Moving the Native AmericansNative American Resistance

A. President Andrew Jackson supported relocating Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi River. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830. The federal government paid Native Americans to move west.

B. Jackson also sent officials to negotiate treaties with the southeastern Native Americans. In 1834 Congress created the Indian Territory (a region in present-day Oklahoma) for Native Americans from the southeast.

C. The Cherokee Nation refused to give up its land in Georgia. Treaties of the 1790s recognized the Cherokee people as a separate nation with their own laws, but Georgia did not recognize the Cherokee laws. In the Supreme Court case Worcester v. Georgia in 1832, the Cherokee sued the state. Chief Justice Marshall ruled that Georgia had no right to interfere with the Cherokee. Further, the Court stated that only the federal government had authority over matters involving the Cherokee. President Jackson disagreed and supported Georgia’s efforts to remove the Cherokee.

D. In 1835 a few Cherokee signed a treaty giving up their land, but most of the 17,000 Cherokee refused to honor it. General Winfield Scott and an army of 7,000 federal troops came to remove the Cherokee and threatened force if they did not leave. The long Cherokee march west began and became known as the Trail of Tears, the trail along which they cried.

A. Black Hawk led a group of Sauk and Fox people back to Illinois in 1832 to recapture the land given up in a treaty. State and federal troops used force to chase them into the Mississippi River and slaughtered most of the Native Americans as they tried to flee westward into present-day Iowa. The troops killed hundreds.

B. The Seminole people of Florida successfully resisted removal. They went to war instead. In 1835 the Seminole and a group of African Americans together attacked white settlements along the Florida coast. They used guerrilla tactics successfully against the American soldiers. By 1842 more than 1,500 American soldiers had died. The government finally gave up and let some of the Seminole remain in Florida. However, many of them had died in the long war, and many were captured and forced to move west.

C. Only a few scattered groups of Native Americans lived east of the Mississippi River after 1842. Most had been removed from their lands. They gave up more than 100 million acres east of the Mississippi and received about $68 million dollars and 32 million acres of land west of the Mississippi. They lived in reservations, divided by nations.