On 26 May 1830 the Congress of the United States passed one of the worst legislative acts in human history, an act so breathtakingly vile that it would serve Hitler as a prototype for his own Holocaust in Germany. I speak, of course, of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Basically, a bunch of white folks who were living in Georgia and other states/territories surrounding the lands of the “Five Civilized Tribes” were really unhappy about a bunch of brownish people owning and farming and having industry on the land the white folks wanted to take for themselves.
The whites were particularly irked that the Native Americans were sitting (literally) on a goldmine. The whites wanted that land and they wanted that gold and they were by gum going to have it if they had to kill every last non-white east of the Mississippi River.
Many of the descendants of these white folks now claim that their “grandmother was a Cherokee Princess”. This is baloney. First, there is no such thing as a Cherokee Princess. Secondly, the “Indian” explanation was often given to explain why so many people tanned suspiciously well for Anglo-whites. In my own genealogy, I discovered while some of the “Indian Blood” that explained the dark complexions of many of my grandparents and relatives was indeed native in origin, some of it was actually courtesy of a free woman of color named Pernesia “Pernancy” King (nee Richardson) who married a white man, William King, in North Carolina in 1822 and who “became” white herself on the census forms a decade later. While there are many long-term Southerners with Native DNA in their genome, there are many more who are whiter than sour cream but just don’t want to think of their great-great-grandparents as proto-Nazi racist murders and land-thieves. Add one Cherokee Princess and voilà; participation in attempted genocide and land theft erased!
While historiacal apologists are always arguing that attempted ethnic cleansing prior to the 20th century are somehow excused by ‘context’ and the idea that the perpetrators didn’t understand their actions were evil, there were always those — even among the ruling elites — who understood the concept of human decency and knew right from wrong. The many white people who fought against the Indian Removal Act tooth and nail puts paid to the idea that the genocidal monsters of the past didn’t ‘understand’ that what they were doing was a bad thing. “Many Christian missionaries, most notably missionary organizer Jeremiah Evarts, protested against passage of the Act. In Congress, New Jersey Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen and Tennessee Congressman Davy Crockett spoke out against the legislation. The Removal Act passed only after bitter debate in Congress.”
The POTUS, Andrew Jackson, who argued that Indian Removal was needful because the Natives “have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition”, signed the act into law two days later and he was instrumental in creating the death march known as The Trail of Tears.
Native Americans, some of whom were lawyers as well as land owners, tried to find legal means to resist the act. Members of the Cherokee Nation in particular had strong family ties with white politicians within the state of Georgia, so there were some laws passed to protect the native lands. However, whites who wished to grab native lands quickly learned that that Jackson’s federal government would protect them at the expense of justice. One such case of a white land-thief went all the way to the Supreme Court. In Worcester v. Georgia “Samuel Worcester and other non-Native Americans were convicted by Georgia law for residing in Cherokee territory in the state of Georgia without a license. Worcester was sentenced to prison for four years, and appealed the ruling, arguing that this sentence violated treaties made between Indian Nations and the United States federal government by imposing state laws on Cherokee lands. The Court ruled in Worcester’s favor, declaring that the Cherokee Nation was subject only to federal law and that the Supremacy Clause barred legislative interference by the state of Georgia.”
Yes, the Worcester case used the laws meant to protect the natives to rob them blind. It is up there with Dred Scott, Bush v.Gore, and Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis in terms of wretched rulings by the SCOTUS.
Although Andrew Jackson was given a carte blanche mandatee by the SCOTUS to keep Georgia authorities from doing anything to protect the Native land owners, he was afraid to send federal troops into the sate. He (rightfully) worried “that enforcement would lead to open warfare between federal troops and the Georgia militia, which would compound the ongoing crisis in South Carolina and lead to a broader civil war.” Jackson decided to do an end run around the problem, and strong armed the Cherokee into a “land exchange treaty” that would push them westward to Oklahoma territory. Ironically, Jackson’s more ‘liberal’ Federalist political opponents, such as Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, were livid at his land exchange. Clay and Adams supported the Worcester decision because to strengthened the Federal government and reiterated the supremacy of the United States over one state.
With no legal recourse and facing violence from the land-grabbing whites around them, many of the Native peoples had no choice but to “voluntarily” move to Oklahoma territory. “Exposure to the elements, disease and starvation, harassment by local frontiersmen, and insufficient rations similarly killed up to one-third of the Choctaw and other nations on the march.” Apologists for Andrew Jackson have often tried to excuse his participation in the atrocity by insisting that he had the best of intentions for his nation, but that argument could also apply to Goebbels and I ain’t buying it.
Some native peoples decided to fight it out. They used the Worcester desision to argue that the states had no rights to try to steal their land in areas where the state government was trying to push natives out in favour of white settlers. This was a big problem in the newly-acquired state of Florida. The government of the Florida wanted more whites and less Indians in their state, and tried to drive Natives off their lands and give those lands to white people. The Seminole Indians of Florida, along with the fugitive slaves they had given refuge to, weren’t down with that, as you can imagine.
The Seminole people and their allies fought the Second Seminole War from 1835 until 1842, under the leadership of Chief Osceola, who wasn’t actually a Seminole by birth (he was bi-racially Anglo-Creek). For the Seminole, declaring allegiance and membership of the tribe was more important than ‘blood’ and their brotherhood was inclusive. The adopted Seminole like Osceola were every bit as determined to fight the white invasion of traditional Native territory as anyone born into the tribe.
Thousands of Seminole died fighting the white Florida invaders, but they considered their homeland worth the cost. In fairness, even in the bloodiest fights the Seminole lost no more people than they would have from the hellish death marches they would have faced if they had capitulated to the unjust laws. They also won most of the battles.
The Seminoles were attacked in the press because they killed many white people (including women and children) who were trying to establish homesteads on Seminole land. In the newspapers of the time, the deaths of these white settlers were called “massacres” by “savages”, and the murder of non-combatants and children is indeed heartbreaking. However, the multiple deaths of Native women and children at the hands of white soldiers and settlers didn’t get mentioned at all. As for myself, I consider the murder of a Seminole child to be every bit as bad as the death of a white one.
Eventually, after enough white settlers who were trying to take Seminole land had died and it became clear the Seminole people were not going to give up as long as even one fighter still lived, Florida decided that they would actually obey the Supreme Court decision to leave Native American lands alone after all. The Seminole natives in Florida still own their lands (now called reservations) to this day, and have let neither their languages or their culture die out in the advent of modernising.
I honestly wish the Cherokee and their allies had decided to fight as well. Even after the losses on the Trail of Tears, they weren’t safe. In 1889 the USA opened up the Cherokee lands in Oklahoma for “settlement” by whites, and when oil was discovered under the Osage reservation in the same area, those natives were again slaughtered by white men who wanted to strike it rich. A war couldn’t have killed any more people than capitulation did.