Effects of Indian Removal

Effects of Indian Removal

Introduction

American interest in the peaceful integration of Indians into white American society waned after the War of 1812. In that war the United States routed Tecumseh's pan-Indian confederacy in the Northwest and decimated the Redstick Creeks in the South. After the war, American commissioners negotiated twenty treaties with tribes that had allied themselves with Great Britain or demonstrated independent hostility toward the United States. The elimination of the Indian and British military threat east of the Mississippi destroyed the negotiating leverage of the Indians in that region, leaving Native Americans subject to U.S. demands. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) had reignited in President Thomas Jefferson an idea that he had first broached in 1776—the removal of the eastern tribes to areas west of the Mississippi River. After the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, and a coterie of southern state officials embraced removal as a way to acquire Native American land and maintain separation between Indians and whites. Jefferson and Jackson suggested that removal would provide eastern Indians with the ability to acculturate at their own pace. In reality, federal officials were more concerned with expanding the nation and acceding to southern political demands. Congress passed the Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the president to initiate the removal process. By 1843 the United States had signed over 170 removal treaties with the eastern tribes and had moved them, sometimes at bayonet point, across the Mississippi. This paper discusses the effects of Indian removal in a holistic context.

Discussion

When Indian leaders resisted federal removal overtures, U.S. treaty commissioners used unscrupulous negotiating tactics to obtain native signatures. For example, in the Treaty of New Echota (1835) the United States responded to the refusal of the official Cherokee government to consider a removal proposal by concluding a treaty with a small group of dissenters. Unprincipled federal methods like these were not limited to the removal period. U.S. commissioners often used deceit and duress to achieve their objectives during the treaty era. Time and again the United States promised a tribe that a request for a cession would be the last, but shortly thereafter federal officials would renege on their promises and come back asking for more land. For example, in the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), the United States granted the Sioux title in perpetuity to the Great Sioux Reserve, located between the Missouri River and the western boundary of the Dakota Territory. However, after the discovery of gold in the Black Hills in 1874, the United States initiated an effort to acquire the Black Hills from the Sioux. The Sioux's refusal to surrender its territory resulted in a series of violent conflicts marked by the decimation of General George Custer's three hundred troops at Little Bighorn (1876) by the Sioux chief Sitting Bull and his warriors and the U.S. Army's massacre of perhaps as many as 350 Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890.

Organizing Removal:

The idea of forced relocation had a ...