Private John G. Burnett accounted his military experiences in 1839 as follows:"I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward the west.” A direct result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, this was the harsh reality for more than 20,000 Native Americans living in America’s southeast (“Cherokee Removal - The Trail Where They Cried”). In order to acquire more land for white settlers and farmers producing profitable crops in the south, President Andrew Jackson proposed a plan for removal in 1829 (Stewart, 37). This plan was signed into law in 1830 as the Indian Removal Act. The act only gave the president the power to negotiate relocation with southern tribes; however, when many Native Americans resisted, the government turned to much more damaging and harmful methods of expulsion (Stewart 38). The Indian Removal Act was utterly inhumane because it was the cause of thousands of deaths and destroyed the lives of the natives that survived.
To begin, because of the Indian Removal Act, Native Americans suffered a loss
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There is no doubt that an immense number of Native Americans died at the hands of United States citizens and were slaughtered for trying to protect themselves from persecution allotted by the Indian Removal Act. The amount spiritual and physical damage done to the tribes that were forced to leave their homelands is simply incomprehensible. It is terrifying to see and realize that this country’s economic and geographical growth came at an awful price: the happiness and safety of thousands of innocent