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The Trail of Tears: The History Behind the History

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know — November 1

Come on into the Grove, pull up a chair, and pour yourself something warm. The coffee’s fresh, there’s a comfortable spot waiting for you, and we’ve got some history to talk about.

Welcome to November and our new series, You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know.

This month, we’re going to explore some familiar stories from American history and ask a few questions about the things that didn’t always make it into our textbooks. We’re going to look at the people, the decisions, the circumstances, and the consequences. Sometimes we’ll discover that what we learned was accurate but incomplete. Other times, we may find that the story was considerably more complicated than we were led to believe.

The goal isn’t to replace one version of history with another. It’s to understand it more fully.

And we’re starting with the Trail of Tears.

The Story We Remember

Most of us have heard of the Trail of Tears.

Depending on when and where you attended school, you might remember learning that President Andrew Jackson forced the Cherokee people from their homes in the southeastern United States and sent them west to what is now Oklahoma.

You probably remember that thousands died from disease, hunger, exhaustion, and exposure.

Perhaps you remember the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

And that might be about it.

It’s a terrible story, one we recognize as a tragic chapter in American history. We shake our heads at the suffering, remember the name, and move on to the next chapter.

But what if I told you the Trail of Tears wasn’t simply one terrible journey? What if the people being removed had their own government, constitution, newspapers, and legally recognized treaties with the United States?

What if they challenged their removal in the Supreme Court and won?

What if Americans at the time openly opposed the policy?

And what if the president we most closely associate with the Trail of Tears wasn’t even in office when the Cherokee removal took place?

Well, now we have some things to talk about.

Before There Was a Trail

The Cherokee people didn’t suddenly appear in American history when the federal government decided it wanted their land.

They had lived in the southeastern region of North America for generations beyond written memory. Their communities, traditions, political relationships, and connections to the land existed long before the United States became a country.

By the early nineteenth century, the Cherokee Nation was navigating an increasingly difficult relationship with the expanding United States.

Cherokee leaders pursued diplomacy, negotiated treaties, and developed institutions designed to preserve their nation’s independence.

In 1827, the Cherokee Nation adopted a written constitution. Its government included legislative, executive, and judicial branches. In 1828, the Cherokee Phoenix began publication, using both English and the Cherokee writing system developed by Sequoyah.

There were Cherokee farms, businesses, schools, and communities.

There were also differences in wealth, religious practices, political opinions, and ways of life. Some Cherokee people had adopted elements of European American culture, while others maintained older practices, and many combined the two. Some Cherokee citizens also enslaved Black people, a difficult but important part of this history that shouldn’t be erased.

The Cherokee Nation was not a single, uniform community.

But it was a nation.

And it had treaties with the United States.

Those treaties were supposed to mean something.

Land, Gold, and an Expanding Country

As the United States grew, pressure on Native lands intensified.

White settlers wanted farmland. State governments wanted control over territory within their claimed borders. Land speculators saw opportunities for profit. The expansion of plantation agriculture, including cotton cultivation supported by enslaved labor, increased the demand for land across the South.

And in 1828, gold was discovered in northern Georgia, within Cherokee territory.

Now, the pressure to remove the Cherokee had existed before the gold discovery. But the prospect of valuable mineral deposits made the land even more desirable to outsiders.

Georgia increasingly asserted authority over Cherokee territory, despite the Cherokee Nation’s treaty relationships with the federal government.

That brings us to Andrew Jackson.

Jackson was not the first American president to consider relocating Native nations westward. Thomas Jefferson had discussed such plans decades earlier.

But Jackson made removal a central priority of his administration.

In May 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, and Jackson signed it into law.

The act authorized the federal government to negotiate agreements exchanging Native lands east of the Mississippi River for territory farther west.

Its supporters presented removal as a practical solution to conflicts between expanding states and Native nations. Some argued that separation would protect Native peoples from settlers, violence, and state interference.

Others saw the enormous economic opportunities that would come from acquiring Native lands.

And those interests were hardly unrelated.

Let Jackson Speak for Himself

One of the advantages we have when studying history is that we don’t always have to guess what people were thinking.

Sometimes they told us.

