“One can never forget the sadness and solemnity of that morning of that morning… Many of the children rose to their feet and waved their little hands good-by to their mountain homes, knowing they were leaving them forever.” - John G. Burnett, US military interpreter during the Trail of Tears. In one of the blackest marks made in history by the United States, the Trail of Tears was the brutal removal of the Cherokee and many other tribes from their homes. While the Supreme Court had ruled that the Cherokee Nation had the right to the land, Andrew Jackson had forced nearly 1,600 Native Americans to march to Oklahoma from Georgia and surrounding areas instead, ignoring the court ruling. The Indian Removal Act was a step in the wrong direction for our …show more content…
Many Americans believed that the Indian Removal Act would be a series of treaty making with the Native Americans, to form alliances and give them the land that the Americans didn’t believe the US would ever extend to, and the original Supreme Court ruling in 1831 also invalidated Cherokee sovereignty over their land. However, the Indian Removal Act quickly became an excuse for Jackson’s tantrum over the Supreme Court’s second ruling in 1832, which confirmed Cherokee sovereignty in 1832. Though the US believed that they had owned the land, the Cherokee had been there for much longer and held the rights to the land. The US also did not have the legal right to the land though they had the treaty because the treaty had been signed by renegade Cherokee who believed in relocation, not by the actual government of the Cherokee Nation. Chief John Ross argued that it had been made illegally, but it was ratified by a single vote and signed by Jackson. This violation of Cherokee rights and Supreme Court rulings were morally wrong in their own right, but the real moral horror of the Trail of the Tears possibly was the most terrible