agriculture and the rudiments of the most necessary arts, and to encourage industry by establishing
among them separate property. In this way they would have been enabled to subsist and multiply on
a moderate scale of landed possession. They would have mixed their blood with ours, and been
amalgamated and identified with us within no distant period of time. On the commencement of our
present war, we pressed on them the observance of peace and neutrality, but the interested and
unprincipled policy of England has defeated all our labors for the salvation of these unfortunate people.
They have seduced the greater part of the tribes within our neighbourhood, to take up the hatchet
against us, and the cruel massacres they have committed on the women and children of our frontiers
taken by surprise, will oblige us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats
beyond our reach.

He told his Secretary of War, General Henry Dearborn (who was the primary government official
responsible for Indian affairs): "if we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never
lay it down until that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi."

Jefferson's first promotions of Indian Removal were between 1776 and 1779, when he recommended
forcing the Cherokee and Shawnee tribes to be driven out of their ancestral homelands to lands west
of the River. Indian removal, said Jefferson, was the only way to ensure the survival of Native
American peoples. His first such act as president, was to make a deal with the state of Georgia that
if Georgia were to release its legal claims to discovery in lands to the west, then the U.S. military
would help forcefully expel the Cherokee people from Georgia. At the time, the Cherokee had
a treaty with the United States government which guaranteed them the right to their lands, which
was violated in Jefferson's deal with Georgia.

American Indian Resistance to White Expansion

North American Indians had been accustomed to dealing with Europeans long before the United
States came into existence. For two centuries Indians traded, intermarried, allied with, and fought
against the various groups of newcomers. The people of the United States, however, represented
something new in their seemingly limitless appetite for Indian land. For many native people, a long
struggle to contain this aggressively expansionist nation consumed the eras of the Revolution and new
Republic.

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Lecture Notes – Indian Removal – Displacement and Marginalization

A war for Indian Independence

Many Indians fought in the Revolution, most of them on the side of the British. In joining they acted
less out of loyalty to the king than from an awareness that American settlers threatened their land and
freedom. Some Cherokees, for example, saw the Revolution as an opportunity to punish squatters and
regain territory lost to Virginia and the Carolinas over the previous decade. Against the advice of older
leaders, Cherokee warriors began raiding backcountry settlements soon after the start of the conflict. In
the Ohio Valley, Delaware and Shawnee leaders at first tried to keep their people neutral. Americans,
however, treated both tribes as enemies, and soon Delaware and Shawnee warriors accepted British
offers of alliance. For the Iroquois Six Nations, the Revolution became a civil war. The Mohawks,
Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas joined the British, whereas the Oneidas and Tuscaroras sided with
the Americans.

The Revolution brought terrible destruction to Indian country. In the South, Americans responded to
Cherokee raiding with punitive expeditions that burned crops and villages and drove whole
communities into flight. In the North, Britain's Iroquois allies suffered similar forays, including John
Sullivan's infamous 1779 raid, in which Americans burned some forty Iroquois towns. Yet for all of the
damage, the fighting was inconclusive. When invading armies left, native people often returned, and
in 1783 Indians still controlled most of the interior. The Treaty of Paris, signed that year, ended the
Revolutionary War and granted the United States all territory east of the Mississippi, but from an Indian
perspective this was a fraud. The British had no right to give away these tribal homelands. Americans
claimed the interior, but Indians possessed it. In those circumstances, conflict was bound to be renewed.

