However, as the United States began to expand, settlers began settling on Native American land. . However, federal treaties and federal laws gave Congress, not the states, authority over the tribes. Chapter 7: As Long as the Grass Grows or Water Runs Match the text on the left with the text on the right.
Instead it negotiated a new treaty providing for prompt emigration west, managed by
the Creeks themselves, financed by the national government. Without enough
support to hold out against the white troops, with his men starving, hunted, pursued across the
Mississippi, Black Hawk raised the white flag. Two measures are deemed expedient. .. . In late 1831, thirteen thousand Choctaws began the long journey west to a land and climate totally
different from what they knew. Leaving his military post, he also gave advice to officers on how to deal with the high rate of
desertion. A delegation of them, protesting to the federal government,
received this reply from Jackson's new Secretary of War, Eaton: "If you will go to the setting sun
there you will be happy; there you can remain in peace and quietness; so long as the waters run and
the oaks grow that country shall be guaranteed to you and no white man shall be permitted to settle
near you." He proposed to Congress that Indians
should be encouraged to settle down on smaller tracts and do farming; also, they should be
encouraged to trade with whites, to incur debts, and then to pay off these debts with tracts of land. No talk of
compensating them for land or property left behind.
The white men are bad schoolmasters; they carry false books, and deal
in false actions; they smile in the face of the poor Indian to cheat him; they shake them by the hand
to gain their confidence, to make them drunk, to deceive them, and ruin our wives. Moving through New Orleans, they encountered a yellow fever plague. The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother; I will repose upon
her bosom." This
was Andrew Jackson. . As soon as Jackson was elected President, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi began to pass laws to
extend the states' rule over the Indians in their territory. .
Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief and noted orator, tried to unite the Indians against the white invasion:
Angered when fellow Indians were induced to cede a great tract of land to the United States
government, Tecumseh organized in 1811 an Indian gathering of five thousand, on the bank of the
Tallapoosa River in Alabama, and told them: "Let the white race perish.
But to put
all the blame on white mobs, Rogin says, would be to ignore "the essential roles played by planter
interests and government policy decisions." The army was supposed to organize their trek, but it turned over its job to private contractors
who charged the government as much as possible, gave the Indians as little as possible. Food disappeared. It appears on classroom maps politely as "Florida Purchase,
1819"-but it came from Andrew Jackson's military campaign across the Florida border, burning
Seminole villages, seizing Spanish forts, until Spain was "persuaded" to sell. Violence between whites and Seminoles now erupted. When Thompson ordered the Seminoles, in December 1835, to assemble for the
journey, no one came. Speculators _____ a. Farewell, my
nation! By
the time Jefferson became President, in 1800, there were 700,000 white settlers west of the
mountains. They came from industrialization and commerce, the growth of
populations, of railroads and cities, the rise in value of land, and the greed of businessmen. This meant withdrawing into the swamps
of central Florida, where they could not grow food, where even wild game could not survive. Another Seminole provocation: escaped black slaves took refuge in Seminole villages.
But the seventeen thousand Cherokees were soon rounded up and crowded
into stockades. When Jefferson doubled the size of the nation by purchasing the Louisiana territory from France in
1803-thus extending the western frontier from the Appalachians across the Mississippi to the
Rocky Mountains-he thought the Indians could move there. We were not safe. Immediately
the Jackson administration took away Worcester's job, and the militia moved in again that summer,
arresting ten missionaries as well as the white printer of the
Georgia now put Cherokee land on sale and moved militia in to crush any sign of Cherokee
resistance. As Secretary of War John Eaton explained to the
Creeks of Alabama (Alabama itself was an Indian name, meaning "Here we may rest"): "It is not
your Great Father who does this; but the laws of the Country, which he and every one of his people
is bound to regard." It did not mention force, but provided for helping the Indians to
move. Here were some of the replies of the
Seminoles at that meeting:
The Indian agent managed to get fifteen chiefs and subchiefs to sign a removal treaty, the U.S.
Senate promptly ratified it, and the War Department began making preparations for the migration. That country he
assigns to his red people, to be held by them and their children's children forever." President Monroe denied that the treaty ever existed and was humiliated when the delegation produced a copy.
With the election of 1828, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia changed their states polices and started encroaching on Native American's lands despite Federal Laws saying this was illegal. Jackson established the tactic of promising rewards in land and
plunder: ".
Black Hawk's bitterness may have come in part from the way he was captured. For whites it "will place a
dense and civilized population in large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters." Jackson
wrote to his wife about "the once brave and patriotic volunteers .. . There were defenders of the Indians. The phrase, "As long as grass grows or water runs," has become the representation of the United State's failure to keep their promises and treaties with Native American throughout American history. The
seven thousand Choctaws left behind now refused to go, choosing subjugation over death. Instead, the Seminoles began a series of guerrilla attacks on white coastal
settlements, all along the Florida perimeter, striking in surprise and in succession from the interior.