The Rise of the Speculator
After the American Revolution, wealthy speculators bought vast tracts of frontier land. They sought profits through resale. Andrew Jackson led these men. He became the most destructive enemy the Native nations ever faced.
In 1814, at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson defeated the Creek Nation. Cherokee allies secured this victory. They swam a river and attacked the Creeks from behind. killed 800 of the Creek warriors. There were very few deaths on his side. Jackson owed his victory over the Creeks to the Cherokees.
These Cherokees joined Jackson because the U.S. government promised them fair treatment. The government lied.
Conquest through Law and Force
Jackson soon stripped the Creeks of half their land. He dictated treaties that replaced communal ownership with individual titles. This tactic fractured tribal unity. It allowed white speculators to seize parcels one by one.
Jackson turned his sights toward Spanish Florida. He launched a war of conquest under the guise of national defense. He burned Seminole villages and seized Spanish forts. Spain sold the territory. As governor, Jackson helped his friends buy land and enslaved people. He built a “Cotton Kingdom” upon forced labor and stolen soil.
The Presidency and the Policy of Removal
The people elected Jackson president in 1828. He ignored federal laws and Supreme Court rulings. He gave Southern states a green light to strip Native peoples of their rights.
Jackson spoke with paternalism and threats. He promised the Choctaw and Cherokee new homes west of the Mississippi. He claimed they would own that land “as long as grass grows or water runs.” Reality proved different. In 1831, thousands of Choctaw perished from hunger and cold. By 1832, the army marched the Creeks west in chains. One boat sank; three hundred people drowned.
Resistance: The Sword and the Pen
In 1835, the Seminoles refused to leave Florida. They launched an eight-year guerrilla war. Led by Osceola, they utilized the swamps to frustrate the U.S. Army. The war cost the U.S. $20 million and 1,500 lives. It ended after the army captured Osceola under a flag of truce. He died in prison.
The Cherokees chose a different path. They built a constitutional government and prosperous farms. Under Sequoyah, they developed a written language and a bilingual newspaper.
These efforts failed to stop white greed. The State of Georgia outlawed the Cherokee government and imprisoned its supporters. In 1838, the U.S. Army forced 17,000 Cherokees into stockades. The Trail of Tears began. During this march, 4,000 people died from exposure and sickness.
Broken Promises: Andrew Jackson and the Machinery of Indian Removal
Jackson got himself appointed to handle treaties and wrote a treaty that took away half the Creek Nation’s land.
The Shawnee chieftain, Tecumseh, said, The land belongs to all, for all of each to use. But Jackson’s treaty gave the Indians individual ownership. His treaty broke up their shared holdings. The treaty turned Indian against Indian, bribing some of them with land and leaving others completely out. Jackson used force, bribery, and tricks. He helped the whites take over three-fourths of Alabama and Florida, a third of Tennessee, and parts of other states. He made the area the place where the Cotton Kingdom of the South would grow and where slaves labored on white-owned plantations.
Jackson attacked the Seminoles and forced Spain to sell Florida to the U.S.
White settlements soon reached the edge of Spanish Florida, which was the home of the Seminole Indians and some of the black slaves who lived with the Seminole Indians. Jackson claimed that the United States had to control Florida to defend itself, and then he launched a war of conquest. Jackson started making raids into Florida, burning Seminole villages and seizing Spanish forts, until finally Spain agreed to sell Florida to the United States. Jackson became the governor of the new territory, and he gave his friends and relatives advice on buying slaves and speculating on land, land that he had stolen, and they had stolen with his connivance.
Jackson and Van Buren lied and promised the defeated Indians and Indian Traitors unmolested sovereignty west of the Mississippi River
In 1828, Americans elected Jackson president of the United States. Under Jackson and then Van Buren, the U.S. government removed Indians from their homelands east of the Mississippi River. Louis Caste, a government official, took millions of acres from the Indians when he became governor of the Michigan territory. Meeting with the Shawnees and Cherokees, Caste promised them that if they moved west across the Mississippi River, the United States would never ask them for their land on the other side of the Mississippi. He said that the Indians would forever have that territory.
In the 1820s, before Jackson became president, the southern Indians and whites had settled down and lived in peace, and lived close to each other. White men visited Indian communities, and Indians were guests in the white homes. Davy Crockett and Sam Houston were friends of the Indians of the South. Well, pressure to remove the Indians from the land came from politicians, business interests, land speculators, and a growing population that demanded new railroads and cities.
