Question

What was the "Trail of Tears" and how does it reflect US policy towards the Native Americans in the first half of the 19th Century?

Answer 1

In the early 1830s, nearly 125,000 native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia , Tennessee, Alabama , North Carolina, and Florida the land their ancestors had occupied and cultivated for generations to come. At the end of the decade, very few people had remained anywhere in the southeastern United States. Operating on behalf of white settlers who wished to cultivate cotton on Indian soil, the federal government forced them to leave their homelands and travel hundreds of miles across the Mississippi River to a specially named "Indian territory." This challenging and often dangerous journey is known as the "Trail of Tears."

White Americans , particularly those who lived on the western frontier, frequently feared and resented the native Americans they met: American Indians seemed to be foreign to them, invaders invading land that white settlers desired (and believed they deserved). Many leaders in the early years of the American revolution, such as President George Washington, felt that the only way to address this "Indian problem" was simply to "civilize" the native Americans.

By 1840, tens of thousands of Native Americans had been displaced from their lands in the south-eastern states and forced to migrate across the Mississippi River to the Indian Territory. The federal government vowed that their new land would remain undamaged forever, but as the white settlement line pushed westward, "Indian Territory" shrank and shrank. Oklahoma became a state in 1907, and the Indian Territory was gone for good.