On this date in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. The bill had been the subject of much controversy in Congress, before being passed by the Senate 28-19 on April 24, and in the House, on May 26, by the narrow margin of 101-97. The only Representative from a district containing, or adjacent to, the affected tribes to vote against the bill was David Crockett. You can read about Crockett's objections here.
The Removal Act, as proposed by President Jackson, with the enthusiastic support of most of the white population in the south, was designed to remove members of the Five "Civilized" Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole) from the southeast, moving them to what later became the state of Oklahoma. The Removal Act provided the funding to allow this action.
The term "civilized" is used to distinguish these tribes from those in other areas of the country and in different eras. These tribes all had established treaty relations, as autonomous nations, with the United States, and they were in compliance with those treaties. The treaties established them on lands across the southeast and each tribe had organized governance structures and were pursuing agricultural and settled ways. There was also considerable intermarriage between whites and tribe members. This was a very different scenario from the situation with the nomadic tribes of the Great Plains like the Sioux and Comanche, which the federal government would face in future decades.
Some factions of each of the tribes would voluntarily remove themselves, but others refused to leave, leading to the forced migrations of the late 1830s, known as the Trail of Tears, as well as to the Seminole War of 1835 to 1842 in Florida.
Although it was their white neighbors who triggered the expulsion, it was carried out by the federal government, which, at the outbreak of the Civil War, led all the removed tribes, who also held black slaves, to support the Confederacy.
The Indian ways of life in the Western Hemisphere were doomed from the moment Europeans first arrived. The diseases the Europeans carried with them, and the lack of immunity of the native population resulted in population reductions of 80-90% across both continents.(1) When the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth in 1620, they settled on the remains of an Indian village wiped out from disease.(2)
Later, there was no way the United States would allow the nomadic raiding culture of the Plains Indians to continue. The only path of survival was adaptation to European ways while keeping selective parts of native cultures. This is what the tribes of the southeast tried to do and, indeed, they were living in peace with their neighbors in 1830. The problem was the insatiable hunger for land by those white neighbors. One of the arguments made in favor of the Removal Act was that the U.S. military establishment was so few in number that it could not prevent settler infringement on native lands, an infringement that would inevitably lead to violence, and thus the Removal Act actually protected the tribes. Whatever the arguments, the removal remains a blot on our history.
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(1) There is a lot of variation in population estimates for the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere, but the bulk of Indians were south of the current borders of the U.S. It's likely that less than 5% of the total population in 1491 lived within today's United States borders.
(2) Mortality rates for the European settlers were also high. Half of the Pilgrims died in that first winter, and in the Chesapeake region the toll was staggering, as you can read in The Barbarous Years.
