Those members of Congress who supported the removal policies became instrumental in the build-up toward the Trail of Tears. American aggressive expansionism was what drove the forced removal from their land. Whites had expanded to the edges of their territory and were bursting at the seams in the attempt to accommodate all of the European immigrants. Jackson, continuing to sting from the defeat in 1788, took up the most vilely racist approaches to dealing with these "American" needs - by enforcing the Indian Removal Act (Prater, 9). Jackson started creating a wedge against the Cherokee by encouraging people to simply move onto and squat on Cherokee land. Settlers, squatters, encroachers would continue to inch their way toward the Cherokees and other people, and would eventually usurp all of their land.
As more and more lands were taken up by the Federal government, the Cherokee became significantly divided internally over how to best deal with the situation. By 1835, there were factions within the Cherokee nation that were calling for them to leave the territory voluntarily. One of the loudest and most eloquent voices on this matter was John Ross, a 1/8 Cherokee who was perhaps the only person who understood the nature of the problem well before it would result in the massive and total relocations. Ross urged his people to stay as one nation, and to resist Jackson's efforts (Meyers, 60). He believed that with time, the Supreme Court and the laws of the United States would bear out and set the situation right. but, it would be John Ridge, another Cherokee leader, who would realize that resistance would be futile and he began to negotiate, quietly, for the creation of a guarantee of land in some distant part of the nation. It was Ridge who south to move the Cherokee to Oklahoma before the Federal government simply forced them out. He fought for the peaceful removal of his people from the region. This small fraction of Cherokee (approximately five-hundred people in total) signed a treaty that granted them land rights in Oklahoma, all they had to do was abandon their homes. This first successful treaty, the Treaty of New Echota, opened the floodgates. Jackson, upon treaty ratification, and without waiting for the Cherokee to leave Georgia on their own, peacefully, moved Federal troops into New Echota and forced the Cherokee out.
Over the course of the next seven years, Jackson would bring increasingly strong pressure upon the Cherokee nation, and he made it very clear throughout that he was not going to back down a single inch. He worked with the Supreme Court to ensure that sovereignty was no longer available, and that the continued survival of the Cherokee nation was entirely dependent upon the whim of the most racist president in American history. Ultimately, it became clear that...
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