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Cherokee Removal Argumentative Essay

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During one of his powerful speeches, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race.” Scholars talk of what happened to the Indians as a great tragedy, but never anything further. We deny what happened to the Indians, particularly the Cherokees. During the 1830’s, the United States government set out to remove all Cherokee individuals from their homes and relocate them west. Relocation meant ending up on a land foreign to them, and presented with environmental conditions that posed difficulties for human living. This journey, known as the Trail of Tears, left countless of Indians physically and spiritually dead. The Cherokee did in fact suffer a genocide. With the help of a reputable source explaining the term genocide, along with the explanation of documents written during the time, people discover the undeniable truth that a genocide happened during the Cherokee Removal. To grasp how the events made the removal a genocide, the meaning of the term …show more content…

If scholars and historians fail to recognize the true devastation that the removal caused, they undermine the pain Indians endured. People like to think of the removal as a positive thing for Indians; the United States granted them an opportunity for a new life rid of the threats from Georgia. President Jackson himself, when talking about American citizens, remarked “How many thousands of our own people would gladly embrace the opportunity of removing to the West on such conditions!” People trusted what Jackson said because of his presidential position. However, people failed and still fail, to recognize that Jackson hoped not only a removal, but an act of genocide against the Cherokee. He and many other did not like them, and they intended to destroy the “wretched

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Between 1830 and 1850, the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, Creek, Seminole and Cherokee peoples were forced to leave their homelands to relocate further west. The Cherokee Nation removal in 1838 (the last forced removal east of the Mississippi) was brought on by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1829, resulting in the Georgia Gold Rush.1 During the Trail of Tears (1838-1839), the Cherokee tribes were moved to the Indian Territory, near the Ozarks. They initially settled near Tahlequah, Oklahoma. This is where the tribes historically settled in 1838 to 1839, after the Indian Removal Act of 1830 passed during the presidency of Andrew Jackson.2 The removal included members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw

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The Genocide: Trail of Tears/ The Indian removal act During the 1830s the united states congress and president Andrew Jackson created and passed the “Indian removal act”. Which allowed Jackson to forcibly remove the Indians from their native lands in the southeastern states, such as Florida and Mississippi, and send them to specific “Indian reservations” across the Mississippi river, so the whites could take over their land. From 1830-1839 the five civilized tribes (The Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, and Chickasaw) were forced, sometimes by gun point, to march about 1,000 miles to what is present day Oklahoma.

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Burnett said it himself, “Murder is murder, and somebody must answer. Somebody must explain the streams of blood that flowed in the Indian country in the summer of 1838. Somebody must explain the 4000 silent graves that mark the trail of the Cherokees to their exile.” This event took place because American were searching for more land. The Cherokees were happy and healthy at their old homes, but once President Andrew signed the bill in 1830, making it the Indian Removal Act, the Indians had no control whatsoever and had to do what they were told.

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In 1838, the Cherokees were forced to give up their lands and to migrate to present-day Oklahoma, due to the signing of The Treaty of New Echota. The Cherokees were deported from their homes, betrayed by the government whom they treated with respect, separated them from their land that they nurtured; the Cherokee struggled to understand how to make a new life. The Indian Removal led to thousands of Cherokees to die due to starvation, diseases, and exhaustion during their march known as The Trail of Tears. This paper will discuss the effects it had on the Cherokees and what has happened during the trail.

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There were some 15,000 captives that were still to be removed. There were draught and poor sanitation that made life very miserable. Very many of them died. The National Council of Cherokee and Chief Ross tried to plead with General Scott to permit the remaining Cherokees to wait till the weather was better for them to be moved. They also wanted to oversee their removal.

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Furthermore, the documents in “The Cherokee Removal” help to realize that the Indians were not savages instead they were trying to assimilate into the American

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On July 17, 1830, the Cherokee nation published an appeal to all of the American people. United States government paid little thought to the Native Americans’ previous letters of their concerns. It came to the point where they turned to the everyday people to help them. They were desperate. Their withdrawal of their homeland was being caused by Andrew Jackson signing the Indian Removal Act into law on May 28, 1830.

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However, this source has significant limitations due to Jackson’s motivation in removing the Cherokee, historians cannot be fully assured Jackson included all facts behind the removal. For example, many of the benefits Jackson mentioned in his speech specifically regarding the Cherokee benefiting from removal hardly seem plausible. This calls into attention Jackson’s integrity and honesty throughout the entire speech.

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The Apache were a strong, fierce, war-like nation, native to the arid deserts of the Southwest (specifically Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma). And since 1492, the discovery of the Americas, the Apache fiercely opposed Spanish, Mexican, and American invasions. Arguably, they are most known and most remembered for their association with the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans; the relationship between the Apache and the settlers that led into the Mexican and American conflicts and the aftermath of that, by how westward expansion in the United States affected the population of the Apaches and then how the laws during the 1800s influenced the forced removal of the Apache. These reasons show the relationship the settlers had with the Apache.

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The white settlements expanded west, they threatened to take over Cherokee land in the southern U.S. The historical question is trying to tell if the Cherokee should leave or stay in their territory. People might disagree with this because the Cherokee’s do not want to leave their homes and want to stay to fight. People think they should stay because it’s their land and it should not be taken away from them and how they should stay to fight for their territory.

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