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    • Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan
    The Trail of Tears

    The Trail of Tears is the name which is applied a series of route-ways running from Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama westwards through Mississippi to Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas that were employed to forcibly remove Native American groups west of the Mississippi River as a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Native American groups involved were the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw who were being forced off of their lands to accommodate new American or European settlers. The Trail of Tears routes were employed throughout the 1830s to move these groups, involving some 60,000 people. It is understood that at least a quarter of these died as a result of disease outbreaks and government violence, while many more died owing to the poor conditions they experienced after they were moved. As a result, the Trail of Tears is also used as a term to describe what is now deemed to be a quasi-genocidal ethnic cleansing of states like Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia to make way for further western settlement here. The term Trail of Tears originated amongst the Cherokee.[1]

    Trail of Tears chronology of eventsTrail of Tears chronology of events

    The Trail of Tears was a product of the continuing desire for ever greater amounts of land by Americans and European arrivals to the United States. For the first two centuries of European settlement in North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they had generally stayed close to the Atlantic seaboard and the Thirteen Colonies which formed the United States in 1776 ran in a straight north-south line along the East Coast. Even by then though pioneering settlers had begun to strike out west of the Appalachian Mountains and other geographical boundaries further inland to Kentucky and Tennessee. Furthermore, in the course of the 1810s the US annexed parts of Florida and then completed their acquisition of it through the Florida Purchase Treaty of 1819.[2] All of this led to growing levels of movement from Georgia and the Carolinas further westwards into Tennessee, Alabama and even Mississippi in search of new land, demand which was augmented by growing levels of migration from Europe, particularly from Scotland and Ireland.[3]

    President Andrew Jackson

    The US government’s response to the desire for more and more land to feed its expanding population (the population grew from 9.6 million in 1820 to 12.9 million in 1830 and 17 million in 1840) was to simply take it from the Native Americans who owned it.[4] On the 28th of May 1830 the US Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. This called for the removal of the major Native American groups who resided in Tennessee, western Georgia, northern Florida, Alabama and parts of Mississippi to regions west of the Mississippi in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma. This would focus on the Five Nations, the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw.[5]

    The government of the seventh US President, Andrew Jackson (1829–1837), now oversaw one of the most brutal actions ever orchestrated by any American government. Over the next six or seven years it forced some 60,000 natives to leave their lands east of the Mississippi and relocate hundreds of thousands of kilometers to the west of the river. Often forced along the routes by divisions of the US military, thousands died from starvation, disease and exposure, while others resisted and were killed in large numbers during the Second Seminole War between 1835 and 1842. It is estimated that as many as 15,000 or so of the 60,000 natives involved died during what the Cherokees came to call the Trail of Tears. Thus, this constituted both an act of quasi-genocide as well as a clear act of ethnic cleansing.[6]

    Extent of migration associated with the Trail of TearsExtent of migration associated with the Trail of Tears

    A map of Alabama from 1823

    In many ways the migration which is associated with the Trail of Tears had begun prior to it and the Indian Removal Act was actually the product of this migration. Back in 1817 a period of mass westwards migration from Georgia, Florida and the Carolinas into what is now Alabama began. Known as the Alabama Fever today, this led to the influx of tens of thousands of people into a region which had barely experienced any western settlement up to that point. Where less than 10,000 people of European ancestry or birth lived in the Alabama territory in 1810, this had increased to well over 100,000 by 1820, and to as much as 300,000 by 1830. The number reached half a million before 1840 and continued to grow thereafter. While the process was not as acute in other regions, similar patterns were seen in other regions westwards to Texas.[7]

    While the migration of Americans and European migrants into the lands of the Five Nations was already underway before the Trail of Tears, the impact of the Indian Removal Act was the depopulation of Alabama, Tennessee, parts of Florida, western Georgia and parts of Mississippi of their Native American population. One could argue that this led to a substantial increase in the Native American population west of the Mississippi River, but in reality the number who made it to regions like Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma was nowhere near the number who were driven westwards owing to disease, war, brutality and starvation.

    Demographic impact of the Trail of TearsDemographic impact of the Trail of Tears

    The demographic impact of the Indian Removal Act was very substantial. If the Alabama Fever had already started long before the Trail of Tears and in many ways led to the Indian Removal Act, then the settlement of Mississippi was more of a product of it. There were over 100,000 settlers here by 1830, many of them having spread into the region from Louisiana and being French Creole settlers of longstanding. This ballooned in the 1830s as a major wave of settlers arrived to Mississippi from the east with the population there reaching nearly 400,000 by 1840, much of the migration being fuelled by a cotton boom and newly available land. There were over 600,000 people there by mid-century and a million people in Mississippi by the mid-1870s.[8]

    Ultimately the Trail of Tears transformed the demography of the southern parts of the United States. It could further be argued that without this rapid westwards expansion the Mexican-American War might not have broken out in 1846 and have led to the further opening of the American West and settlement of states like California and Oregon as quickly as they were in the 1840s and 1850s. Yet it all occurred on the back of the ethnic cleansing of the American south in the 1830s.

    See alsoSee also

    Explore more about the Trail of TearsExplore more about the Trail of Tears

    References

    1. ↑ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2959.html
    2. ↑ https://history.state.gov/milestones/1801-1829/florida
    3. ↑ https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/territorial-period-and-early-statehood/
    4. ↑ https://libguides.princeton.edu/c.php?g=84237&p=541428
    5. ↑ https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/indian-treaties
    6. ↑ https://www.history.com/news/trail-of-tears-conditions-cherokee
    7. ↑ https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/alabama-fever/
    8. ↑ https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/07/mississippis-1830s-cotton-bubble-an-excerpt-from-flush-times-and-fever-dreams-a-story-of-capitalism-and-slavery-in-the-age-of-jackson.html


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