The Cherokee Removal

Superior Essays
Perdue and Green’s “The Cherokee Removal, A Brief History with Documents” is an introduction to the social and political period surrounding the removal of Cherokee Indians. The authors’ inclusion of many documents, shares with readers, the Indian voices as well as key political figures’ position on sovereign governance. This complex period is successfully outlined by Perdue and Green, with a chronological account of the Indians’ first encounter with Europeans through the inevitable journey, “Trail of Tears”.

The geographical region disputed in the authors’ text, includes North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama. This land was home to Native Americans hundreds and thousands of years before the Europeans arrived. Cherokee
…show more content…
“Congress’s approach to the problem rested on the same theories that had governed the diplomats in Paris. According to the international law, England had owned the American colonies by right of discovery, a concept that gave Christian European governments the right to claim and occupy the lands of non-Christian and ‘uncivilized’ peoples, and by right of conquest, by which England had acquired France’s right of discovery claims at the conclusion of the French and Indian War.”1 This creates the complexity of land ownership in the United …show more content…
Monetary awards were given to guides and supporters of the removal plan. Indians who resisted migration west were put into stockades for long periods of time, until the arrangement for removal began. “They are prisoners, without a crime to justify the fact”.5 Voices of Andrew Jackson, John Ridge, Lewis Cass, the Cherokee women, Evan Jones, Elias Boudinot and many more could not change the course of events happening to the Cherokee nation.

The complexity of this time in history raises many concerns for the survival of the Native Americans. The authors posed many questions as to the actions and decisions of the Cherokees. “For us today, Indian removal may well retain its moral simplicity, but the issue as it unfolded was exceedingly complex. Not all white Americans supported Cherokee removal; not all Cherokees opposed it; and the drama itself took place against a complicated backdrop of ideology, self-interest, party politics, altruism, and

Related Documents

  • Superior Essays

    The struggle between the Native Americans and the Americans was extremely relevant and volatile during the 1800’s. The struggle escalated in 1830 when Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act (“Worcester”). As a result, new issues arose on a fight that had been around for centuries between the Native Americans and the Americans. One major collateral outcome of this act is the Supreme Court case, Worcester vs. Georgia. This case and the results of it turned out to be a major step forward for the Native Americans fighting for their rights and freedom during this time.…

    • 1617 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    How did the American government shift from an “expansion with honor” policy to a policy of the expulsion of the Cherokee people? The Cherokee people were once a great nation whose population spanned all across the South Eastern corners of the North American continent. The Cherokee people once called states such as North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, and Virginia home. The Cherokee people once governed their own nation, a nation where men hunted and women farmed. A nation where both men and women worked together in harmony as a balance for each other, an equilibrium.…

    • 1495 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Native American response paper This response paper will be on the articles A Tour of Indian Peoples and Indian Lands by David E. Wilkins and Winnebagos, Cherokees, Apaches, and Dakotas by Debra Merskin. The first article discusses what the Indian tribes were and where they resided. There are many common terms to refer to the native people including American Indians, Tribal nations, indigenous nations, first peoples, and Native Americans. Alaskan natives are called by their territories like the Inuits or the Aleuts.…

    • 1151 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Indian Removal Act In 1828 Andrew Jackson had own presidency and had succeed by changing things with the government. One of many was him having a special relationship with the common people. He removed about 10 percent of workers and replaced with loyal friends and followers. In the 1800’s Native Americans had been living next to white neighbors, taking on their culture.…

    • 435 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears During the spring semester of 2016, I was given the opportunity to read a very insightful book called, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears, by Theda Purdue and Micheal D. Green. The book covers the events leading up to, during, and directly after the Trail of Tears. The Trail of Tears was the mass migration of Native Americans from their motherland in the eastern shores of the United States, to the territories of the southwestern United States. Throughout the early 19th Century, there were many conflicts between the government and Native Americans; although none were more racially and economically motivated than that of the state of Georgia and it’s citizens. “We believe the present plan…

    • 820 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Enduring a cultural, spiritual, and physical bludgeoning since its first contact with European society, the Cherokee Nation succumbed to the foreign power in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, as tensions rose between the two entities, nationalist attitudes emerged to justify the arguments on both sides of the struggle. The United States’ perpetual infringement of Indian sovereignty inspired both sentiments of opposition and reluctant submission within the indigenous nation. Stemming from religious and governmental assimilation policies, the law’s bias against the Cherokees in their efforts to keep their borders and culture intact, and political infighting over land secession, Cherokee nationalism encompassed the spirit of resistance to Western encroachment. Lacking the Christian religion, the Cherokee Nation became a hotspot for evangelical missionaries to spread the Gospel, establish Western values through schools, and breed contempt among their subjects.…

