What was the Indian Removal Act?

The Indian Removal Act was a federal law passed by Congress and signed by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830 authorizing the President to negotiate treaties with Native nations east of the Mississippi River exchanging their ancestral lands for territories west of the river, in practice forcing the relocation of tens of thousands of people who became known collectively as the Five Civilized Tribes plus many smaller groups. The Act passed the Senate on April 26, 1830 by a 28 to 19 vote and the House on May 26, 1830 by a 102 to 97 vote, both narrow margins reflecting bitter sectional and partisan disagreement.

Northern Whigs led by Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey and Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts opposed the bill on moral and legal grounds. Religious women's groups organized the first national women's political petition campaign against the Act in 1829 and 1830, gathering tens of thousands of signatures. Catharine Beecher and Lydia Sigourney led the campaign through the Christian press.

The Act itself was relatively short, authorizing the President to designate western lands for removed nations, to exchange them for the eastern lands, to compensate tribes for improvements, to provide assistance during emigration, to protect the relocated tribes from white encroachment, and to appropriate 500,000 dollars for these purposes. Crucially, the Act required treaties of cession, not unilateral expulsion. President Jackson and his administration applied intense pressure, fraud, threats, and military force to obtain those treaties. Some treaties were signed by unauthorized factions and ratified despite protests from elected tribal governments.

The Cherokee took their case to the Supreme Court. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), Chief Justice John Marshall ruled the Cherokee were a domestic dependent nation, not a foreign nation that could sue in federal court, but he sympathized with the legal position. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), Marshall ruled that Georgia laws had no authority within Cherokee territory and that only the federal government could deal with Indian nations. President Jackson reportedly said John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it. The federal government did not intervene to protect the Cherokee, and the Treaty of New Echota signed by an unauthorized minority faction on December 29, 1835 set the stage for the Cherokee Trail of Tears in 1838 to 1839.

The Indian Removal Act produced the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Cherokee removals discussed elsewhere, plus removals of smaller northern tribes including portions of the Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, Miami, Potawatomi, Ottawa, and others. By 1850 about 100,000 Native peoples had been relocated west.