Honors US History I
2 March 2012
Removal of Indians DBQ All presidents have a legacy; some good, some bad. Andrew Jackson’s legacy is the Indian Removal Act. This act was not supported by the Supreme Court, made Native Americans leave the places that they called home for countless years, and had a huge impact on Native Americans personally. In 1830, with consent and encouragement from President Andrew Jackson, many Indians were wrongly forced off of their native lands and onto foreign ones. To begin with, it was not the entire government that thought Native Americans should be relocated. In Worcester v. Georgia, a case where a Cherokee tribe appealed to the Supreme Court, the ruling was, in fact, in favor of the Cherokee Indians. Chief Justice John Marshall, in the majority opinion of the Court, wrote “The Cherokee nation, then, is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force.” He clearly stated that the Cherokee Indians have a right to their own land, are completely separate from the state of Georgia, and the whole …show more content…
They were in a foreign place. The Seminoles, Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws Indian tribes are just a few examples of the Indians removed from their homes (Doc 4). In document four you can see that they all came from very different and unique lands and were all simply grouped into one territory. Andrew Jackson had no sympathy for them. He called them savages and recognized them as an inferior race (Doc 3). He also said that they had “neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement” to change their condition. Andrew Jackson publically degraded Native Americans everywhere and made his hatred