Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the United States came into existence. Indian nations now had to deal with a new country and relationships were very different than before. From an Indian viewpoint, the new republic was not just another foreign colonial power and it was not the same as the European colonial powers. The formation of the United States began a new chapter in cultural imperialism, racism, and genocide.
Within the newly formed United States there was a feeling that Indians and Indian nations did not belong in the new country. While there were some who felt that the solution to the “Indian problem” was genocide—that is, killing them off via biological warfare, starvation, and actual warfare—the political solution was to simply remove Indians from the United States. The purchase of the vast area west of the Mississippi River known as Louisiana provided the Americans with the solution to what was perceived as the “Indian problem”: all Indians would be removed from their homelands in the east and allowed to establish new homelands in the west. There was, of course, no concern about the Indian nations who were living in the west and how they might respond to having their lands occupied by other Indian nations. One of the early proponents of Indian removal was Thomas Jefferson. Historian Frances Jennings, in his book The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire, writes of Jefferson:
“However sphinxlike he might be in other respects, his behavior toward Indians was always clear and consistent. He wanted to get rid of them.”
With regard to legal issues, such as civil rights and freedom of religion, Indians were not considered to be citizens and thus were not entitled to these things. Historian Frances Jennings writes:
“The Revolutionaries wanted to reduce Indians and slaves permanently below human status. The means for this was to classify them together as nonwhite. This racist classification served all purposes of social caste as well as legal disfranchisement.”
While removing Indians from the newly formed United States to somewhere west of the Mississippi River (then western boundary of the United States) was a popular sentiment, in reality there was a concern that relocating Indian nations onto lands controlled by European nations would result in Indian nations entering into military alliances with potential American enemies. This dilemma, however, was solved with the purchase of Louisiana. Historian Joseph Ellis, in his book American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, writes:
“The Purchase made Indian removal possible, and Indian removal would provide the revenue required to pay off the Purchase. From the Indian perspective, however, it was too true to be good, for the Louisiana Purchase sealed their doom east of the Mississippi.”
While the political, economic, and military efforts to force Indians to remove themselves from the United States began in the late eighteenth century, the removal concept became an official American policy in 1830 with the passage of Indian Removal Act. The Act passed 28 to 19 in the Senate and 102 to 97 in the House.
Indian removal, in the minds of nineteenth-century politicians and in the writings of many historians following removal, was justified for many reasons. First, Indians were seen are racially inferior and thus incapable of learning “civilization” and becoming full citizens. Indians were, and sometimes still are, portrayed as a savage and illiterate people. In Noble, Wretched, and Redeemable: Protestant Missionaries to the Indians in Canada and the United States, 1820-1900, historian C.L. Higham concludes:
“Removal also implies that the government viewed Indians as genetically inferior and dangerous to the white population.”
It is interesting to note that in 1830, the Cherokees had a higher literacy rate than did non-Indians. However, the Cherokees were literate in their own language and in the viewpoint of many Americans, literacy in an Indian language did not really count as literacy.
Indians were portrayed, and in many textbooks today are still portrayed, as nomadic hunters who had no concept of land ownership and were, therefore, barriers to civilization which required agriculture and individual land ownership. In reality, most Indian nations, particularly those east of the Mississippi River, were farmers and had been farming their lands for hundreds of years. Contrary to popular belief, Indian legal systems included well-defined concepts of land ownership (although, it must be pointed out, that these concepts were very different from those of European-based cultures.)
Together with racism, one very important reason for advocating Indian removal was economics: driven by greed, non-Indians wanted Indian lands and did not want to pay for them. In their book The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast, Theda Perdue and Michael Green write:
“Much of the Indian-owned land in the South was extraordinarily fertile and capable of producing enormous crops of cotton.”
With the plantation system and its heavy dependence on slave labor, southern society became more rigidly polarized along racial lines. Indians, who were classified as “not white,” were considered to be subordinate, that is, in the same category as black slaves. Theda Perdue and Michael Green write:
“Indians who became ‘civilized’ could never be integrated into free white Southern society on an equal footing.”
One of the primary arguments in favor of Indian removal claimed that European Christian farmers could make more efficient use of the land than the Indian heathen hunters. This argument conveniently ignored the fact that Indians were efficient farmers and had been farming their land for many centuries. Historian David La Vere, in his book Contrary Neighbors: Southern Plains and Removed Indians in Indian Territory, writes:
“It mattered little that the Southeastern Indians had long been successful agriculturalists; in the government’s eyes they were still ‘savages’ because they did not farm the ‘correct’ way, as women still controlled the fields and farming.”
Some historians, in their attempt to justify removal, continue to portray Indians as hunters and as such, hindrances to the development of the land. Law professor Bruce Duthu, in his book American Indians and the Law, sums up the removal of the Southeastern Indian nations this way:
“Buttressed by the twin pillars of greed and racism, the removal policy would clear the way for white southerners to claim the tribes’ fertile agricultural lands and gold resources.”
