The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	History
Author:	Theda Perdue, Michael Green

"The Indians have ceased to be an object of terror. The time seems to arrived when our policy toward them should undergo an important change... Our views of their interest, and not their own, ought to govern them."
--John C. Calhoun,
Secretary of War
Report to US House of Representatives, 1818.


This book tells of a tragedy for Native Americans. For centuries before British and later American settlement, the Cherokee people had settled in the Appalachian Mountains of what became part of the states of Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama. .

'The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears" is the retelling of the the forced removal of thousands of native peoples from 1838--1842, a trek that took the out of their homeland to a more desolate location over one thousand miles across North America in what was then called "Indian Territory" (later the state of Oklahoma. A quarter of the Cherokee removed in a series of poorly planned and provisioned forced repatriations organized by the US Army and later by the native government died thanks to the policies of "Great White Fathers" in Washington like President Andrew Jackson and Calhoun, who went on to become Vice-President of the United States.
The Cherokee died from diseases like cholera, from the numbing cold, from hunger, and sometimes white-on-Indian violence, especially against those tried to resist or escape the forced removals.

When Calhoun spoke of determining the fate of the Native peoples in 1818, the American Government had triumphed in two wars and held their own against British forces in the Great Lakes area during the War of 1812. Some Indian tribes had formed ties with with the British, and the end of the war in 1815 ending British control below Lower Canada also gave American settlers a strong desire for revenge against the tribes.

The American forces had also defeated the great native alliance led by Shawnee leader Tecumseh in the Great Lakes country, and also emerged victorious over a branch of the Creek Indians known as "The Red Stick Faction" in the southern territories. Andrew Jackson, a man who despised all Indian peoples, was a general in the latter war and, ironically, some of those soldiers and scouts who helped him defeat the Red Stick Creek were Cherokee.

Despite this aid, Jackson never wavered in his desire to run the Cherokee off their land. A resident of Tennessee, "Old Hickory" represented the living embodiment of many Americans who were pushing by the hundreds of thousands into the Appalachians region and beyond to the Mississippi in the 1820's.

The push into the Southern territories was lead by the citizens of Georgia, who wanted the Cherokee land either for small farms or cotton plantations that would rely on the chattel labor of African-American slaves.

Professor Theda Perdue, co-author of the book, expanded on the power arrayed against the Cherokee in a 2003 interview for Public Broadcasting for a Program called "Race: The Power of An Illusion":

"And so the pressure to remove Indians from the Southeast, to push them off their ancestral lands, really is a double-pronged attack. It's an attack on the basis of: Indians have this land; they're not making the proper use of it; it needs to be farmed by whites who can put it to proper use. But also the idea that you have these independent people of color in the South, who are not fully subjugated because they're governed by their own tribal governments. And these people have to be brought to heel. These people have to be subjugated to this racial system.

"It was virtually impossible to subjugate them unless you did away with their nations. And of course that is what the state of Georgia did in the removal crisis. It simply declared the Cherokee government inoperative within the chartered bounds of Georgia. And Georgia law began to be enforced over Cherokees who lived within the state. And Georgia law was discriminatory. Cherokees were not the equals of whites in Georgia law. They could not testify against whites. And this meant that Cherokees were brought into that racial system. Georgians, of course, intended to make life so miserable for the Cherokees that they would agree to go west; that is, that they would surrender their land, which could then be opened to white settlement."


Other peoples threatened by this unbridled expansion policy included the Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks and Seminoles. All or most of these people would face deportation to Indian Territory at this time.


In 1830, a gold strike occurred on Cherokee land that was already being overrun by white settlers. This and Jackson's election to the Presidency in 1828, sealed the fate of a proud and ancient civilization with their own religion, writings, newspapers and businesses.

It is a sad and tragic story, fueled by greed for land and race-hatred. But the Cherokee Nation survives today with 300,000 citizens of the three main tribes, and hundreds of thousands of others with Cherokee ancestry, including the actors James Garner, Johnny Depp, James Earl Jones as well as entertainers like the late Johnny Cash, Billy Ray Cyrus and former President Bill Clinton.
Here's more background on Southeastern Indian Removal, from the recent Documentary "500 Nations":