This Day in History
On this day in 1830 — 196 years ago — President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law.
The Act created a process that allowed the president to exchange lands west of the Mississippi River for the homelands of Native tribes in the eastern United States. In return, tribes were promised financial assistance, supplies for relocation, and the guarantee that they could live on their new lands under the protection of the United States government “forever.”
In practice, however, the Indian Removal Act became a tool of coercion and dispossession. Under Jackson and his supporters, Native nations were pressured, bribed, and forced into signing removal treaties that stripped them of their ancestral territories across the Southeast.
By the end of his presidency, Jackson had signed nearly 70 removal treaties, leading to the forced relocation of approximately 50,000 Native Americans to what was then called Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma. Entire nations were uprooted from lands they had inhabited for generations and pushed into unfamiliar territory designated by the federal government.
The policy culminated in the Trail of Tears — one of the darkest chapters in American history. Thousands of Native people died from disease, starvation, and exposure during the forced marches west, including nearly one-quarter of the Cherokee Nation.
Because of his central role in Native removal and the suffering it caused, many Native Americans remember Jackson as the “Indian-killer” president and continue to oppose efforts to honor him, including his image remaining on the twenty-dollar bill.
