Indian Removal and Land Allotment: The Civilized Tribes and Jacksonian Justice<xref ref-type="fn" rid="FN1">*</xref>

Abstract

BY the year 1830, the vanguard of the southern frontier had crossed the Mississippi and was pressing through Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri. But the line of settlement was by no means as solid as frontier lines were classically supposed to be. East of the Mississippi, white occupancy was limited by Indian tenure of northeastern Georgia, enclaves in western North Carolina and southern Tennessee, eastern Alabama, and the northern two thirds of Mississippi. In this twenty-five-million-acre domain lived nearly 6o,ooo Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws.' The Jackson administration sought to correct this anomaly by removing the tribes beyond the reach of white settlements, west of the Mississippi. As the President demanded of Congress in December, i830: What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of civilization, and religion?2 The President's justification of Indian removal was the one usually applied to the displacement of the Indians by newer Americans-the superiority of a farming to a hunting culture, and of Anglo-American liberty, civilization, and religion to the strange and barbarous way of the red man. The superior capacity of the farmer to exploit the gifts of nature and of nature's God was one of the principal warranties of the triumph of westward-moving civilization.3 Such a rationalization had one serious weakness as an instrument of policy. The farmer's right of eminent domain over the lands of the savage