Without doubt the ugliest event in the Jackson years was the removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia to reservations located west of the Mississippi River. Andrew Jackson had built much of his reputation as an Indian fighter during the Creek Wars, but historians have not called him an Indian hater. He respected Indians as worthy enemies, but when the state of Georgia clashed with the Cherokee, there was little doubt that Jackson would come down on the side of Georgia.
The Cherokee had previously been recognized as a nation with laws and customs of their own. They had done much to try to accommodate themselves to the white culture, even translating the New Testament into the Cherokee language. But an 1828 Georgia law declared that the state had jurisdiction over Indian Territory. When gold was discovered on Indian land, and Indians sought legal relief to hold onto their property, and the issue came to the Supreme Court in Worcester v. Georgia. The Supreme Court said that Georgia laws had no force on Cherokee land, but sent no marshals to Georgia to enforce their decision. 51 Jackson defied the court, saying that "the decision of the supreme court has fell still born."
Still trying to hold onto their land the Cherokee again sought legal relief and brought the case of Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Marshall clearly sympathized with the Cherokee position:
If courts were permitted to indulge their sympathies, a case better calculated to excite them can scarcely be imagined. A people once numerous, powerful, and truly independent, found by our ancestors in the quiet and uncontrolled possession of an ample domain, gradually sinking beneath our superior policy, our arts, and our arms, have yielded their lands by successive treaties, each of which contains a solemn guarantee of the residue, until they retain no more of their formerly extensive territory than is deemed necessary to their comfortable subsistence. To preserve this remnant the present application is made.
Unfortunately, Marshall took an uncharacteristically strict view of the Constitution and claimed that the Cherokee did not have the legal right to sue in the United States Supreme Court:
If it be true that the Cherokee Nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted. If it be true that wrongs have been inflicted and that still greater are to be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future.
Since there was no other court save the deaf ear of public opinion and humanity to which the Cherokee could turn, they were eventually forced to leave Georgia and settle in Indian country, now the state of Oklahoma. Jackson felt that the Indians would be better off "out of the way" and settled his policy on "voluntary emigration west of the Mississippi." Although the removals conducted under the control of the United States Army were generally peaceful, thousands of Cherokee were removed along the "Trail of Tears" to the West. Provisions for the Indians en route were scant, and weather conditions including frozen rivers led to the death of many along the way. Some of the tribes resisted, and fighting occurred from time to time, but the majority of the Cherokee and other tribes were settled, much against their will, in the trans-Mississippi territory.
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