The law required the government to negotiate removal treaties fairly, voluntarily and peacefully: It did not permit the president or anyone else to coerce Native nations into giving up their ancestral lands. This “Indian territory” was located in present-day Oklahoma. In 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act, which gave the federal government the power to exchange Native-held land in the cotton kingdom east of the Mississippi for land to the west, in the “Indian colonization zone” that the United States had acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Indian Removal ActĪndrew Jackson had long been an advocate of what he called “Indian removal.” As an Army general, he had spent years leading brutal campaigns against the Creeks in Georgia and Alabama and the Seminoles in Florida–campaigns that resulted in the transfer of hundreds of thousands of acres of land from Indian nations to white farmers.Īs president, he continued this crusade. As President Andrew Jackson noted in 1832, if no one intended to enforce the Supreme Court’s rulings (which he certainly did not), then the decisions would “…still born.” Southern states were determined to take ownership of Indian lands and would go to great lengths to secure this territory.

Supreme Court objected to these practices and affirmed that native nations were sovereign nations “in which the laws of Georgia can have no force.”Įven so, the maltreatment continued. Several states passed laws limiting Native American sovereignty and rights and encroaching on their territory. State governments joined in this effort to drive Native Americans out of the South. They stole livestock burned and looted houses and towns committed mass murder and squatted on land that did not belong to them. Many of these whites yearned to make their fortunes by growing cotton, and often resorted to violent means to take land from their Indigenous neighbors. In Illinois and Wisconsin, for example, the bloody Black Hawk War in 1832 opened to white settlement millions of acres of land that had belonged to the Sauk, Fox and other native nations.īut the Native Americans’ land, located in parts of Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Florida and Tennessee, was valuable, and it grew to be more coveted as white settlers flooded the region. In the southeastern United States, many Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek and Cherokee people embraced these customs and became known as the “Five Civilized Tribes.”ĭid you know? Indian removal took place in the Northern states as well.

John marshall indian removal act