    • 1191 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The process of removal of the Cherokees was not a fair removal, because the Americans were taking away their control of the land which left the Cherokees to stand up…

    • 1061 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The Indian Removal Act, which was passed by Congress in 1830, completely changed the path for the future in multiple aspects. In determining what impact this event still has on our country today, one must start by analyzing the relationships between Native Americans, the United States government, and the common white settler. Additionally, one must analyze how the removal of these tribes affected not only them, but the white settlers. Socially, Native Americans were viewed as no more than objects in the way of what the Americans viewed as rightfully theirs.…

    • 1566 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Indian Removal Dbq

    • 831 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Despite peaceful petitioning, any efforts made on their part was met with resistance. The greatest example of this that they give is when gold was found on Georgia land. Indians were banned digging for the gold and thus, many Cherokee were arrested, tried, imprisoned, and abused (p.139). Despite their previous concerns being ignored, they continued to press the Senate and House of Representatives over the matter of the removal policy and the New Echota treaty. They described the “treaty” in this way, “...the instrument entered into at New Echota, purporting to be a treaty, is deceptive to the world, and…

    • 831 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Brief History Of Alcatraz

    • 1100 Words
    • 5 Pages

    A group that went by “Indians of All Tribes” used their act of civil disobedience to portray the hardships faced by the Native Americans. Initially, the public support…

    • 1100 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    It forced the Native Indians to surrender millions of acres of land and to move to west. Throughout the removal many Indians suffered through sickness and death. The Indian Removal Act not only removed the Indians from their rightful lands forcefully but also is responsible for over 4000 deaths of the Native Americans, that today is known as the ‘Trail of Tears’. Bibliography Calloway, Colin G. Kill the Indian and Save the Man 1870s-1920s. (In Bedford/St. Martin’s (Ed.), First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History, 4th ed., 2012) 412-483.…

    • 1122 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Present Impacts of The Last of the Mohicans James Fenimore Cooper’s the Last of the Mohicans tackles the racism of the Jacksonian era through a story based around the late 1700s. He portrays the racism through his characters, for example, the main character proclaims after just learning someone’s race, “A Mingo [group of Native Americans] is a Mingo, and God having made him so, neither the Mohawks nor any other tribe can alter him” (Cooper 29). This quote shows how influential race is in the Last of the Mohicans. In his novel, Cooper proposes, through metaphor, that a coherent, interracial society can never exist and that Indians are brutal savages who deserved to lose their land.…

    • 1223 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    To take something and claim it as yours, when you never owned it in the first place...the United States government and public supporters sought to justify the removal of Cherokee Indians in the 1820 and 1830s, and tried to move them west of the Mississippi river. Big supporters like Lewis Cass and the state of Georgia played a big role in justifying the removal. Lewis Cass wrote essays to support, and Georgia told the Cherokees to either abide by Georgia law, or get out. United States and public sector sought to justify the removal of Cherokees by making them abide by state and United States laws, then forcing them out for noncooperation and paying them a sum of money. Georgia was angry about sharing the land with the Cherokees.…

    • 1112 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Topic and Research Question Topic: For my historical event analysis, I have chosen to focus on The Cherokee "Trail of Tears" Research Question: How the Indian Removal Act of 1830 affected the Cherokee? Preliminary Writing Plan Introduction The historical analysis focuses on the topic is “The Cherokee Trail of Tears”; the topic is about a historical event that caused suffering and death of one of the tribes that are native in America. The Cherokee are among the Creeks, the Chickasaw, the Seminoles and the Choctaw who constituted the native tribes that assimilated and coped with the white settlers (United States Department of State, 2017).…

    • 751 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    On May 28, 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. The law authorized Andrew Jackson to negotiate with Indians for their removal to federal land west of the Mississippi River in exchange for their homelands. Andrew Jackson was able to convince the American people that Indians could not coexist peacefully with them. He argued that the Indians were uncivilized and needed to be guarded from their own savage ways. As a result of his actions, thousands of Indians were forcibly ripped from their homes and onto a journey to a unknown territory, that was not as fertile as their home grounds.…

    • 2378 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Superior Essays