Cherokee Removal Argumentative Essay

This historical document was written by Private John G. Burnett. Burnett’s diary entry was written on December 11, 1890. The years of the diary were during his journey through the Trail of Tears between 1828 and 1839. Burnett was a reserved person who was just fine with being by himself for weeks at a time. As he hunted more and more, he became acquainted with many of the Cherokee Indians who grew to eventually become his friends. Private Burnett wrote this diary entry to show the horror of what was happening between the American Indians and the Americans. The Americans were forcefully taking the Native Americans out of their homes and making them move, saying goodbye to what once was their homes and life. Burnett wanted this horrific removal

xIs it wrong to kick someone out of their own home when they didn’t do anything wrong? The Cherokee was in that same situation. The Cherokees’ situation was just like taking a cell phone ,which is dear to a human, away. They were kicked off their own land. They had done nothing too bad, but the Georgians wanted them to leave. The Supreme Court even allowed them to stay, but the new settlers still wanted them out. The Indian Removal isn’t justified and the Indians should have stayed in Georgia because it was their own land, staying would help their health, and only a few signed the treaty.

The Trail of Tears was part of the Indian-removal process. The federal government drove out fifteen thousand Creeks from their land with promises of money and concessions. All across America, nearly a quarter of a million Native Americans, who eventually were stripped of their land by immigrants from Europe, lived happily in the Americas. In the early 1830’s, America was prosperous with natives. By the late 1830’s; however, barely any natives remained in the southeast of the United States. The government drove out all of the natives from their land to grow crops such as cotton. The land the natives lived on had better soil for these crops. When the Americans kicked the natives off their land, they needed a place to “put” them. So the American

As a part of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Native American people were forcefully assembled and made to endure one of the longest walks from Georgia to Oklahoma on what has become known as the Trail of Tears. President Andrew Jackson’s motives for movement of the Native people to a new territory was to eliminate the Native race by stripping the victims of their vital resources needed for basic survival. After 178 years of expansion and growth in the United States of America, the circumstances for Native Americans remain unchanged. President Jackson’s sentiments have permeated the present society in issues associated with the physical and emotional fight to decolonize. Decolonization is both the individual and communal effort to regenerate

The Cherokee, a small tribe of Indians, has been forced to move from their homeland after John Ridge met secretly US official to sign a removal treaty for the selling of Cherokee’s land. Ridge and almost 2000 Cherokee migrated to Oklahoma while the vast majority of the population ignored the illegal treaty and remained on their lands. When the deadline of removal past, the general Winfield Scoot arrived in Georgia with seven thousand soldiers with the orders to remove the Cherokee. And this action was the decline of the Cherokee. After reading the book about writing by John Ehle about the Cherokee nation, we can try to analyze the impact of this removal in the Cherokee’s live.

There were tribes known as the Five Civilized Tribes that lived in the regions of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Florida. These tribes were the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. They all lived in peace with each other and adopted many cultural ways and customs of the whites. Unfortunately, some Americans believed forcing the tribes, specifically the Cherokees, out of their regions would be a great personal achievement. Georgia was first on the list to seize and to do so the president gave the Cherokees a “choice”. They either moved west to new lands, which were called Indian Territory, where their independence would be respected or they would have to live under Georgia laws, meaning many of their human rights such as voting would be taken away from them. This decision was completely unfair to the tribe since the region was home to them and the new lands were unfamiliar and not at all valuable to them. Jackson soon passed the bill, forcing the Cherokees to march from their homelands all the way west to a portion of the Louisiana Purchase. This march was known as the Trail of Tears where thousands of Cherokees passed away on the journey. This demonstrates how Jackson’s view of the common people was only placed on his white Americans, rather than the natives who were always in the United

Between 1830 and 1850, the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, Creek, Seminole and Cherokee peoples were forced to leave their homelands to relocate further west. The Cherokee Nation removal in 1838 (the last forced removal east of the Mississippi) was brought on by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1829, resulting in the Georgia Gold Rush.1

