In May 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act “to provide for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi.” The legislation made no mention of how Indians were to be compensated for their lands, which had been guaranteed them by federal treaties, or how they would be transported over hundreds of miles of rudimentary roads to an indeterminate location that none of those affected had ever laid eyes upon.ĭuring the succeeding eight years, the administration of President Andrew Jackson-goaded by an unholy alliance between white-supremacist Georgia slave owners, determined to expand their cotton kingdom onto native lands in present-day Alabama and Mississippi, and their New York financier enablers-alternatively cajoled and coerced nearly 80,000 indigenous inhabitants of the South into surrendering their ancestral homes. A Choctaw encampment on the Mississippi River, ca.
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