Indian unity against the new Republic

Soon after the Revolution ended, the United States began pressuring tribes for land cessions. Believing
they were dealing with conquered peoples, American treaty commissioners tried to dictate new
territorial borders. They worked to gain possession of Indian country piece by piece, signing
agreements with single tribes and, if that failed, with particular factions or individuals. American
citizens, meanwhile, pushed westward, with settlers and land speculators ignoring any and all
boundaries. In response, northern Indian leaders attempted to unite their peoples in common defense.
The Mohawk Joseph Brant, the Shawnee leader Blue Jacket, and others built a multitribal alliance,
rejecting the earlier treaties and insisting that future land cessions be made only with the tribes'
unanimous consent. In 1786 they informed Congress that they wanted the Ohio River to be a firm
boundary between the new Republic and the Indian nations. That arrangement, they suggested, would
be fair to everyone and would promote peaceful coexistence. If the Americans continued to demand
land beyond the Ohio, however, the united tribes would fight for their homes.

Confederation was not a new strategy. Before the Revolution, Indians had attempted similar alliances,
the most famous being the movement named for the Ottawa leader Pontiac. In 1763 this coalition
of Great Lakes and Ohio Valley tribes attempted to rid the Northwest of the British. Indians seized
seven military posts and killed some 2,500 soldiers and settlers before disease and the British army
broke the "rebellion." The confederacy of the 1780s reflected what was, by then, a well-established
political tradition.

The Indians' effort to contain American expansion led to war, and for a time the confederacy had the
better of the fighting. On two occasions multitribal forces led by Blue Jacket and the Miamis' Little
Turtle defeated invading American armies—in 1790 near modern-day Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the
next year in northwestern Ohio. In the wake of those victories, however, the confederacy began to
splinter, as some leaders (among them Joseph Brant) advocated negotiation over continued war. In 1794
General Anthony Wayne led a third invasion, besting an outnumbered Indian force at the Battle of
Fallen Timbers in northwest Ohio. That defeat broke what was left of the Indian alliance, and in 1795,
in the Treaty of Greenville, tribal representatives assented to large new land cessions in return for
American promises that their remaining territory would be secure.

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Lecture Notes – Indian Removal – Displacement and Marginalization

Prophecy and Resistance – Tecumseh’s Vision

While white farmers sought to take Indians' land, other Americans pursued their minds and souls.
Missionaries, teachers, and government agents worked to "civilize" native peoples, urging them to
change their economies and abandon their religions and languages. The men and women involved
in this effort assumed that when confronted by a "superior" society, Indians would be destroyed if they
did not join the new order. They also anticipated that as Native Americans discarded their old ways
they would become willing to part with much of their land. The eradication of Indian cultures, they
believed, would promote the growth of the Republic while rescuing native people from annihilation.

Few Indians accepted the logic of the civilization campaign. They adopted specific elements of Euro-
American cultures that they found attractive, but they seldom sought the kind of wholesale
transformation desired by agents and missionaries. Some Indians, meanwhile, responded to cultural
pressure by actively rejecting white ways. This resistance often took religious form. In the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, prophets appeared in many tribes, holy men who taught
that the acceptance of Euro-American culture had weakened the Indians and angered the Creator.
Indians needed to purify themselves, casting away at least some foreign practices and ideas, if they
were to restore order to their lives and communities. Together, the prophets represented an ongoing
Indian effort to regain spiritual power and autonomy in a world unbalanced by colonization.

Although some prophets opposed warfare, others played crucial roles in maintaining the armed
defense of Indian land. Pontiac's movement, for example, drew inspiration from the Delaware prophet
Neolin. Something similar occurred in the early nineteenth century with the last, and most famous,
effort to create an Indian confederacy. Like other holy men before him, the Shawnee Prophet,
Tenskwatawa, taught that Indians must reject Euro-American religion, goods, and economic
practices if they were to regain the favor of the Creator. This message, which he began preaching in
1805, won him followers from a variety of northwestern tribes. Tenskwatawa's brother, Tecumseh,
shaped that religious revival into a new movement for Indian unity. Like the previous generation
of leaders, he urged an end to land cessions and criticized chiefs who continued to sign American
treaties. He travelled throughout the interior, inviting tribes to join together to restrain the United
States.

