LITR 4231 Early American Literature Research Posts 2014 (research post assignment) Research Post 1

Laura Tompkins

March 26, 2014

What Can We Learn From the Trail of Tears?

          I knew very little about the Trail of Tears. I selected this particular topic because I was born in Seattle but my family moved when I was eight. It is the most beautiful part of the country, just like Chattanooga, which was part of the Cherokee land. I have always been interested in Native Americans but after moving, I had to study Texas history. I know that President Andrew Jackson and his administration had something to do with what happened to the Cherokee Nation and it involved Manifest Destiny but I did not learn about that in school.

          When studying history, we learn that events are complicated. In An American Betrayal, Smith introduces the reader to John Ridge and Elias Boudinot, two young Cherokee men whose fathers were successful businessmen in the white community. They were part of a small group of Cherokee elite who wanted to become “acculturalized” with whites (Smith 31) and so they decided to go to a Christian college. The two men were welcomed into the community until they fell in love with two young white women and wanted to marry. Almost all of the young women’s families and supposed friends were against the marriages, but both couples married despite the vicious opposition.  Even though Ridge and Boudinot experienced this racism, they still wanted to assimilate with the white community. They were part of a minority of the Cherokee nation called the Treaty Party, which accepted money from the federal government to give up land under the Treaty of New Echota². Other groups of Cherokees wanted to move west to get away from the new settlers and others wanted to stay and fight to keep their land.

          The Cherokee nation originally had treaties with the United States from as early as the 1790’s but with new settlers needing land and the discovery of gold, the government would void these treaties and in 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. The Supreme Court determined in Worcester v. Georgia that the Cherokee nation did indeed have the right to treaties under the Constitution but President Andrew Jackson chose not to enforce this reversal. Under President Martin Van Buren, the process of rounding up the Native Americans began in 1838 and the forced migration of the Five Civilized Tribes to what is now Oklahoma.

          Manifest Destiny is hard to define. One could say that it is American exceptionalism but that is another vague term. Scott references the idea of American destiny as going back to John Winthrop, the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, when Winthrop states, “We are entered into Covenant with him for this work” to mean that it was their mission or destiny to go to the New World to walk with God3. He also mentions Jonathan Edwards referring to the “Second coming of Christ…would begin in America” so this idea that the country started with a Godly mission went horribly wrong when the government began to take land away from Native Americans.

Works Cited

Daniel Blake Smith, An American Betrayal: Cherokee Patriots and the Trail of Tears (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2011), 1-73.

http://www.nationaltota.org/the-story/

Scott, Donald M. “The Religious Origins of Manifest Destiny.” Divining America, TeacherServe©. National Humanities Center. March 26, 2014.            <http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/mandestiny.htm>