In December 1830, Jackson delivered his annual message to Congress, explaining his administration’s removal policy.

He described it as a benevolent effort, arguing that Native peoples could establish new communities away from the pressures of white settlement.

He also celebrated the prospect of opening land to settlers and increasing the wealth and power of southern states.

Both arguments appeared in the same message.

That’s important.

Jackson’s defense of removal combined claims about protecting Native peoples with unmistakable enthusiasm for American territorial and economic expansion.

He portrayed relocation as a generous opportunity, comparing it to the experience of Americans who voluntarily moved west seeking new homes.

But there was an obvious difference.

Those settlers generally chose to move.

The Cherokee were fighting to remain.

And when we examine what happened afterward, we have to ask whether the promised protection and prosperity matched the actual consequences.

Not Everyone Agreed

It’s tempting to imagine that Americans in the 1830s simply accepted removal as the natural course of events.

They didn’t.

The Indian Removal Act was controversial. It passed the House of Representatives by a narrow margin, 102 to 97.

Some lawmakers opposed it on legal and moral grounds. Missionaries, religious groups, and other citizens spoke against removal. Native leaders petitioned, organized, negotiated, and challenged government actions.

Their objections weren’t all identical. Some focused on treaty obligations. Others emphasized religious principles, constitutional questions, or the human consequences.

And opposition didn’t ultimately stop the policy.

But it existed.

That matters because it reminds us that people at the time had choices. They debated those choices, understood many of the consequences, and disagreed over what the government should do.

We don’t have to pretend everyone in the nineteenth century shared the same beliefs.

They clearly didn’t.

The Cherokee Took Their Case to Court

Rather than simply surrendering their homeland, Cherokee leaders pursued legal remedies.

In 1831, the Supreme Court considered Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. The Court did not decide the underlying dispute in the Cherokee Nation’s favor, ruling that the Nation could not bring the case under the particular jurisdiction it invoked.

But the legal fight continued.

In 1832, the Supreme Court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that Georgia could not impose its laws within Cherokee territory in the manner it had attempted.

This was a significant victory for Cherokee sovereignty.

And yet the Cherokee remained under enormous pressure.

The ruling did not result in the federal government securing their continued possession of their eastern homeland.

Think about that for a moment.

A sovereign Native nation had treaties with the United States. It challenged state interference through the American legal system. It secured an important Supreme Court victory.

And still, removal moved forward.

That’s not merely a story about a tragic journey. It’s a story about the relationship between law, political power, and the willingness of government officials to uphold legal protections.

A Nation Divided Over an Impossible Choice

Now we come to one of the more complicated parts of this history.

The Cherokee themselves did not all agree about what to do.

Principal Chief John Ross and the majority of Cherokee citizens opposed removal. They continued seeking ways to preserve their homeland through diplomacy, legal challenges, and political resistance.

But a smaller group of Cherokee leaders reached a different conclusion.

Men including Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot believed that the United States would ultimately force removal regardless of Cherokee opposition.

They feared that continued resistance might leave the Nation with nothing.

To them, negotiating a treaty seemed like a way to secure land, compensation, and a future for the Cherokee people in the West.

We need to understand that reasoning, even while recognizing that the majority of the Nation rejected their position.

In December 1835, members of this minority signed the Treaty of New Echota.

The agreement surrendered Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi River in exchange for western territory and financial compensation.

But the signers did not have authority under Cherokee Nation law to make that decision for the Nation.

Thousands of Cherokee people protested.

Nevertheless, the United States Senate ratified the treaty in 1836, by the narrowest possible margin required for approval.

The federal government now claimed legal authority to remove the Cherokee.

The majority of the Cherokee Nation had never consented.

That distinction is essential.

A treaty had been signed.

That does not mean the Cherokee Nation had freely agreed to leave.

The Removal

The treaty established a deadline for departure.

Most Cherokee people remained in their homes, continuing to resist removal.

In May 1838, under President Martin Van Buren, federal troops and state militia began rounding them up.

Families were forced from their homes and taken to temporary stockades and detention camps.

Imagine being told that you must leave your home, your community, the land your family had known for generations, and travel to a place you may never have seen.