As in the 1790s, the effort to create an Indian confederacy ended in war. In 1811 an army led by William
Henry Harrison marched against Prophets-town, Tenskwatawa's village, while Tecumseh was away.
In the Battle of Tippecanoe, the prophet's followers ambushed the Americans as they camped near the
village; but Harrison's troops drove the attackers back, forcing the Indians to abandon Prophetstown.

In 1809, no American was more eager to acquire Indian lands than William Henry Harrison, the
governor of the Indiana Territory. The federal government had just divided Indiana, splitting off the
present states of Illinois and Wisconsin into a separate Illinois Territory. Harrison recognized that,
shorn of Illinois, Indiana would not achieve statehood unless it could attract more settlers by offering
them land currently owned by Indians. Disregarding instructions from Washington to negotiate only
with Indians who claimed the land they were ceding, Harrison rounded up a delegation of half-starved
Indians, none of whom lived on the rich lands along the Wabash River that he craved. By the Treaty of
Fort Wayne in September 1809, these Indians ceded millions of acres along the Wabash at a price of two
cents an acre.

This treaty outraged the numerous tribes that had not been party to it. Among the angriest were
Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief, and his brother, Lalawéthica. Late in 1805, Lalawéthica had had a
frightening dream in which he saw drunken Indians tormented for eternity. Overnight, Lalawéthica
was transformed from a drunken misfit into a preacher. He gave up liquor and began pleading with
Indians to return to their old ways and to avoid contact with whites. He quickly became known as the
Prophet. Soon, he would take a new name, Tenskwatawa, styling himself the “Open Door” through
which all Indians could revitalize their culture. Shawnees listened to his message.

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Lecture Notes – Indian Removal – Displacement and Marginalization

In the meantime, Tecumseh sought to build a coalition of several tribes to stem the tide of white
settlement. He insisted that Indian lands belonged collectively to all the tribes and hence could not be
sold by splinter groups. Failing to reach a settlement with Tecumseh or the Prophet, Harrison
concluded that it was time to attack the Indians. His target was a Shawnee encampment called
Prophetstown near the mouth of the Tippecanoe River. With Tecumseh away recruiting southern
Indians to his cause, Tenskwatawa ordered an attack on Harrison’s encampment, a mile from
Prophetstown, in the predawn hours of November 7, 1811. Outnumbered two to one and short of
ammunition, Tenskwatawa’s force was beaten off after inflicting heavy casualties.

Although it was a small engagement, the Battle of Tippecanoe had several large effects. It made
Harrison a national hero, and the memory of the battle would contribute to his election as president
three decades later. It discredited Tenskwatawa, whose conduct during the battle drew criticism from
his followers. It elevated Tecumseh into a position of recognized leadership among the western tribes.
Finally, it persuaded Tecumseh, who long had distrusted the British as much as the Americans, that
alliance with the British was the only way to stop the spread of American settlement. The following
year, the Indians' conflict with the United States merged with the War of 1812. Tecumseh allied with
the British, hoping to use the war to end American expansion. The Indians enjoyed some military
success, but when the fighting closed the United States retained possession of the Northwest. Tecumseh
himself was killed in 1813 at the Battle of the Thames in southeast Ontario. With his death, and in the
absence of a British victory, the last movement to create an eastern Indian alliance unravelled.

