Was it legal for the US to remove the Cherokee from their lands in 1838?

Introduction

In 1838-39 American troops, prompted by the state of Georgia, expelled the Cherokee Indians from their inherited homeland in the Southeast and removed them to the Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. The exclusion of the Cherokees was a product of the demand for arable land during the rampant growth of cotton agriculture in the Southeast, the discovery of gold on Cherokee land, and the racial prejudice that many white southerners harbored toward American Indians.

Origins of Removal Policy

By the 19th century the Cherokees had lived in the interior Southeast, including north Georgia, for hundreds of years. Settlers of European forefathers began moving into Cherokee territory in the early eighteenth century; from that point forward, the colonial governments in the area began demanding that the Cherokees cede their territory. By the end of the Revolutionary War (1775-83), the Cherokees had given up more than half of their original territory to state and federal governments.

In the late 1780s U.S. officials began to advise the Cherokees to abandon hunting and their traditional ways of life and to instead learn how to live, worship, and farm like Christian American yeomen. Many Cherokees clinched this "civilization program." The Cherokees established a court system, formally abandoned the law of blood revenge, and adopted a republican government. A Cherokee man named Sequoyah created the Cherokee syllabary, which enabled the Cherokees to read, write, record their laws, and publish newspapers in their own language (Garrison, 48).

Cherokee Resistance

The Cherokee government continued that they constituted a sovereign nation independent of the American state and federal governments. As a proof, Cherokee leaders pointed to the Treaty of Hopewell (1785), which established borders between the United States and the Cherokee Nation, offered the Cherokees the right to send a "deputy" to Congress, and made American settlers in Cherokee territory subject to Cherokee law.

The Cherokee government, particularly its principal chief, John Ross, took steps to protect its national territory. Ross joined Charles Hicks and Major Ridge in the "Cherokee Triumvirate" and received credit for his efforts in negotiating the Treaty of 1819. He then continued his work by making legal shifts for the Cherokees as president of the constitutional convention. In 1825, the Cherokee capital, New Echota, was established near present-day Calhoun, Georgia. The Cherokee National Council warned the U.S. that it would refuse future cession requests and enacted ...