A People’s History of the United States: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

Between 1790 and 1830, the population of the United States tripled. As a result, the population expanded past the Mississippi Valley and the Appalachian Mountains. This population expansion occurred at the expense of American Indians.

After the Revolutionary War, Indian tribes—most of which had fought on the side of the British—continued to war with American colonists. In the early 1800s, Thomas Jefferson doubled the size of the country by buying the Louisiana Territory from France; Jefferson’s decision necessitated the removal of Indians to clear way for farmers and industrialists. As white settlers encroached on their homes, many Indian tribes fought back, while some other tribes believed that they could coexist with settlers. One of the most famous figures to emerge from the fights with Indians in the new Louisiana Territory was Andrew Jackson. In 1814, he became a national hero by killing eight hundred Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.

In the 1810s, American settlers in the Louisiana Territory reached an uneasy truce with the Indians. Under the terms of the treaty Andrew Jackson signed with the Creek Indians, for example, individual Indians were allowed to own property. However, Jackson used bribery and intimidation to force Indians off their land, and he encouraged working-class whites to “squat” on Indian land in the hopes that the Indians would leave. Amazingly, the vast majority of history textbooks on Andrew Jackson, and even some serious biographies, do not talk about his legacy as a briber, bully, and killer of Indians.

After Andrew Jackson was elected president, the Southern states passed laws strengthening their control over Indians and encouraging whites to settle on Indian land. Many of these settlers harassed Indians—in effect, pressuring them to leave their lands and go west. Jackson deployed an army major to tell the Choctaw and Cherokee Indians to leave their territory, promising them that they’d be allowed to stay in their new territory, “as long as the grass grows or water runs.” For generations of American Indians, the phrase has become a symbol for American duplicity.

Throughout the 1810s and 20s, certain white frontier figures, such as Davy Crockett, became lifelong friends with Indian tribes. Furthermore, in Georgia, some Cherokee Indians tried to adapt to the U.S., and many of them became farmers. The Cherokee chief Sequoyah developed a written language for his people, and other leaders developed a “formal government.” Despite their attempts to integrate with America, Zinn notes, “none of this made them more desirable than the land they lived on.”

In 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, formally ordering all Indians to abandon their land in the U.S. and go west. The military seized the Cherokees’ lands and abolished their government. A missionary named Samuel Worcester was imprisoned for refusing to take a loyalty oath to the state of Georgia—an oath that would have forced him to say that he supported the Indian removal. Worcester took his case to the Supreme Court, and the Court found that the Georgia’s laws violated the state’s treaty with the Cherokee tribe. Jackson refused to honor the Court’s decision.

At the same time that Jackson supported the removal of Indians, he remained hugely popular. Bolstered by reelection, he hurried the process of Indian removal. White settlers invaded the land of the Creek Indians, and the federal government did nothing to protect the tribe. The Creek tribe refused to leave its land and, in response, Jackson deployed the army to evict the Creek and march them westward. The military also evicted other Indian tribes, such as the Choctaws and the Chickasaws.

The Seminole tribe, based mostly in Florida, refused to cooperate with the military’s eviction policy. In 1835, Seminole Indians attacked a group of 110 American soldiers, killing almost all of them. Andrew Jackson sent in the army to restore “order” in Florida, and the war with the Seminole dragged on for years. At the same time, some Cherokee Indians refused to abandon their land, practicing a policy of nonviolent resistance. In 1838, under the Presidency of Martin Van Buren, federal troops marched onto the Cherokee territory, rounded up Cherokee Indians, and forced them to march west on what would later be known as the Trail of Tears. On the march, as many as four thousand Cherokees died of sickness and starvation. At the end of that year, Van Buren told Congress that the Cherokee eviction had had “the happiest effects.”