Unit 2.5 Classwork: The Indian Removal Act & the Trail of Tears

At the beginning of the 1830s, nearly Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida. Their ancestors had occupied and this land for generations, but by the end of the decade, very few Native Americans remained anywhere in the southeastern United States.

White Americans often feared and the Native Americans: to them, Native Americans were unfamiliar people who occupied land that white settlers wanted. But the Native Americans’ land was valuable, and it grew to be more as white settlers flooded the region. Many of these whites yearned to make their fortunes by growing cotton, and often resorted to violent means to take land from their Native neighbors. They stole livestock; burned and looted houses and towns; and even committed mass murder.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was a key feature of Andrew Jackson’s presidency that gave him power to negotiate removal treaties with Indian tribes living east of the Mississippi river. Working on behalf of white settlers who wanted to grow on the Natives’ land, the U.S. government forced them to leave their homelands and walk hundreds of miles to a specially designated " Territory," which would later become the state of Oklahoma.

By the end of the decade, eastern Native Americans were relocated to the” Indian Territory. Since the bulk of the new territory was in the American south, Jackson successfully opened up 25 million acres of land to white settlement and the expansion of .

Some tribes their forced removal from their ancestral homes, which they coined the Trail of Tears because of its devastating effects on the exhausted migrants. Over 70,0000 Native Americans were forced to march more than miles to Indian Territory. Disease was .

Historians estimate that more than Cherokee died as a result of the journey, and these deaths do not even account for the other four tribes who were also forced to make the journey. Another notable tribe was the Indians of Florida recruited runaway enslaved Blacks to fight alongside them and bravely waged three different wars until the U.S. government the remaining members of their tribe to settle west in present-day Oklahoma.