| 1803 | President Jefferson bought the massive Louisiana territory from France in the Louisiana Purchase. |
| 1827 | Cherokee Nation based in Georgia adopts a written constitution. |
| 1828 | Andrew Jackson is elected president; Georgia state legislature takes first step to pass laws extending jurisdiction over Cherokee territory. |
| 1829 | President Jackson’s first message to Congress requests that Congress write and pass removal legislation. |
| 1830 | Congress passes the Indian Removal Act. |
| 1832 | The U.S. Supreme Court in Worcester v. Georgia declares that Georgia state laws do not have authority over Cherokee lands. |
| 1833 | Federal officials negotiate with the United Band of Potawatomis, Chippewas, and Ottawas, resulting in the Treaty of Chicago that initiates the removal of these Indians to Iowa and Kansas. |
| 1834 | Congress passes “An Act to regulate trade and intercourse with Indian tribes, and to preserve peace on the frontiers,” which in part designates all lands west of the Mississippi River not included in Missouri, Louisiana, and Arkansas Territory, to be Indian country. |
| 1836 | Martin van Buren is elected president. |
| 1837 | Panic of 1837 triggers recession that lasts until mid-1840s. |
| 1838–1839 | Approximately 14,000 Cherokees are removed west on what becomes known as the Trail of Tears; approximately 800 Potawatomi Indians are relocated at gunpoint from northern Illinois to eastern Kansas in what becomes known as the Trail of Death. |
| 1840 | The Miamis sign a treaty that cedes all of their remaining lands in Indiana. |
| 1846 | Federal soldiers forcibly relocate 300 Miamis from Indiana to Kansas. |
From the late 1820s through the late 1830s, the relocation of American Indians from their eastern lands to territories west of the Mississippi River became a prominent and hotly contested topic in the United States. On both the national and local levels, missionaries, politicians, and ordinary citizens debated the motivations for and the necessity of a policy that would open up millions of acres of land for non-Indians from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. As this unit reveals, this conversation was not one-sided as the leaders and members of American Indian tribes played an important role in shaping the national conversation.
When Andrew Jackson took office in March 1829, he had a number of priorities. One of these was the enactment of a removal policy that would authorize the federal government to buy Indian lands in order to relocate eastern Indians to western territories. Although Jackson was not the first president to support the idea of removal, he used his office to actively push the policy forward. As a result of his efforts, by the spring of 1830 both houses of Congress debated the efficacy of legislation that would grant this authority. At the end of May 1830, the Senate and the House passed the bill that has become more familiarly known as the Indian Removal Act, authorizing the president to negotiate for eastern Indian lands in exchange for lands west of the Mississippi River.
Although the bill appears to have passed quickly, it did not pass easily, and the content of the debates in Congress reveal that American politicians often saw power and political authority, rather than compassion and justice, as the central issue surrounding Indian removal.
It is important to note that the congressional debates did not occur in a vacuum and American Indian tribes also had a voice in the struggle. The Cherokees are the most well-known target of the removal legislation and have therefore shaped the conversation over removal in very clear ways, most notably because of their ability to use political and legal channels to resist the pressure from Georgia and the United States prior to the Trail of Tears. Despite their prominence, the Cherokee arguments were not the only ones that constituted American Indian statements against removal. In treaty councils held throughout the 1830s, different native orators delivered speeches that illustrated the basis of their own resistance to the American push for removal.
The documents that follow focus on the ways in which both Indians and non-Indians talked about the issue of removal. Studying the language used by the different parties reveals much about their underlying desires and the thoughts they had about the events that framed the era of Indian removal.