Indian Removal Act of 1830: Cherokee Assimilation and a 101 to 97 Vote

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The Indian Removal Act of 1830 led to the forced relocation of more than 60,000 people from at least 18 tribes west of the Mississippi. The episode contrasts French fur traders in the Great Lakes, who built alliances through marriages a la facon du pays and posts like Fort Miami, with the early U.S. policy of acculturation under George Washington. The Cherokee met those demands: Sequoyah's syllabary produced literacy rates that often exceeded those of white Georgians, and the nation published the bilingual Cherokee Phoenix and adopted a written constitution. Some elites also adopted plantation slavery. Georgia, citing the Compact of 1802, still demanded the land.

Andrew Jackson told tribes to submit to state law or move west, relying on Johnson v. McIntosh and the Doctrine of Discovery. The act passed the Senate 28 to 19 and the House 101 to 97 over opposition from Henry Clay, Theodore Frelinghuysen, missionary Jeremiah Evarts and Davy Crockett, who lost his seat. When Worcester v. Georgia ruled in 1832 that states could not regulate Native land, Jackson did not enforce it. The Choctaw ceded land at Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, a small Cherokee faction signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, and the Trail of Tears followed. Historians now debate the policy as ethnic cleansing or genocide, while Robert V. Remini and Francis Paul Prucha called it the lesser of evils.

• The Second Seminole War ran from 1835 to 1842, with Black Seminoles fighting alongside Seminole warriors.
• The U.S. lost over a thousand soldiers in Florida, and several hundred Seminoles stayed without signing a treaty.
• Removal supporters invoked the biblical story of Jacob and Esau.
• Jackson accused Northern critics of hypocrisy, since the North had already displaced its own Native populations.
• Some scholars link the ideology of Manifest Destiny to later Nazi concepts of Lebensraum and General Plan Ost.