Deportations, robbery and genocide: how the law on the resettlement of Indians allowed the United States to legalize the seizure of new territories

May 28, 1830 in the United States came into force on the initiative of President Andrew Jackson on the resettlement of Indians. He created the legal basis for the forced deportation of the indigenous people of the North American continent.

The first steps of the colonialists

In the pre-Columbian era, the Indian peoples of several regions of North America created large settlements, manufactured metal products, and mastered farming. The social structure of their society was quite complex. First of all, this concerns the peoples who lived in the southeast of the modern USA. However, the natural course of their development was disrupted by the white colonizers, which provoked bloody wars in North America and brought diseases to the continent, to which the Indians did not have immunity.

Until the beginning of the 18th century, Indians with a numerical advantage could easily prevail over the interventionists. Therefore, the colonialists soldered them with alcohol and used household objects infected with pathogenic bacteria against them, made deceptive promises and pitted the Indian peoples among themselves.

Already in the XVII century, a number of Indian peoples were destroyed. In the eighteenth century, rival European powers began to attract Native Americans to participate in colonial wars, in which they suffered significant losses.

Soon after the founding of the United States, a new system of regulations was passed in the new country, transferring the right to sign treaties with the Indians exclusively to central authorities.

The first US president, George Washington, proposed a plan for the coexistence of Americans with the Indians. One of his key points was the recognition of the sovereignty of the so-called civilized tribes - Native American peoples, leading a settled lifestyle, recognizing private property and engaged in agriculture. The first ethnic groups that fully met these criteria were Chiroki, Chikaso, Choctaw, screams (Muskogee) and Seminoles. All of them lived in the southeastern part of the North American continent.

At the end of the 18th – beginning of the 19th centuries, the American authorities concluded a series of treaties with “civilized tribes”, according to which the Indians made territorial concessions to the whites in exchange for recognition of their sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs.

• US President George Washington
• Gettyimages.ru
• © GraphicaArtis

“The relations between the federal government and the Indian tribes were based on the constitutional provision that the legal status of the Indians was likened to the status of a foreign power independent of the US government,” wrote historian Vladislav Stelmakh.

However, peaceful coexistence did not last long. At the beginning of the 19th century, by agreement with Spain and France, Florida and Louisiana came under the control of the United States. Moreover, many of the Indians living there did not even suspect that the whites already considered their lands theirs. After this, the territories of the "five civilized tribes" were surrounded by the United States on all sides.

In the years 1813-1814, the United States intervened in the war between the screaming Indians supporting them and the opposing groups, as a result of which the United States took part of the land from both its opponents and its allies. In 1817, the American military clashed with the Seminoles.

The idea of ​​seizing from the Indians all lands east of the Mississippi began to expand, regardless of the previously concluded treaties and the level of civilization of the tribes.

The Road of Tears

In the 1820s, US authorities began legal justification for the future forcible seizure of their land from the Indians. In 1823, the US Supreme Court officially legalized the previously existing "doctrine of discovery", according to which the Indian lands were declared non-owned, and those colonizers who occupied this or that territory first became their owners. 

In 1830, the trial began on a lawsuit filed against the authorities of the state of Georgia due to the seizure of Indian-owned fields. The Supreme Court took the side of the defendant, citing the fact that the Native American peoples are allegedly "US-dependent nations."

• US President Andrew Jackson and Chief William Witherford after the Battle of Horseshoe Bend
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• © Kean Collection

“President Andrew Jackson, who came to power in the USA in 1829, had extensive agrarian plans, and for their implementation he decided to take away the lands from the Indians,” the head of the Department of Political Science and Sociology of the Russian University of Economics named after RT. G.V. Plekhanova Andrey Koshkin.

In 1830, the US Supreme Court adopted a new decision, which stated that the independence of the Indians should be understood narrowly, because they are "independent not as a foreign power, but as peoples under the patronage of the United States because of their savagery and ignorance."

In his presidential address in 1830, Jackson said he was proposing to "acquire" vast territories "occupied by a handful of savage hunters."

According to Andrey Koshkin, the American authorities completely ignored the official guarantees given by Washington earlier and the fact that a number of tribes fully met the criteria of "civilization" existing in the USA.

According to Vladislav Stelmakh, some American politicians claimed that the Indians are not foreign nations in the constitutional sense, so it makes no sense to negotiate with them. Others hid behind the ideals of humanism and said that civilizing the Indians is the "duty" of white Americans.

On May 28, 1830, the U.S. Indian Resettlement Act entered into force. He gave the president of the United States the right to dispose of uninhabited territories west of the Mississippi, exchange them for Native American lands east of the river, pay compensation to Native Americans and assist them in emigration.

“On paper, everything looked beautiful: voluntary exchange, compensation, assistance in organizing the move. In practice, everything happened differently. It was a cover for genocide. The Indians, of course, did not want to abandon their fertile and settled lands and move to less suitable agricultural areas in modern Oklahoma. Moreover, other Native American peoples already lived there. Indians were forcibly driven from their lands and forced to go west under completely unbearable conditions, ”said Andrei Koshkin.

• “The Road of Tears” - Forced Migration of Indians
• © fws.gov

According to historian Alexei Styopkin, when adopting legislation on the resettlement of Indians, Americans were guided by purely pragmatic and mundane considerations.

“Behind this story was the lobby of large land speculators. Since the start of North America, resale and leasing of land has been the most profitable business. In addition, those who managed to seize the plots and start renting them out got an opportunity for a dizzying political career, ”the expert noted.

Many Indians did not voluntarily leave their homes. Most desperately the Seminoles resisted, in the battles with which the American army suffered serious losses. A group of representatives of this tribe retreated into the swamps of central Florida and lived there without contact with the federal government for more than a hundred years.

Teal did not take up arms, but refused to move. Then the US authorities signed a fictitious agreement with a group of teal who did not have the right to represent the tribe, and the US president ratified this fake.

The American army forcefully drove west the majority of the Indians living east of the Mississippi - both southern “civilized” and northern, “civilized” were not considered. In most cases, deportation was carried out using brute force.

“The resettlement took place in inhuman conditions. Thousands of Indians died from hunger, unsanitary conditions, and diseases — up to 25-30% of the total number of some tribes. Among the Indians, these events are known as the "road of tears." In the future, this name passed into the scientific literature, ”said Koshkin.

According to the expert, the operation as a whole turned out to be a “major fraud” on the part of the US government. The Indians received less than 61.75 million acres of land. The allotments of some peoples west of the Mississippi were tens of times smaller than those selected by the government. At the same time, financial compensations for the less-received plots were many times less than their market value and were paid in multi-year installments.

During the American Civil War, many of the West Indians supported the Confederation. After the hostilities ended, the federal government seized another part of the territories belonging to the indigenous peoples and organized “land races” on them for white Americans who wanted to get land.

• US Navajo Reservation
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• © Spencer Platt

Native American tribes drove to the reservation. Those Indians who wanted to preserve their lifestyle were either destroyed during the “Indian wars” or fled to Canada, where the indigenous population was more loyal to the attitude than in the USA.

“The so-called Indians Relocation Act has become a beautiful screen for the brutal robbery and destruction of the Indians. Unfortunately, with the robbery, the Americans annexed most of the territory of the modern USA. When the lands for robbery in the west ended, they began to expand throughout the world, ”concluded Andrey Koshkin.