Compare And Contrast The Trail Of Tears And The Bataan Death March

Mark Twain once said, “History does not repeat itself but it does rhyme”. When looking at the past one may see exactly what Mark Twain is speaking of. One major “rhyme” in history is the Trail of Tears in 1830-1836 and the Bataan Death March in 1942. These two events have major similarities that occurred between them and yet multiple differences. When comparing the two one has to look at the fact that individuals were upset about what happened to the United States soldiers during the Bataan Death March even though years prior the United States put the Native Americans in an identical situation during the Trail of Tears of 1838. The United State caused the death of Several Native Americans with no sympathy but willingly executed a man for doing the exact thing that their government allowed. When comparing these two major events, the Trail of Tears and the Bataan Death March, one

Both had multiple casualties from malnutrition and disease and had to endure the same hardships. The difference is that the United States did this action out of greed for the Native Americans land that they own east of the Mississippi River. Ethan Davis rights in his article “An Administrative Trail of Tears: Indian Removal,” that Congressional Democrats told society that the Removal Act was "a measure of life and death. Pass the bill on your table, and you save [the Indians]. Reject it, and you leave them to perish"(11). The American government lied and evoked an illusion of wanting to keep the natives safe, calling the removal “the lesser of two evils”. Saying that the Indian removal was to allow the Natives to “pursue happiness” on their own terms. Americans were stricken with horror when the surviving soldiers of the Bataan Death March recalled their struggles. Even though the difficult and brutal situations the American soldiers suffered through was precisely what transpired during the Trail of