Indian Removal Act Authorizes Ethnic Cleansing to Benefit Land Speculators and Slaveholders

President Andrew Jackson signs the Indian Removal Act into law, authorizing the president to grant lands west of the Mississippi River to Native American tribes in exchange for their ancestral homelands within existing state borders. The legislation passes narrowly in the House (102 to 97) despite vigorous opposition from Congressman Davy Crockett and others who recognize it as a transparent land grab benefiting white settlers, land speculators, and slaveholders seeking to expand cotton cultivation using enslaved labor. The Act establishes a legal framework for what becomes the forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of approximately 60,000 Native Americans from the “Five Civilized Tribes” (Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw) between 1830 and 1850, demonstrating how federal institutions can be captured to serve economic elites while destroying indigenous communities.

The Act’s passage and enforcement exemplify kakistocracy through Jackson’s willful defiance of constitutional checks and the rule of law. When the Cherokee challenge removal through legal channels and Chief Justice John Marshall rules in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) that Georgia cannot extend its law over sovereign Cherokee lands and has no authority to displace indigenous people, President Jackson simply refuses to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision. Jackson instead obtains a fraudulent treaty signature from a single Cherokee chief in the Treaty of New Echota (1835), which Congress ratifies against protests from Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, authorizing removal despite representing none of the Cherokee people’s legitimate leadership. This demonstrates the collapse of constitutional governance when economic interests align: land speculators profit from acquiring indigenous territory, slaveholders gain new cotton lands, and political leaders advance their power base by distributing seized lands to supporters.

The Trail of Tears (1838-1839) results in approximately 4,000 deaths out of 16,000 Cherokee forcibly marched up to 1,000 miles to Indian Territory, with similar death tolls among other tribes. The ethnic cleansing campaign enables the seizure of millions of acres of prime agricultural land in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina, which is immediately opened to white settlement and slavery expansion. The Indian Removal Act’s legacy—designated a National Historic Trail in 1987—illustrates how institutional corruption operates when government abandons moral and legal constraints to serve economic elites, using law as a weapon of dispossession while enriching land speculators and extending slavery through state-sponsored violence against vulnerable populations.