Trail of Tears Forced Removal Begins as 7,000 Troops Round Up 16,000 Cherokee at Gunpoint

U.S. troops under General Winfield Scott begin forcibly removing the Cherokee Nation from their ancestral homelands in Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama, starting a process that becomes known as the Trail of Tears. President Martin Van Buren, enforcing the fraudulent 1835 Treaty of New Echota rejected by legitimate Cherokee leadership and nearly the entire Cherokee population, directs 7,000 U.S. Army soldiers to round up approximately 16,000 Cherokee men, women, and children at bayonet point. Families are seized from their homes with minimal possessions, often without warning, and herded into concentration camps where inadequate food, bad water, and disease cause massive suffering throughout summer 1838 before forced migration even begins. The ethnic cleansing, justified by a treaty signed by unauthorized representatives and ratified by one Senate vote despite a petition with nearly 16,000 Cherokee signatures opposing it, exemplifies how democratic institutions can be manipulated to enable genocide benefiting land speculators, gold prospectors, and slaveholders.

The removal process begins on May 26, 1838 in Georgia, followed ten days later by operations in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama. Soldiers forcibly remove Cherokee from their homes, allowing them to take few possessions, and march them to stockades that serve as concentration camps. Many Cherokee languish throughout the summer in these facilities, suffering from exposure, bad water, inadequate food, and disease. American doctor and missionary Elizur Butler, who accompanies the removal, later estimates approximately 2,000 deaths occur in the Army internment camps before the westward march even begins. The conditions in the stockades are deliberately brutal, with overcrowding, poor sanitation, and minimal provisions creating a humanitarian catastrophe that military authorities observe but do not ameliorate. Chief John Ross’s wife Elizabeth is among those who die during the removal.

The forced march to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) covers approximately 1,000 miles, with most Cherokee traveling on foot without adequate shoes or clothing during an unusually harsh winter. The removal occurs in multiple detachments between summer 1838 and spring 1839, with different groups experiencing varying death tolls depending on route, season, and conditions. Whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera, and starvation become epidemic along the way. Death toll estimates vary: Butler’s contemporary count of 4,000 total deaths remains most cited, though a 1973 demographic study estimates 2,000 deaths while an 1984 study concludes 6,000 people died. Recent historical consensus settles on approximately 4,000 Cherokee deaths out of 16,000 forcibly removed—a 25 percent mortality rate representing one of the deadliest episodes of ethnic cleansing in American history.

The removal’s underlying causes reveal the alignment of economic interests driving indigenous dispossession. The 1828 discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia sparked the Georgia Gold Rush, making Cherokee lands suddenly valuable to white prospectors. The rampant growth of cotton agriculture in the Southeast created demand for arable land that could be cultivated by enslaved labor. White southerners’ racial prejudice toward Native Americans, combined with states’ rights ideology claiming Georgia could override federal treaties, provided political cover for theft. Despite the Supreme Court’s 1832 Worcester v. Georgia ruling that states lack authority to seize Cherokee lands, President Jackson refused to enforce the decision, and Van Buren continued the removal policy despite receiving Chief Ross’s petition with nearly 16,000 signatures requesting the fraudulent treaty’s repeal.

The Trail of Tears demonstrates kakistocracy through the systematic abuse of democratic forms to enable ethnic cleansing for economic gain. The U.S. government negotiates with unauthorized Cherokee representatives, treats their minority agreement as binding on the entire nation despite legitimate leadership’s explicit rejection, ratifies the fraudulent treaty by one Senate vote while ignoring petitions from nearly the entire Cherokee population, ignores Supreme Court rulings protecting Cherokee sovereignty, and deploys military force to execute removal that kills one-quarter of those displaced. The episode reveals how institutions ostensibly designed for democratic governance—treaty-making, Senate ratification, executive enforcement—can be manipulated to serve elite economic interests through procedural formalism that provides legal veneer for genocide. The Cherokee removal stands as a foundational example of how American democracy has been weaponized against vulnerable populations when political and economic power align to prioritize white settlement and slavery expansion over human rights, constitutional governance, and basic humanity.