Different strategies – the Cherokee Nation

Westward-moving white settlers found sizable numbers of Native Americans in their paths,
particularly in the South, home to the so-called Five Civilized Tribes: the Cherokees, Choctaws,
Creeks, Chickasaws, and Seminoles. In the South, these tribes adopted a different path. As Tecumseh
worked to form a confederacy, Cherokees began building a centralized political system for their tribe.
This was partly a response to American land hunger. Tribal leaders hoped that a strong national
government would prevent individuals and faction leaders from negotiating their own treaties. It also
reflected the Cherokees' accommodation to Euro-American culture. Years of commercial dealings and
intermarriage with whites had created in these tribes, especially the Cherokees, an influential minority
of mixed-bloods who embraced Christianity, practiced agriculture, raised livestock, spun cloth, built
gristmills, and even owned slaves. One of their chiefs, Sequoyah, devised a written form of their
language; other Cherokees published a bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. A segment of the
tribe, meanwhile, undertook a more thorough change, entering the market economy as owners of
businesses and plantations and seeking Euro-American education for their children. This latter group
led the move toward political centralization, although often with the agreement of more traditional
Cherokees. The culmination of the trend came with the framing of the 1827 Cherokee Constitution,
which created a government modelled on that of the United States and declared that government to be
the only authority capable of selling Cherokee land. Creeks likewise began centralization, particularly
after the Creek War of 1813–1814. The national council took control of tribal law, drafting and enforcing
national statutes. Politics, however, remained far more decentralized than among the Cherokees, and
the Creeks did not adopt a national constitution until the 1860s.

The “civilization” of the southern Indians impressed New England missionaries more than southern
whites, who viewed the Civilized Tribes with contempt and their land with envy. Presidents James
Monroe and John Quincy Adams had concluded several treaties with Indian tribes providing for their
voluntary removal to public lands west of the Mississippi River. Although some assimilated mixed
bloods sold their tribal lands to the government, other mixed-bloods resisted because their prosperity
depended on trade with close-by whites. In addition, full bloods, the majority even in the “civilized”
tribes, clung to their land and customs. They wanted to remain near the burial grounds of their
ancestors and condemned mixed-bloods who bartered away tribal lands to whites. When the Creek
mixed blood chief William McIntosh sold all Creek lands in Georgia and two-thirds of Creek lands in
Alabama to the government in the Treaty of Indian Springs (1825), a Creek tribal council executed
him.

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Lecture Notes – Indian Removal – Displacement and Marginalization

During the 1820s, whites in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi intensified pressure on the Indians by
surveying tribal lands and squatting on them. Southern legislatures, loath to restrain white settlers,
moved to expropriate Indian lands unless the Indians moved west. State laws extended state
jurisdiction over the tribes, which effectively outlawed tribal government, and excluded Indians from
serving as witnesses in court cases involving whites, which made it difficult for Indians to collect debts
owed them by whites.

These measures delighted President Andrew Jackson. Reared on the frontier and sharing its contempt
for Indians, Jackson believed it was ridiculous to treat the Indians as independent nations; rather, they
should be subject to the laws of the states where they lived. This position spelled doom for the Indians,
who could not vote or hold state office. In 1830, Jackson secured passage of the Indian Removal Act,
which authorized him to exchange public lands in the West for Indian territories in the East and
appropriated $500,000 to cover the expenses of removal. But the real costs of removal, human and
monetary, were vastly greater. During Jackson’s eight years in office, the federal government forced
Indians to exchange 100 million acres of their lands for 32 million acres of public lands. In the late 1820s
and early 1830s, the Choctaws, Creeks, and Chickasaws started their “voluntary” removal to the West.
In 1836, Creeks who clung to their homes were forcibly removed, many in chains. Most Seminoles were
removed from Florida, but only after a bitter war between 1835 and 1842 that cost the federal
government $20 million.

Ironically, the Cherokees, often considered the “most civilized” tribe, suffered the worst fate. By the
end of the 1820s the Cherokees had become one of the most important targets of the aforementioned
removal policy, the United States' campaign to persuade the major eastern tribes to trade their lands
for new homes west of the Mississippi. In 1827, with the Cherokees proclaiming themselves an
independent republic within Georgia, the state of Georgia demanded, with increasing fervor, that
the federal government must end Indian possession of land within its borders, citing an 1802 agreement
in which the federal government had promised to do just that. Federal officials urged the Cherokees to
cooperate, offering them new lands and pledges of future security, and some did choose to migrate. By
the late 1820s, however, those who remained were determined to preserve their homes, and the United
States faced the choice of either reneging on its promise to Georgia or violating its treaties with the
Cherokees in order to force the tribe out.

