THE TRAIL OF TEARS ANOTHER STORY

THE TRAIL OF TEARS ANOTHER STORY

For centuries the Cherokee Nation has been recognized as one of the most progressive among American Indian tribes. Before contact with European explorers in the 1500s, Cherokee culture had developed and thrived for almost 1,000 years. Traditionally the Cherokees had lived in villages in the southern Appalachians in areas including present-day Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, western North Carolina, and South Carolina, northern Georgia, and northeastern Alabama. Here in valleys, ridges, mountains, and streams they developed a culture based on farming, hunting, and fishing. Life of the traditional Cherokee remained unchanged as late as 1700, which is marked as the beginning of Cherokee trade with the whites.

After contact, the Cherokees acquired many aspects of the white neighbors with whom many had intermarried. Soon they had shaped a government and a society that matched the most "civilized" of the time. They built European-style homes, laid out European-style fields and farms, developed a written language, established a newspaper, and wrote a constitution. But they found that they were not guaranteed equal protection under the law and that they could not prevent whites from seizing their lands. They were driven from their homes, herded into internment camps, and moved by force to a strange land.

Migration from the original Cherokee Nation began in the early 1800s as Cherokees wary of white encroachment moved west and settled in other areas of the country's vast frontier. White resentment of the Cherokees had been building as other needs were seen for the Cherokee homelands. One of those needs was the desire for gold that had been discovered in Georgia. Besieged with gold fever and with a thirst for expansion, the white communities turned on their Indian neighbors and the U.S. Government decided it was time for the Cherokees to leave behind their farms, their land and their homes. A group known as the Old Settlers had moved in 1817 to lands given to them in Arkansas, where again they established a government and a peaceful way of life. Later they, too, were forced into Indian Territory.

President Andrew Jackson authorized the Indian Removal Act of 1830, following the recommendation of President James Monroe in his final address to Congress in 1825. Jackson sanctioned an attitude that had persisted for many years among many whites. Even Thomas Jefferson, who often cited the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Confederacy as the model for the U.S. Constitution, supported Indian Removal as early as 1802. Jefferson saw the vast Louisiana Territory as a refuge for Eastern Indians as well as a frontier where white settlers could peacefully engage in "economic intercourse" (commerce) with natives. In the context of the times, Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson could be regarded as distinctly progressive in his relations with Native Americans. Long before becoming president, as a general and territorial governor, "Sharp Knife" (as Jackson was known by Southeast Indians) had shown that he could be severe and harsh, but also fair. In all his dealings with Native Americans he showed genuine feelings of concern for their welfare and rights--provided their welfare and rights did not conflict with the United States. His paternalism was appreciated by many chiefs, who regarded him as an honest and strong (though sometimes dangerous) friend. They knew he had taken an Indian orphan into his home and raised the boy as his son; and they knew he welcomed Indians as full-fledged citizens once they adopted the ways of white men. "It will be my sincere and consistent desire," Jackson declared, "to observe toward the Indian tribes within our limits a just and liberal policy, and to give that humane consideration attention to their rights and their wants which is consistent with the habits of our Government and the feelings of our people." Security was Jackson's main concern, but he was also worried about the ultimate extinction of "the Indian race" if they were not protected. He never intended or even imagined the horror that accompanied removal.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 directed the executive branch to negotiate for Indian lands. This act, in combination with the discovery of gold and an increasingly untenable position with the state of Georgia, prompted the Cherokee Nation to bring suit in the U.S. Supreme Court. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) Chief Justice John Marshall, writing for the majority, held that the Cherokee Nation was a "domestic dependent nation," and therefore Georgia state law applied to them. That decision, however, was reversed the following year in Worcester v. Georgia. Under an 1830 law Georgia required all white residents in Cherokee country to secure a license from the governor and to take an oath of allegiance to the state. Missionaries Samuel A. Worcester and Elizur Butler refused and were convicted and imprisoned. Worcester appealed to the Supreme Court. This time the court found that Indian nations are capable of making treaties, that under the Constitution treaties are the supreme law of the land, that the federal government had exclusive jurisdiction within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation, and that state law had no force within the Cherokee boundaries.