In the southeast, many Indian nations, particularly those designated as the Five Civilized Tribes, adopted many European cultural features, including Christianity and slavery. In an article in the Chronicles of Oklahoma, Arrell Morgan Gibson writes:
“Leaders of the Southern tribes could not comprehend, in their hope to co-exist and cope with the fast changes swirling about their nations, that their success in altering tribal ways and education, business and polity only precipitate ugly envy and antagonism among their Anglo-American neighbors.”
Gibson goes on to say:
“Leaders of the Southern tribes did not understand that the nineteenth century Anglo-American society was obsessively monistic—it feared, scorned and rejected people unlike themselves in culture and physical characteristics.”
The actual physical process of removal was at best brutal and callous and, at worst, genocidal and racist. Anthropologist Charles Hudson, in his book The Southeastern Indians, writes:
“‘Removal’ is a gentle, almost antiseptic word for one of the harshest, most crudely opportunistic acts in American history.”
Law professor Rebecca Tsosie, in her chapter in American Indian Nations: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, puts it this way:
“The federal government’s removal policy inspired some of the most devastating losses of tribal landholdings, resulting in the complete exclusion of many groups from any portion of their aboriginal landbase.”
The physical removal of the tribes from their homelands to Indian Territory was carried out by government contractors: private businesses whose primary motivation was profit. These contractors were responsible for feeding and transporting the Indians and when they could save money on food and transportation this simply added to their profits. The contractors billed the government for spoiled meat, rotten grain, for food not delivered, and for non-existent employees. In his book Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire Through Indian Territory, Paul VanDevelder reports:
“Bribery, perjury, and forgery were the procedures that governed contracts for Indian removal.”
The money paid to the contractors was tribal money, not tax-payer money. It was money collected by the government for the sale of the Indian homelands. Arrell Morgan Gibson reports:
“Vast sums of tribal money were paid to contracting firms, newly formed to render this service for the government, and, as later revealed, most of the contractors were friends and relatives of officials in high places.”
Thomas Hartley Crawford served as Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1838 to 1845. In his biographical sketch of Crawford in The Commissioners of Indian Affairs, Ronald Satz reports:
“A strong advocate of Jackson’s Indian removal policy, he contended that white families moving west suffered greater hardship than Indian emigrants.”
Ronald Satz goes on to report:
“Crawford’s official reports totally ignored the miseries suffered by many Indian emigrants.”
The removal of thousands of Indians from the east to the area west of the Mississippi River created a number of problems. In 1836, for example, there were more than 231,000 Plains Indians in the area between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River. Removal added more than 51,000 Indians to this area. This increase in population – an increase of more than 35%-- impacted the Indian food supply of the region in two ways: (1) there was increased hunting, particularly buffalo hunting, and (2) the free range of the buffalo herds began to be more restricted. The increase in population and the decrease in the buffalo herds led to an increase in the hostilities between the tribes, and warfare tended to become more deadly. In the years between 1820 and 1850, the death rate from Plains Indian warfare was about 5 times what it had been during the previous century.
Removal often ignored the rights of the tribes who had traditionally occupied the area west of the Mississippi. Anthropologist Alexander Lesser, in his book The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand Game: Ghost Dance Revival and Ethnic Identity, writes:
“In the process of removing the Indian tribes of the east across the Mississippi, the government was not over-careful to consider the territorial rights of the indigenous people of the Plains.”
One Cherokee, in a letter to the Cherokee Phoenix, put it this way:
“Our Creator has not given us the land beyond the Mississippi, but has given it to other people; and why should we wish to enter upon their possessions?”
Thus, many removed tribes found themselves at war with the original inhabitants of the area as the United States had not acquired any rights to relocate people onto this land.
Removal didn’t stop at the Mississippi River. Tribes who had removed to Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, and other areas soon found that the Americans wanted to remove them a second, third, or even fourth time. Writing about the tribes from the Great Lakes area, Linda Parker, in an article in Chronicles of Oklahoma, writes:
“Each time the Federal government promised that the reservation would be their final home. However, in each case, the insatiable demands of white settlers pushed the Indians off their land, removing them to another reservation with the promise, never kept, that at last they were beyond the reach of aggressive frontiersmen.”
It did not seem to make any difference to the Americans if the once removed tribes had taken up European-style farming and had developed the land, when the American settlers wanted Indian land, the treaty negotiators promised the Indians better hunting and better land farther west.
While the removal of the Southeastern Indian nations—Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole—are most often discussed, it should be pointed out that more than 60 Indian nations were actually removed from the East and resettled west of the Mississippi River.
Indians 101
Twice each week Indians 101 looks at various American Indian topics. More about nineteenth century history from this series:
Indians 201: The Indian Removal Act
Indians 101: Indian Removal in 1833
Indians 101: Preparing the Cherokee for Removal
Indians 101: The Cherokee Trail of Tears
Indians 101: The Removal of the Chickasaw Indians
Indians 101: The Removal of the Ponca Indians
Indians 101: The Cherokee Prior to the Trail of Tears
Indians 101: The Choctaw Removal