The balance in this standoff tipped in Georgia's favor with the presidential election of 1828. Andrew
Jackson was a long-time advocate of the removal policy, and Georgia's leaders took his victory as an
invitation to force their claim to Cherokee land. Soon after the election, the state legislature passed an
act to absorb tribal territory into existing Georgia counties. It then extended state law over the
Cherokees and established a process to parcel out the tribal lands to Georgia citizens. The Cherokees
responded by asking the federal government to protect the tribe, as promised in the treaties. The new
president, however, refused to act.

Some in the South expected violence, but the Cherokees chose different methods of resistance. Led by
Principal Chief John Ross, they lobbied Congress, seeking allies among Jackson's political opponents.
They conducted what modern Americans would call public relations campaigns, appealing in
particular to opinion in the North. They received aid in these efforts from reformers and
philanthropists, including missionaries with ties to the tribe. Using the Cherokees' reputation as
"civilized Indians," Cherokee chief Ross and his allies argued that the Cherokees had done everything
Americans ever asked and wanted only to be left unmolested to continue their progress. When the
Jackson administration ignored their appeals, they sought to compel federal action through petitioning
the U.S. Supreme Court for an injunction to halt Georgia’s attempt to claim state jurisdiction over their
“nation.”, a strategy that resulted in two of the most important cases in Native American legal
history: Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832). In the second of these
cases, Chief Justice John Marshall affirmed the Cherokees' right to self-government and acknowledged
that, under the treaties, the federal government had a duty to protect the tribe from Georgia and its
citizens.

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Lecture Notes – Indian Removal – Displacement and Marginalization

The Cherokees won the day in court, and they gained a great many sympathetic allies. They did not,
however, defeat Georgia and Jackson. Reportedly sneering, “John Marshall has made his decision;
now let him enforce it,” President Jackson ignored the Supreme Court's decision, and his lieutenants
continued to press the Cherokees for a removal treaty. In 1834, Cherokee chief John Ross got a taste of
what state jurisdiction meant; Georgia, without consulting him, put his house up as a prize in the state
lottery. In this increasingly desperate situation, some Cherokees broke with the tribal government and
began to advocate emigration. In 1835, arguing that the battle had been lost, this "Treaty Party"
negotiated and signed a removal agreement, the Treaty of New Echota (1835), which ceded all
Cherokee lands in the United States for $5.6 million and free passage west. The Cherokee government
continued to resist, leaders insisting (correctly) that the Treaty Party did not represent the tribal
majority. The U.S Congress ratified this treaty (by one vote), but the vast majority of Cherokees
denounced it. In 1839, a Cherokee party took revenge by murdering its three principal signers,
including a former editor of the Cherokee Phoenix. The Cherokee fate, however, was sealed; the end of
their story was simple and tragic. In 1838, federal troops began to implement the agreement, gathering
Cherokees together for the long journey west. By the time the last group arrived in Indian
Territory (today, eastern Oklahoma) in early 1839, at least four thousand Cherokees had died either in
camps prior to departure or while traveling west along what became known as the “Trail of Tears”.

In the end, the Cherokees, like Tecumseh's confederacy, failed to keep Americans at bay. In the
twentieth century, however, it would be the Cherokees' methods that would help Native
Americans regain some of their property and autonomy. Political organizing, public relations, and the
law would be the weapons of the new warriors.

Bibliography

Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American
Communities. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Champagne, Duane. Social Order and Political Change: Constitutional Governments among the Cherokee, the
Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Creek. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992.

Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–
1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

——. War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Edmunds, R. David. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

McLoughlin, William G. Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1986.

Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1998.

Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green, eds. The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents. Boston:
Bedford Books, 1995.

Sugden, John. Tecumseh: A Life. New York: Holt, 1998.