What was the Trail of Tears?

The Trail of Tears refers most specifically to the forced march of the Cherokee Nation from their homelands in Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama to what is now Oklahoma in 1838 and 1839, and more broadly to the removal of the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole nations over the preceding decade. The legal basis was the Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed by Andrew Jackson, which authorized the president to negotiate removal treaties. The Cherokee had adopted a written constitution, a newspaper, and farms modeled on their white neighbors, and had won a Supreme Court case in 1832 affirming their sovereignty, which Georgia and the federal government simply ignored.

The removal treaty was signed at New Echota in 1835 by a small unauthorized faction, over the objection of the elected government and a petition signed by the large majority of the nation. When the deadline passed, federal troops and state militia rounded up roughly 16,000 Cherokee into stockades and marched them west, mostly on foot, through winter. Estimates of deaths from exposure, disease, and starvation run around 4,000, roughly a quarter of those removed, with more dying after arrival. The name comes from the Cherokee description of the journey as the trail where they cried.

The consequences persist. The Cherokee Nation, the United Keetoowah Band, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee, descended from those who evaded removal in the North Carolina mountains, are federally recognized today. The removal opened millions of acres to white settlement and the expansion of cotton slavery, and it established a precedent of treaty violation that continued through the century. Congress designated the route a National Historic Trail in 1987, and the Supreme Court's 2020 McGirt decision, holding that much of eastern Oklahoma remains reservation land under the removal-era treaties, is a direct legal descendant of these events.