President Jackson refused to enforce the court's decision and along with legal technicalities, the fate of the Principal People seemed to be in the hands of the federal government. Even though the Cherokee people had adopted many practices of the white culture, and had used the court system in two major Supreme Court cases, they were unable to halt the removal process. The federal government used the Treaty of New Echota in 1835 to justify the removal. The treaty, signed by about 100 Cherokees and known as the Treaty Party, relinquished all lands east of the Mississippi River in exchange for land in Indian Territory and the promise of money, livestock, and various provisions and tools. When the pro-removal Cherokee leaders signed that treaty, they also signed their own death warrants. The Cherokee National Council earlier had passed a law that called for the death penalty for anyone who agreed to give up tribal land. The signing and the removal led to bitter factionalism and the deaths of most of the Treaty Party leaders in Indian Territory. Opposition to the removal was led by Chief John Ross, a mixed-blood of Scottish and one-eighth Cherokee descent. The Ross party and most Cherokees opposed the New Echota Treaty, but Georgia and the U.S. Government prevailed and used it as justification to force almost all of the 17,000 Cherokees from the southeastern homelands.
Technically, President Jackson did not move the Cherokee and other Indian nations from Georgia to Oklahoma, the Army did. Jackson ordered the Army to enforce the law (the Indian Removal Act). The Indians had a two-year grace period to prepare for the move and get started voluntarily. Some Cherokees resigned themselves to their fate, packed their belongings, and headed west. The majority did not, hoping for a miracle. When the two-year grace period expired, Jackson had left office and President Martin Van Buren ordered the removal to begin. Under orders from President Van Buren, the U.S. Army began enforcement of the Removal Act in the summer of 1838. The Cherokee villages were ransacked, looted and burned by militiamen. In a single week 17,000 Cherokees were rounded up and headed to a concentration camp where many grew sick and died while awaiting transport to the west. Then they were boxed like cattle onto steam boats and railroad cars. Around 3,000 Cherokees loaded onto boats that traveled the Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi, and Arkansas Rivers into Indian Territory. For the last leg of the journey they walked. In the winter of 1838-39, 14,000 Indians were marched 1,200 miles through Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas into rugged Indian Territory. Food provided by the federal government arrived late or mysteriously disappeared. Many starved. An estimated 4,000 died from hunger, exposure and disease. The journey became an eternal memory as the "trail where they cried" for the Cherokees and other removed tribes. Today it is remembered as the Trail of Tears.

"I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward the west....On the morning of November the 17th we encountered a terrific sleet and snow storm with freezing temperatures and from that day until we reached the end of the fateful journey on March the 26th 1839, the sufferings of the Cherokees were awful. The trail of the exiles was a trail of death. They had to sleep in the wagons and on the ground without fire. And I have known as many as twenty-two of them to die in one night of pneumonia due to ill treatment, cold and exposure....
"
Private John G. Burnett
Captain Abraham McClellan's Company,
2nd Regiment, 2nd Brigade, Mounted Infantry
Cherokee Indian Removal 1838-39

Fortunately, despite their horrible mistreatment by the government, the Cherokee endured. Those who were able to hide in the mountains of North Carolina or who had agreed to exchange Cherokee citizenship for U.S. citizenship later emerged as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians of Cherokee, N.C. The descendants of the survivors of the Trail of Tears comprise today's Cherokee Nation with membership of more than 165,000. Jackson was no longer President of the United States when the Trail of Tears took place, and it had never occurred to him that this would be the result of his policy, but it was his insistence on the speedy removal of the Cherokee, by force if necessary, that caused this atrocity. It could be said that Jackson did indeed save them from extinction, but the cost in human suffering was awfully high and surely unnecessary.