Trail Of Tears Essay Thesis

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Pages: 3

The Trail of Tears was the forcible relocation of Native American people (mostly Cherokee) from the southeast to the west. The march itself was 800 miles long and was traveled mostly by foot. Over a quarter of all the people (around 45,000) died along the way. It all started with the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which was meant to force Native American tribes off of their land. In the 1832 trial Worcester vs. Georgia, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional and recognized the Cherokee as an independent nation. President Andrew Jackson completely ignored this and forced them to relocate anyway. This was one of the few times in history that a president ignored a Supreme Court verdict. The Trail of Tears, however, actually occurred under the presidency of Martin van Buren.
Before the 1830s, nearly 125,000 Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in the Southeastern United States. But in the 1830's there was a forced migration of those Cherokees from their homelands and walked thousands of miles to a specially designated “Indian territory” and had to across the Mississippi River. That walk is called the "Trail of Tears." In 1838, the U.S. military expelled Cherokees without regard for their dignities or lives. The US military would do almost anything to get the land. They stole livestock, burned the houses, and captured land that belongs to Native Americans And the conflicts was impossible to avoid, General Winfield Scott claimed that “The blood of the white man or the blood of the red man may be spilt, and, if spilt, however accidentally, it may be impossible for the discreet and humane among you, or among us, to prevent a general war and carnage.” And the Cherokees were absolute vulnerable in this conflict, with less people and less
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This also led to the Civil War by causing lots of tension between people in America and between Native