Alexis de Tocqueville saw some of them, in the dead of winter 1831, while researching what would become Democracy in America. They were Choctaw, crossing the Mississippi at Memphis. Among them were the wounded and the sick, new-born babies, old men at the point of death. Snow had frozen hard on the ground; great blocks of ice rode in the great river. They had nothing. “No cry, no sob, was heard among the assembled crowd; all were silent,” Tocqueville wrote. “Never will that solemn spectacle fade from my remembrance.”
What Tocqueville witnessed was part of the forced expulsion of five Native American nations from their homelands in the American south-east to Oklahoma, some 800 miles away. It was triggered by the Indian Removal Act, signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on 28 May 1830.
The Choctaw were one of the so-called ‘five civilised tribes’ of Native American peoples, the other four being the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminoles. ‘Civilised’ meant incorporating aspects of western society they found useful: commerce, literacy, faith, and so on. Relentless colonial expansion had already pressed hard on their lands; between 1684 to 1819, the Cherokee had already given up over 90 per cent of their original territory in 28 different treaties. But the states wanted more: by the end of the 1820s Georgia and Alabama were claiming state jurisdiction over Native American lands and peoples. Mississippi and Tennessee followed suit.
The treaties the tribes had agreed were with the federal government. The states had no legal jurisdiction. Georgia’s claim over the Cherokee was fought all the way to the Supreme Court. Georgia lost. The Cherokee celebrated. But it made no difference. President Jackson – nicknamed ‘Sharp Knife’ by the Native Americans – thought the removal of the tribes inevitable and sought to make it so. “My white children have extended their law over your country,” he told the Creeks. “You must be subject to that law.”
The Cherokee removal is perhaps the best documented. Men, women and children were rounded up at gunpoint and driven into stockades, prior to the journey. Behind them, they saw their homes looted and burnt; graves were robbed for silver and other treasures. Conditions in the stockades were appalling; cholera, dysentery and other diseases was rife. Worse hardships were ahead. The traditional figure for the number of Cherokee who died in the removal is 4,000 out of a population of some 20,000; one estimate puts it at 8,000.
One American soldier, later a Confederate colonel, recalled: “I… have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever saw.” Not for nothing are these forced migrations remembered as the ‘trail of tears’.
In December 1838, months before the last migrants arrived in Oklahoma, Jackson’s successor, Martin van Buren, wrote to Congress: “It affords me sincere pleasure to be able to apprise you [that] the measures authorised by Congress with a view to the longstanding controversy with [the Cherokee] have had the happiest effects, and they have emigrated without any apparent reluctance.”
This is a slightly extended version of a piece that first appeared in the May 2023 issue of History Today.
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Mathew Lyons 
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