The nullification crisis underscored Jackson’s commitment to the sovereignty of the nation. His exclusion of Indians from the era’s assertive democratic nationalism led to the final act in the centuries-long conflict between white Americans and Indians east of the Mississippi River. The last Indian resistance to the advance of white settlement in the Old Northwest came in 1832, when federal troops and local militiamen routed the Sauk leader Black Hawk, who, with about 1,000 followers, attempted to reclaim ancestral land in Illinois. One of the Illinois militiamen was the young Abraham Lincoln, although, as he later remarked, he saw no action, except against mosquitoes.
In the slave states, the onward march of cotton cultivation placed enormous pressure on remaining Indian holdings. “Extending the area of slavery,” proclaimed Thomas Hart Benton, who represented Missouri in the Senate for thirty years, required “converting Indian soil into slave soil.” During the 1820s, Missouri forced its Indian population to leave the state. Soon, the policy of expulsion was enacted in the older slave states. One of the early laws of Jackson’s administration, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, provided funds for uprooting the so-called Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—with a population of around 60,000 living in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi.
The law marked a repudiation of the Jeffersonian idea that “civilized” Indians could be assimilated into the American population. These tribes had made great efforts to become everything republican citizens should be. The Cherokee had taken the lead, establishing schools, adopting written laws and a constitution modeled on that of the United States, and becoming successful farmers, many of whom owned slaves. But in his messages to Congress, Jackson repeatedly referred to them as “savages” and supported Georgia’s effort to seize Cherokee land and nullify the tribe’s laws.
“Free citizens of the Cherokee nation” petitioned Congress for aid in remaining “in peace and quietude upon their ancient territory.” In good American fashion, Cherokee leaders also went to court to protect their rights, guaranteed in treaties with the federal government. Their appeals forced the Supreme Court to clarify the unique status of American Indians.
A lithograph from 1836 depicts Sequoia, with the alphabet of the Cherokee language that he developed. Because of their written language and constitution, the Cherokee were considered by many white Americans to be a “civilized tribe.”