Native Americans who emigrated from Europe perceived the Indians as a friendly society with whom they dwelt with in harmony. While Native Americans were largely intensive agriculturalists and entrepreneurial in nature, the Indians were hunters and gatherers who earned a livelihood predominantly as nomads. By the 19th century, irrefutable territories i.e. the areas around River Mississippi were under exclusive occupation by the Indians. At the time, different Indian tribes such as the Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees had adapted a sedentary lifestyle and practiced small-scale agriculture. According to the proponents of removal, the Indians were to move westwards into forested lands in order to generate additional space for development through agricultural production (Memorial of the Cherokee Indians). The Act led to an array of legal and moral arguments for and against the need to relocate the Indians westward from the agriculturally productive lands of the Mississippi in Georgia and parts of Alabama. This paper compares and contrasts the major arguments for and against the

During the 1830s the united states congress and president Andrew Jackson created and passed the “Indian removal act”. Which allowed Jackson to forcibly remove the Indians from their native lands in the southeastern states, such as Florida and Mississippi, and send them to specific “Indian reservations” across the Mississippi river, so the whites could take over their land. From 1830-1839 the five civilized tribes (The Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, and Chickasaw) were forced, sometimes by gun point, to march about 1,000 miles to what is present day Oklahoma. While making this gruesome travel more than 4,000 Indians died from disease, starvation and treacherous conditions. This travel became known as the “trails of tears”.

There were some 15,000 captives that were still to be removed. There were draught and poor sanitation that made life very miserable. Very many of them died. The National Council of Cherokee and Chief Ross tried to plead with General Scott to permit the remaining Cherokees to wait till the weather was better for them to be moved. They also wanted to oversee their removal. The General agreed, and Ross supervised the move. The natives were thus moved from the removal forts to internment camps till travel was resumed. The 1200 miles journey came with many hardships as heavy rains made the primitive roads treacherous. The Cherokees were forced to drag the wagons out of the muddy roads. Death became a daily occurrence because of the road conditions, winter distress, and illness. The government only provided a single blanket to each Indian as shelter from the cold wind of the winter. The ill-equipped Cherokees were trapped beside the frozen Mississippi River with many of them dying of pneumonia. Starvation and malnutrition made the Cherokees more prone to diseases like cholera, dysentery, and smallpox. After arrival in Oklahoma, the Cherokees tried to acclimatize to their new territory in the process re-establishing their system of government. Currently in the United

The Apache were a strong, fierce, war-like nation, native to the arid deserts of the Southwest (specifically Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma). And since 1492, the discovery of the Americas, the Apache fiercely opposed Spanish, Mexican, and American invasions. Arguably, they are most known and most remembered for their association with the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans; the relationship between the Apache and the settlers that led into the Mexican and American conflicts and the aftermath of that, by how westward expansion in the United States affected the population of the Apaches and then how the laws during the 1800s influenced the forced removal of the Apache. These reasons show the relationship the settlers had with the Apache.

In the world of today, the actions of our ancestors are frowned upon and chastised, but piles of history books cannot cover the crude horrors of the people before us and the suffering they caused. Centuries ago, American soldiers drove the Navajo Indian tribe off their land to seize it for themselves. They were thrown into places with “conditions that could only be described as concentration camp-like” (Ault). The Navajo Nation, the largest of the approximately 500 Native American tribes who used to roam the lands of the United States, had to stand up to the American government over a century ago and fight to keep their land that their ancestors had held for hundreds of years (Ault).

The Manifest Destiny was the idea that it was America’s destiny or fate to expand from coast to coast. As stated in the Anthology of American Literature, “the doctrine asserted that the new nation was spiritually supreme and its expansion was the will of God” (McMichael 686). This justification lead

On July 17, 1830, the Cherokee nation published an appeal to all of the American people. United States government paid little thought to the Native Americans’ previous letters of their concerns. It came to the point where they turned to the everyday people to help them. They were desperate.

This source has significant value to historians but, like any other source, has its limitations. Andrew Jackson’s motivation to remove the Cherokee from their homeland originated from an avid persona to benefit the Americans. The speech analyzes Jackson’s motivation, and specific plans to remove the Cherokee. In consideration of the speech being written in 1830, the audience can learn how Jackson was rather harsh towards the natives in order to benefit himself and others. This is evident with Andrew Jackson’s actions and his presumptions of the Natives. However, this source has significant limitations due to Jackson’s motivation in removing the Cherokee, historians cannot be fully assured Jackson included all facts behind the removal. For example, many of the benefits Jackson mentioned in his speech specifically regarding the Cherokee benefiting from removal hardly seem plausible. This calls into attention Jackson’s integrity and honesty throughout the entire speech.