لخّصلي

The Trail of Tears is the name given to the forced migration of the Cherokee people from
their ancestral lands in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina to new territories west
of the Mississippi River. The journey, undertaken in the fall and winter of 1838–1839, was fatal
for one-fourth of the Cherokee population.
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled the size of United States territory. The
expansion of white settlements in North America started encroaching on Native-American lands,
ultimately creating the pressures that led to the removal of Native Americans. President Thomas
Jefferson and others proposed setting aside tracts of the western lands for the indigenous nations.
The Cherokee had made significant efforts to assimilate into European-American
culture. Many of them adopted Western dress and gave up hunting and gathering for a market
economy based on export-oriented agriculture and became literate. In the 1820s the nation
adopted a formal government with a written constitution.
Nonetheless, the prevailing sentiment in Georgia favoured expelling the Cherokee. The
land had simply become too valuable, first for cotton cultivation and later—after gold was
discovered on Cherokee land in 1829—for prospecting. Georgia's state government asserted
jurisdiction over the entire Cherokee territory, annulled the nation's laws, annexed the land, and
began distributing plots by lottery
The Cherokee Nation took its case to the United States Supreme Court. The legal battles
that ensued raised profound questions concerning states' rights, the status and sovereignty of
indigenous nations, and the separation of powers between branches of the federal government. In
the first of two rulings on the matter, Chief Justice John Marshall denied the Cherokee legal
standing as U.S. citizens before the Court. However, in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), Marshall
held that Georgia could not extend its law over the sovereign lands of the Cherokee nation, and
had no authority to displace the indigenous people.
The Cherokee had won a major legal victory, but it proved a hollow one, for in 1828,
Andrew Jackson had been elected president. Earlier in his career, Jackson had defeated the
Creeks and Seminoles on the battlefield, leading to the appropriation of their lands. Jackson was
a tireless proponent of Native-American resettlement to the west. In May of 1830, he pushed the
Indian Removal Act through Congress. This law authorized the president to designate lands west
of the Mississippi for tribal use and to negotiate treaties ensuring their movement. Jackson
supported Georgia's aggressive actions toward the Cherokee and had no intention of interfering
to protect the nation, even after the Worcester ruling. The president reportedly uttered defiant
words to the effect of, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it."
A small, breakaway faction of Cherokee, called the Removal Party or Treaty Party, met
with U.S. government representatives in 1835 and agreed to a land swap in the Treaty of New
Echota. The Cherokee chief and national council argued that the treaty was fraudulent since the
nation's duly constituted government had not been consulted, yet the U.S. Senate ratified the
pact. Under President Martin Van Buren, Jackson's successor, federal agents rounded up the
Cherokee in late 1837 and early 1838, driving them off their land and into detention camps in
Tennessee and Alabama. A few Cherokee eluded their captors by hiding in the Smoky
Mountains; today, their descendants are known as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.