1830-1850
THE TRAIL OF TEARS AND SLAVERY:
Tragedies in Lockstep
As cotton demand and profitability rose in the late 18th century, Southern plantation owners sought more land across the South and Southwest to grow cotton. The insatiable demand for land led to such measures as the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which confiscated swaths of former Native American territory, making more land available for cotton farming and therefore further expanding slavery across the South.
The Trail of Tears was an ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of approximately 60,000 people of the “Five Civilized Tribes” between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government. As part of the Indian removal, members of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to newly designated Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River after the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830.
The Cherokee removal in 1838 (the last forced removal east of the Mississippi) was brought on by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1828, resulting in the Georgia Gold Rush.
Ryan P. Smith notes on SmithsonianMag.com the little-known fact that there were Cherokee slaveholders, foremost among them Cherokee chief John Ross. Furthermore, numerous Black enslaved people, Cherokee-owned, made the brutal march themselves or else were shipped en masse to what is now Oklahoma aboard cramped boats by their wealthy Indian masters.
“And what you may not know is that the federal policy of Indian removal, which ranged far beyond the Trail of Tears and the Cherokee, was not simply the vindictive scheme of Andrew Jackson,” Smith writes, “but rather a popularly endorsed, congressionally sanctioned campaign spanning the administrations of nine separate presidents.”
In the case of the Trail of Tears and the enslavement of Blacks by prominent members of all five so-called “Civilized Tribes,” Smith goes a step farther, likening the ugly truth of history to a “mangy, snarling dog standing between you and a crowd-pleasing narrative.”
“Obviously,” Smith says, “the story should be, needs to be, that the enslaved Black people and soon-to-be-exiled red people would join forces and defeat their oppressor.” But such was not the case—far from it. “The Five Civilized Tribes were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized Black codes, immediately reestablished slavery when they arrived in Indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, crushed slave rebellions, and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.”
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