The Trail of Tears

The Cherokee had lived for centuries in the southern Appalachians. Under pressure from settlers, they ceded more than 90 percent of their lands between 1721 and 1819. They adapted in ways many Americans demanded — farming, trading, building a written legal system and constitution, and, through Sequoyah’s syllabary, achieving widespread literacy. None of this protected them. When gold was found on Cherokee land in 1830, the same year as the Indian Removal Act, Georgia held lotteries giving Cherokee land and gold rights to whites and passed laws stripping the Cherokee of the right to govern themselves or testify in court against whites.

The Cherokee fought removal through the courts and won: in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the Supreme Court held that Georgia’s laws had no force in the Cherokee Nation. But President Jackson refused to enforce the decision. Most Cherokee, led by Principal Chief John Ross, opposed removal; a minority concluded that resistance was futile and that a treaty was the only way to survive as a people. In December 1835, U.S. officials met with this minority at New Echota, Georgia. Only 300 to 500 Cherokee were present and none were elected officials, yet twenty signed a treaty ceding all Cherokee land east of the Mississippi for $5 million and new land in the West. More than 15,000 Cherokee protested. The Senate ratified the treaty on May 23, 1836, by a single vote.

Most Cherokee refused to believe they would be forced out. In May 1838, General Winfield Scott, with 3,000 troops and authority to raise more, began rounding them up into stockades. Despite orders to treat them humanely, families were separated, the old and sick forced out at gunpoint, and homes looted as their owners were led away. Three groups left that summer, mostly by water, but low rivers, drought, and disease brought several deaths a day. The Cherokee asked to delay removal until fall and to conduct it themselves; the request was granted, but they had to wait in crowded internment camps.

By November, twelve groups of about 1,000 each were moving overland, roughly 800 miles. Autumn rains turned roads to mud, food was scarce, and two-thirds of the travelers were trapped between the ice-bound Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in January. One survivor remembered losing his father, then his mother, then his five brothers and sisters: “One each day. Then all are gone.”

Approximately 4,000 of 16,000 Cherokee died in the stockades or on the way. In Indian Territory, the survivors rebuilt their nation and government, but the bitter division between the treaty signers and the majority who had opposed removal lasted for years.

The Trail of Tears stands for the human cost of a national policy that sacrificed treaty promises and a Supreme Court ruling to the demand for land. The routes are commemorated today as the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, administered by the National Park Service.