Document 10.1 ANDREW JACKSON, Second Annual Message (1830)
Document 10.2 Petition of the Women’s Councils to the Cherokee National Council (1831)
Document 10.3 JOHN MARSHALL, Majority Opinion, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831)
Document 10.4 Andrew Jackson as the Great Father (c. 1835)
Document 10.5 JOHN ROSS, On the Treaty of New Echota (1836)
Essay Questions for Thinking through Sources 10
Compare Perspectives: These documents provide insight into questions about how white Americans perceived Native Americans and how Native Americans perceived both white Americans and themselves. What do they reveal about how Andrew Jackson viewed Indians, and how do his views compare to Indians’ understanding of themselves? What do the documents suggest about how Native Americans perceived Americans, American government, and their place within it?
Notice Point of View: From what positions and with what motivations did the authors of these sources compose them? How did each creator’s motivations and goals affect the strategies they employed to make their points?
Notice What’s Missing: The four text-based sources in this set are official political documents that serve to illustrate the decisions people came to after research, discussions, and debates. All five of the sources provide evidence about political decisions that individuals or groups have already made, but they say little about the processes through which they arrived at those decisions. What types of sources would you need to consult if you were interested in learning about the ways Jackson, the Supreme Court, and Cherokee people, and the political cartoonist developed and shaped the ideas and strategies they ultimately employed in their official records? How might such sources alter your thinking about these issues?
Make Moral Judgments: These documents provide evidence about the arguments and strategies that President Andrew Jackson’s administration employed to achieve his goal of removing Native Americans from the southeastern section of the United States in the 1830s. They also illustrate the ways that Native Americans and some white Americans responded to and criticized those arguments and strategies, demonstrating that Jackson was well aware of the evidence that challenged his assumptions and decisions. What moral or ethical issues arose for the participants in the events described here? How should historians address questions of morality? Is it possible to avoid doing so?
Thinking through Sources forExploring American Histories, Volume 1Printed Page 76