Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act

Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act

One of the most controversial topics in our history as a nation was the Indian Removal Act of

1830. Like most topics in our history, people today don't apply much thought. Andrew Jackson

and the supporters of this law are judged as uneducated and racist, and the whole white race

is condemned as greedy and ignorant. In this paper I will examine this law and the man largely

responsible for it, and, its consequences both for history and those of us living today.

First I will qualify myself because in this time of political correctness, it is prudent to not

come across as racist or biased. My ancestors on my dad's side of the family were Choctaw

Indians living in Sunflower County Mississippi as late as the 1950s. Contrary to popular belief,

not all Indians were removed during the 1830s and 1840s. Many like my great grandfather's

family chose to stay and become citizens of their state, which was an option under the Indian

Removal Act. (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2959.html) That is a part of history

that gets left out when the topic is discussed today. People who stayed behind suffered as

well because the decision to stay wasn't an easy one because this meant they had to give up

their tribal affiliations. And I'm sure that decision didn't go over well with the rest of the tribe

either. Nevertheless my ancestors stayed behind in Mississippi until my great grandfather who

was a sharecropper who grew cotton like most in the south did in the early to mid-1900s. He

had a large family who worked alongside him in the cotton fields. A heart condition made

it impossible for him to continue farming so he loaded up his family and moved to Duncan

Oklahoma and lived out the rest of his life.

Andrew Jackson is judged by many today as being an uneducated racist hillbilly who just

happened to be in the right place in history to become the president of the United States. And

he gets all of the blame for the government's policy on Indian Removal. However he wasn't the

person who first thought of the idea, it was Thomas Jefferson. The idea originated shortly after

the United States purchased the Louisiana territory from France in 1803. "Some Indian peoples,

including many Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Creeks, chose to heed Jefferson's call to

adopt the ways of white society, adopting governments modeled on the United States, churches

and schools producing high literacy. But other Natives rejected the white road. For them,

Jefferson had little patience. Given his principles, Indians had two choices: full assimilation or

removal. Jefferson began raising the specter of Indian removal in private letters written in

1803. Native resistance to European-style farming and to land sales, as well as white settlers'

disrespect for Indian property rights, appears to have disposed Jefferson to doubt the feasibility

of assimilating Native people into American life. Would it not be better to move Indians out of

harm's way, he wondered, to exchange tribal lands in the east for lands west of the Mississippi?

He reasoned that Native people, safely ensconced in the west, could live peacefully, moving

from "savagery" to "civilization" at their own pace, while at the same time enabling frontier

whites to take over the Indians' old homelands back east. The "best use we can make of" the