What Is The Rationale For Andrew Jackson Removal

President Andrew Jackson signed The Indian Removal Act on May 28, 1830 allowing for the forced removal and relocation of the native indigenous people of the eastern United States, but representatives of the Cherokee nation would try to legally resist the unjust removal from their ancestral land. Cherokee Chief, John Ross, fought long and hard against Jackson’s removal policy, taking the fight for Cherokee rights all the way to the Supreme Court, but to no avail. By May of 1838, the removal deadline, approximately sixteen thousand Cherokee Indians were forced from their homeland and made to head west for reservations located on the Great Plains. About four thousand Cherokee men, women, and children would succumb to the elements along the Trail

As part of Jackson’s removal policy tribes were unfairly made to sell off their land to the U.S. government and move west to land that the government had designated as Indian Territory. However, in Jackson’s Rationale for Removal, written in 1829, Jackson argued that emigration to this new territory would be on a voluntary basis and tribes that decided to stay on their homeland “should be distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws” (Pg. 1) . Tribes were forced to make a decision to stay and conform to the ways of the American government or to leave behind their homeland in hopes of being able to retain some of their ancestral culture. Faced with sovereignty or land, many tribes felt strong armed and packed up and headed west. However, the Cherokee would stand up to Jackson’s removal policy and fight for their rights to land that was once promised to

The state of Georgia refused to recognize the Cherokee constitution, thus forcing the Cherokee to take their fight all the way to the Supreme Court. Even though the Supreme Court would rule in favor of the Cherokee people, Georgia would refuse to acknowledge the Supreme Court’s decision. Jackson openly defied the decision of the Supreme Court and forced the Cherokee off their land. Members of the civilized Cherokee nation went from feeling included by the government because of the advances that they had made in American civilization, to feeling that they were being cast out into a foreign territory. As Chief John Ross confirmed the Cherokee people were once again “to become strangers and wanderers in the land of their fathers, forced to return to the savage life, and to seek a new home in the wilds of the far west, and that without their consent” (Pg. 1) . It no longer mattered how assimilated an Indian was with American culture, no Indian would ever be seen as an equal to their Anglo-American counterparts. Indians, seen as inferior, were given no rights to the land that their ancestors once roamed upon so freely, they were evicted from their homeland with no say about where they would