Trail of tears

Introduction

In this essay I have discussed the overall history of this event i.e. the trail of tears in chronological order and at the same time its impact on the Cherokees nation. John Ross who born in 1970 Born to a Scottish trader and a woman of Indian and European heritage, he was only one-eighth Cherokee by blood, developing a written language, adopting a constitution and building a capital city Ross became the Cherokees' principal chief, and Ridge was named his counselor

In 1827, the Cherokees adopted a written constitution that defined a government with executive, legislative and judicial branches. That same year, they acquired new leadership: Path killer died, and Charles Hicks, his assistant and logical successor, followed him two weeks later. The council appointed an interim chief, but Ross and Ridge were making the decisions when to hold council, how to handle law enforcement, whether to allow roads to be built through tribal land. The two men so relied on each other that locals called the three-mile trail between their homes the Ross Ridge Road.

Andrew Jackson

A month later, Andrew Jackson was elected president of the United States. He would test the Cherokees' leadership soon enough, but even before Jackson was inaugurated, Georgia presented a more immediate threat, passing laws that annexed Cherokee land and extended state laws to that territory. Within two years, the state would require any whites living among the Indians such as missionaries to sign an oath of allegiance to the state or get out (Foreman, 235).

Ross spent much of those two years in Washington, trying to overturn the new laws. Jackson's secretary of war, John Eaton, told Ross the tribe's troubles had been self-inflicted: by adopting a constitution, it had insulted Georgia's sovereignty. As the months passed and Georgia's deadline loomed, some 500 Cherokees abandoned their homes and headed west to join earlier emigrants. 

Indian removal bill

When Ross returned from Washington, he joined Ridge's campaign, rousing crowds with his defiant oratory He told a missionary friend that his "hopes of success were never greater."

But more trouble was on the way: gold had been discovered on tribal land in Georgia, drawing a new wave of settlers, and President Jackson was not about to stop them. In February 1830, the tribe exercised its legal right to evict squatters; Ridge, then 60, led a two-day raid in which Cherokees burned settlers' houses and outbuildings. After Georgia authorities sent a posse after the Cherokees, gunfire rang out through northern Georgia (Fitzgerald, 432).

The timing could hardly have been worse: at that very moment, Congress was hotly debating the Indian removal bill, a measure Jackson had introduced to establish an "ample district" west of the Mississippi to which the Indians of the South could move. On one hand, he had said in his inaugural address, Indian emigration "should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land." On the other, he made it clear that Indians could not live as independent peoples within the United ...