Indian Removal - Overview

Overview

Since the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, America's policy had been to allow Native Americans to remain east of the Mississippi as long as they became assimilated or "civilized". His original plan was to guide the Natives towards adopting a sedentary agricultural lifestyle, in large part due to "the decrease of game rendering their subsistence by hunting insufficient". Jefferson's expectation was that by assimilating them into an agricultural lifestyle, they would become economically dependent on trade with white Americans, and would thereby be willing to give up land that they would otherwise not part with, in exchange for trade goods. In an 1803 letter to William Henry Harrison, Jefferson wrote:

When they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pare them off from time to time in exchange for necessaries for their farms and families. To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands. At our trading houses, too, we mean to sell so low as merely to repay us cost and charges, so as neither to lessen or enlarge our capital. This is what private traders cannot do, for they must gain; they will consequently retire from the competition, and we shall thus get clear of this pest without giving offence or umbrage to the Indians. In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.

There was a long history of Native American land being purchased, usually by treaty and sometimes under coercion. In the early 19th century the notion of "land exchange" developed and began to be incorporated into land cession treaties. Native Americans would relinquish land in the east in exchange for equal or comparable land west of the Mississippi River. This idea was proposed as early as 1803, by Jefferson, but was not used in actual treaties until 1817, when the Cherokee agreed to cede two large tracts of land in the east for one of equal size in present-day Arkansas. Many other treaties of this nature quickly followed. The process was used in President Andrew Jackson's policy of migration in the Indian Removal Act of 1830.