The Trail of Tears: America's Shameful March
In the winter of 1838, more than 15,000 Cherokee men, women, and children were forced from their ancestral homeland in the southeastern United States and marched over a thousand miles to designated "Indian Territory" in present-day Oklahoma. An estimated 4,000 Cherokee died along the way — from cold, hunger, disease, and exhaustion. The Cherokee called it Nunna daul Tsuny: "The Trail Where They Cried."
The Five Civilized Tribes
The Trail of Tears was not a single event but the culmination of decades of American policy aimed at removing indigenous peoples from lands east of the Mississippi River. The victims were primarily the so-called "Five Civilized Tribes" — the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole — peoples who had lived in the southeastern United States for centuries.
The term "civilized" reflected the fact that these nations had adopted many aspects of Euro-American culture. The Cherokee, in particular, had developed a written language (created by Sequoyah around 1821), established a constitutional government modeled on the United States, published a bilingual newspaper (the Cherokee Phoenix), and built schools and churches. Many Cherokee were farmers, and some owned plantations and enslaved people.
None of this mattered when white settlers wanted their land.
The Pressure to Remove
The roots of Indian Removal lay in the relentless westward expansion of the American settler population. After the War of 1812, which broke the power of indigenous confederacies in the Northwest and Southeast, white settlers flooded into indigenous territories. The discovery of gold on Cherokee land in Georgia in 1828 intensified the pressure dramatically.
The state of Georgia began asserting jurisdiction over Cherokee territory, passing laws that nullified Cherokee governance and distributed Cherokee land to white settlers through a lottery system. When the Cherokee appealed to the federal government, they found a hostile audience.
"The condition of the Indians in relation to the United States is perhaps unlike that of any other two people in existence." — Chief Justice John Marshall, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831)
Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act
Andrew Jackson, elected president in 1828, was an unapologetic advocate of Indian removal. A veteran of wars against the Creek and Seminole, Jackson viewed indigenous peoples as obstacles to American progress. In his First Annual Message to Congress in 1829, he framed removal as a benevolent policy — necessary, he claimed, to save Native peoples from extinction.
On May 28, 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act by a narrow margin. The law authorized the president to negotiate treaties with indigenous nations for their relocation west of the Mississippi, to "Indian Territory" (present-day Oklahoma). The treaties were supposed to be voluntary. In practice, they were anything but.
The Cherokee Resistance
The Cherokee mounted the most sustained legal and political resistance to removal. In the landmark case Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Georgia had no authority over Cherokee territory — that the Cherokee Nation was a sovereign entity with which only the federal government could treat. Chief Justice John Marshall delivered the opinion.
Jackson reportedly responded: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." Whether he actually said these words is debated, but they capture his position perfectly. He ignored the ruling and continued pressing for removal.
In 1835, a small faction of Cherokee — the so-called Treaty Party led by Major Ridge, his son John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot — signed the Treaty of New Echota, agreeing to removal in exchange for $5 million and land in Indian Territory. The treaty was not authorized by the Cherokee National Council and was opposed by the vast majority of Cherokee, including their elected chief, John Ross. A petition signed by nearly 16,000 Cherokee opposing the treaty was sent to Congress. It was ignored.
The March of Death
Removal began in earnest in 1838 under the supervision of General Winfield Scott, who arrived in Cherokee territory with 7,000 federal troops. Cherokee families were rooted out of their homes at bayonet point, often without time to gather possessions. Their homes and farms were immediately occupied by white settlers.
The Cherokee were first held in stockades and temporary camps, where disease spread rapidly in the crowded, unsanitary conditions. Then began the long march westward — a journey of roughly 1,200 miles through Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas.
The march took place over the brutal winter of 1838–1839. Groups traveled on foot, by horse, and in wagons. Rations were inadequate, blankets were scarce, and medical care was virtually nonexistent. The elderly and very young were especially vulnerable. Whooping cough, dysentery, typhus, and cholera swept through the groups.
An estimated 4,000 Cherokee perished — roughly one in four of those who set out. Among the dead was Quatie Ross, wife of Chief John Ross, who reportedly gave her blanket to a sick child and died of pneumonia.
The Other Trails
The Cherokee were not the only nation forced to walk this path. The Choctaw were removed between 1831 and 1833 — the first nation to undergo the process. Alexis de Tocqueville, witnessing their crossing of the Mississippi in December 1831, wrote that the scene was one of "solemn" suffering that he would never forget. Thousands of Choctaw died.
The Creek removal in 1836 was preceded by a brief war after some Creek leaders resisted. The Chickasaw negotiated better financial terms but still suffered during the journey. The Seminole fought a series of brutal wars (1817–1858) in the Florida swamps rather than submit, and many were never removed.
Aftermath and Legacy
In Indian Territory, the removed nations faced further hardships: unfamiliar terrain, conflict with plains tribes already living in the area, and the broken promises of a federal government that had pledged perpetual ownership of the new lands. That promise, too, would eventually be broken during the Oklahoma land rushes of the late 19th century.
The Treaty Party leaders — the Ridges and Boudinot — were assassinated by Cherokee who considered them traitors, in accordance with Cherokee law against unauthorized cession of land.
The Trail of Tears stands as one of the most shameful episodes in American history — a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing carried out by a democratic government against peoples who had done everything asked of them to "civilize" and assimilate. It laid bare the fundamental contradiction at the heart of American expansion: that the rhetoric of liberty and democracy coexisted with the systematic dispossession of indigenous peoples.
Today, the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail stretches across nine states, a solemn reminder of a march that should never be forgotten.
