The Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears
A federal law and a forced march that killed thousands of Cherokee
Quick facts
- Act signed
- 1830, by President Andrew Jackson
- Cherokee removed
- More than 16,000
- Deaths on and from the march
- More than a thousand, perhaps several thousand
- Removal completed
- March 1839
What happened
In 1830 President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the federal government to negotiate treaties to remove Native American tribes living east of the Mississippi River, chiefly in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina, and relocate them to land in the West. The Cherokee resisted in the courts and won a Supreme Court ruling, but Jackson's administration pressed removal anyway. In May 1838, U.S. Army troops and state militia forcibly evicted more than 16,000 Cherokee from their homelands and drove them west on what became known as the Trail of Tears. More than a thousand Cherokee died on the journey, and an unknown number, perhaps several thousand, perished from the consequences of the forced migration. The relocation was completed by the end of March 1839.
Why it matters
The Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears are among the clearest cases of the United States using federal power to dispossess and destroy Native nations for the benefit of white settlement. The episode is a documented atrocity, not a matter of dispute, and it stands as a permanent counterweight to any telling of American expansion as simply the spread of freedom across open land.
How we know
The Indian Removal Act and the treaties made under it are federal records, and the Cherokee removal is documented in Army records, missionary accounts, and Cherokee sources, which support the death toll of more than a thousand on the march and thousands more from its effects.
Sources
- National Archives. President Andrew Jackson's Message to Congress on Indian Removal (1830) · Primary source (author-declared)archives.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- National Park Service. Trail of Tears National Historic Trail: History & Culture · Primary source (author-declared)nps.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Part of a timelineHistory of the United States32 events · A hundred English colonists on a swampy island, a constitution argued out over one Philadelphia summer, a country that doubled its size for four cents an acre and fought a civil war over who counted as free, and the superpower that came out the other sideView all →