The Indian Removal Act

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 gave President Andrew Jackson the authority to negotiate the exchange of Native lands in the East for territory west of the Mississippi, and it became the legal engine for clearing the Southeast of its original inhabitants. The pressure behind it was the explosive growth of the cotton economy, which made the rich lands of the Five Civilized Tribes—Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole—irresistibly valuable to white planters. Jackson, a veteran of the Creek War, championed removal as both policy and personal conviction.

Although the act spoke of voluntary and negotiated exchange, in practice removal was carried out through coercion, fraudulent treaties signed by unrepresentative minorities, and ultimately military force. Over the following decade tens of thousands of people were driven west to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, suffering staggering losses of life along the way. The Cherokee Trail of Tears is the best known of these ordeals, but the Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw endured their own, and the Seminole resisted removal in a long and costly war. The act stripped the Southeast of nearly all its Native peoples within a single generation.