These developments pushed poor white frontiersmen into violent clashes with the Indians, but frontiersmen, who were the neighbors of the Indians, didn’t want to get rid of the Indians. Federal laws and treaties between the federal government and tribes put the U.S. Congress in charge of Indian affairs. STATES PASSED THEIR OWN LAWS that gave away Indian lands to the whites. As president, Jackson was supposed to enforce federal laws. But instead of enforcing federal laws, he ignored them, telling states, Do what you want. He told the Indians that they would not be forced to go west, but if they stayed, they’d have to obey state laws and would have endless trouble from whites who wanted their lands. But if they agreed to leave, the federal government would provide them with money and land west of the Mississippi.
Jackson told the Choctaws and the Cherokees that if they left their old lands peacefully, he’d give them new lands, and the government would leave them alone. And he sent them this message. Say to the chiefs and warriors that I am their friend. Still, they must, by removing from the limits of the states of Mississippi and Alabama, and by being settled on lands I offer them, put it in my power beyond the boundaries of any state in possession of land of their own, which they will then possess as long as grass grows or water runs. He lied.
The Choctaws did not want to leave, but 50 members of the tribe were bribed with money and land. So they signed the treaty that gave up Choctaw lands east of the Mississippi. In return, the Choctaws were supposed to get financial help for their journey west. 15,000 Choctaws began the journey west of the Mississippi in 1831, migrating to a land and climate completely different from anything they knew. The army was supposed to organize the Choctaws’ exodus, but it failed. The Choctaws died by the thousands from hunger, cold, and disease. 7,000 Choctaws still in Mississippi refused to follow those who left. After Jackson was reelected to the presidency in 1832, he accelerated Indian removal.
Alabama’s 22,000 Creeks lived on a teeny portion of their former territory, but they agreed to leave in exchange for the federal government’s promise that some of the land would be given to individual Creeks, who would then either sell it or stay on it with federal protection. The government immediately broke its promise; it didn’t protect the Creeks from whites. The whites swarmed all over the Creek land.
Desperate Creeks attacked white settlers, and the government declared that this was war, and the US Army had to use force, Jackson said, to make the Creeks go west. Soldiers invaded Creek communities, marched the people westward in groups of two or three thousand. Starvation and sickness killed hundreds of Creeks. As they were carried across the Mississippi in old, rotting boats, 300 of them died when one boat sank. In 1835, a government official ordered the Seminoles of Florida
Jackson and the Machinery of Indian Removal
In December 1835, a government official ordered the Seminoles of Florida to gather at a meeting place to begin their journey west. No one showed up. The Seminoles had decided to fight. Making surprise attacks on white settlements along the coast, striking quickly from hideouts in the interior, they murdered white families, captured slaves, and destroyed property. General Winfield Scott led U.S. troops into Florida to fight the Seminoles, but they found no one. Two-thirds of Scott’s officers resigned from the Army, worn out by mud, swamps, heat, and disease. The war lasted eight years and cost $20 million and 1,500 American lives. The Seminoles, who were a tiny force fighting a vast nation, had great resources. In the 1840s, they got tired. The Seminoles asked for a truce but were arrested. Their leader, Oseeola, died in prison, and the war died out.
In Georgia, the Cherokees were fighting back without violence. They tried to fit into the white man’s world by becoming farmers, blacksmiths, and carpenters. They set up a governing council and welcomed Christianity and white missionaries. After their chief Sequoyah invented a written form of their language, they printed a newspaper in both English and Cherokee. But although the Cherokees were taking up the ways of white society, the whites still wanted their land.
Georgia passed laws that stripped the Cherokees of their land and outlawed the tribal government, meetings, and newspapers. Any Indian who encouraged others to stay in the homeland could go to prison. White missionaries who said that the Cherokees should be allowed to remain on the land also received punishments, such as four years of hard labor in prison.
The federal government arranged a removal treaty with a few Cherokees who signed it behind the backs of most of the tribe. The government sent the army to enforce the treaty. Seventeen thousand Cherokees were rounded up and crowded into stockades. On October 1st, 1838, the first group set out on what came to be called the Trail of Tears. Four thousand Cherokees died of hunger, thirst, sickness, or exposure in the stockades around the brutal march westward.
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This concise documentary-style video explains how President Andrew Jackson secured passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and how the law triggered the mass forced relocation now known as the Trail of Tears — displacing tens of thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral lands, leading to death, suffering, and loss of sovereignty. It highlights the sequence of removals for the Choctaw, Seminole, Creek, Chickasaw, and Cherokee nations and the devastating human toll of the policy.
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