Indian Removal Act

Many Europeans thought Native Americans to be a savage people. However, euro-native relations varied, particularly between the French and English colonies.[12] New France, which was established in the Great Lakes region, generally pursued a cooperative relationship with the Native tribes, with the existence of certain traditions such as marriage à la façon du pays, a marriage between tradesmen (coureur des bois) and Native women. This tradition was seen as a fundamental social and political institution that helped maintain relations and bond the two cultures. Many of the missionaries were also known to teach the tribes how to use iron tools, build European-style homes, and improve farming techniques; teachings the Wyandot, who maintained a century long friendship with French Canadians, would spread on to other tribes as they relocated to the Maumee Valley.[13] Throughout the 17th and 18th century during the Beaver and French and Indian Wars, the greatest number of and most powerful tribes tended to side with the French, though other tribes such as the Iroquois supported the English for various strategic reasons. For strategic economic and military purposes, the French also had a practice of building forts and trading posts within Native villages, such as that of Fort Miami in Indiana within the Miami village of Kekionga. However, the belief in European cultural and racial superiority was generally widespread among high ranking colonial officials and clergymen in this period.

During American colonial times, many colonialists and particularly the English felt their civilization to be superior: they were Christians, and they believed their notions of private property to be a superior system of land tenure. Colonial and frontier encroachers inflicted a practice of cultural assimilation, meaning that tribes such as the Cherokee were forced to adopt aspects of white civilization. This acculturation was originally proposed by George Washington and was well underway among the Cherokee and the Choctaw by the beginning of the 19th century.[14] Native peoples were encouraged to adopt European customs. First, they were forced to convert to Christianity and abandon traditional religious practices. They were also required to learn to speak and read English, although there was interest in creating a writing and printing system for a few Native languages, especially Cherokee, exemplified by Sequoyah's Cherokee syllabary. The Native Americans also had to adopt settler values, such as monogamous marriage and abandon non-marital sex. Finally, they had to accept the concept of individual ownership of land and other property (including, in some instances, African people as slaves). Many Cherokee people adopted all, or some, of these practices, including Cherokee chief John Ross, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot, as represented by the newspaper he edited, The Cherokee Phoenix.[15]

Despite the adoption of white cultural values by many Indians and tribes, the United States government began a systematic effort to remove Native peoples from the Southeast.[16] The Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, Seminole, and original Cherokee nations[lower-alpha 2] had been established as autonomous nations in the southeastern United States.

Andrew Jackson sought to renew a policy of political and military action for the removal of the Natives from these lands and worked toward enacting a law for "Indian removal".[17][18][15][19][20] In his 1829 State of the Union address, Jackson called for Indian removal.[21]

The Indian Removal Act was put in place to annex Native land and then transfer that ownership to Southern states, especially Georgia. The Act was passed in 1830, although dialogue had been ongoing since 1802 between Georgia and the federal government concerning the possibility of such an act. Ethan Davis states that "the federal government had promised Georgia that it would extinguish Indian title within the state's borders by purchase 'as soon as the such purchase could be made upon reasonable terms'".[22] As time passed, Southern states began to speed up the expulsions by claiming that the deal between Georgia and the federal government was invalid and that Southern states could pass laws extinguishing Indian title themselves. In response, the federal government passed the Indian Removal Act on May 28, 1830, in which President Jackson agreed to divide the United States territory west of the Mississippi River into districts for tribes to replace the land from which they were removed.

In the 1823 case of Johnson v. McIntosh, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision stating that Indians could occupy and control lands within the United States but could not hold title to those lands.[23] Jackson viewed the union as a federation of highly esteemed states, as was common before the American Civil War. He opposed Washington's policy of establishing treaties with Indian tribes as if they were sovereign foreign nations. Thus, the creation of Indian jurisdictions was a violation of state sovereignty under Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution. As Jackson saw it, either Indians comprised sovereign states (which violated the Constitution) or were subject to the laws of existing states of the Union. Jackson urged Indians to assimilate and obey state laws. Further, he believed he could only accommodate the desire for Native self-rule in federal territories, which required resettlement on Federal lands west of the Mississippi River.[24][25]

• Brands, H.W. (2006). Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times. Anchor. ISBN 978-1-4000-3072-9.