Not because you had decided to begin a new life somewhere else.

Because the government had decided you could no longer stay.

Conditions in the camps were often terrible. Disease spread, and people died before the westward journeys even began.

Some Cherokee groups traveled by water. Others traveled overland, with many enduring bitter winter weather, inadequate supplies, sickness, and exhaustion.

The journeys continued into 1839.

Historians cannot establish an exact death toll, but approximately 4,000 Cherokee people are commonly estimated to have died during the roundup, detention, forced migration, and its immediate consequences.

Four thousand.

We can write that number on a page, but it is much harder to comprehend what it represents.

Parents. Children. Grandparents. Friends. Neighbors.

People with names, histories, relationships, hopes, and plans.

And those who survived carried losses that didn’t simply disappear when they reached their destination.

More Than One Trail of Tears

Here’s another part of the story that deserves far more attention.

The Cherokee were not the only Native nation subjected to removal.

The Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), Chickasaw, and Seminole peoples experienced displacement, coercion, and, in some cases, warfare as the United States pursued control of their homelands.

Nor was removal confined to the South.

Native nations and communities across the Midwest and northern states also experienced forced relocation.

Historian Claudio Saunt has documented the enormous scale of these removals, estimating that approximately 88,000 Indigenous people were forcibly moved west during the 1830s and 1840s, with between 12,000 and 17,000 deaths associated with those removals.

That is a much larger story than the single Cherokee journey many of us remember from school.

It also reminds us that the policies did not emerge from one president acting alone.

They reflected decades of expansion, political decisions, economic interests, and a willingness to disregard Native claims to their own homelands.

The Story Didn’t End on the Trail

There’s one more thing I don’t want us to overlook.

The Cherokee people survived.

Not without devastating losses. Not without political divisions, grief, and extraordinary hardship.

But they survived.

In Indian Territory, Cherokee communities rebuilt institutions of government. The Cherokee Nation adopted a new constitution in 1839, and Tahlequah became its capital.

Not every Cherokee person was removed from the East. Some remained in or returned to their homelands, and their descendants include members of today’s Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina.

The Cherokee Nation continues to exist as a sovereign government today, as do other Native nations whose ancestors experienced removal.

Their languages, cultures, governments, and communities are not merely relics of a nineteenth-century tragedy.

They are living parts of the present.

And I think that’s one of the most important corrections we can make when discussing Native American history.

If we only talk about what was done to Indigenous peoples, we risk overlooking everything they did to resist, adapt, survive, and rebuild.

Their history is more than their suffering.

So What Didn’t We Know?

We may have known that the Cherokee were forced west.

But did we know they had a constitution and a national newspaper?

Did we know they challenged Georgia in the Supreme Court and won a major ruling?

Did we know that Americans argued against removal at the time?

Did we know the treaty used to justify Cherokee removal was signed by a minority without the authority to speak for the Nation?

Did we know Jackson helped establish the policy, but Van Buren oversaw the Cherokee roundup?

Did we know the Trail of Tears was part of a much broader removal policy affecting Native nations across the country?

And did we spend nearly enough time learning about the people and nations that survived?

I suspect many of us knew some of these things.

And perhaps some of us didn’t.

That’s why we’re having this conversation.

Because history isn’t just a collection of dates, names, and events. It’s a record of choices people made, the reasons they gave, the people who challenged them, and the consequences that followed.

Understanding those choices doesn’t mean excusing them.

And acknowledging the suffering they caused doesn’t require us to ignore the complexity of the people involved.

It requires us to look more closely.

Until Tomorrow

Well, friends, that’s our first visit to the November history desk.

We’ve covered some difficult ground today, and there is still more to learn.

I don’t expect everyone who visits the Grove to agree about every historical interpretation. I do hope we’ll approach these stories with curiosity, respect for the evidence, and a willingness to reconsider what we thought we knew.

Because sometimes the most valuable thing we can learn is that the story we were told wasn’t necessarily wrong.

It just wasn’t the whole story.

And sometimes the missing pieces change everything.

The coffee pot’s still on, and there’s always another chair here in the Grove.

Y’all come sit a spell.

— Sunstone Grove

Sources and Further Reading

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