Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition:The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s

Mary Hershberger

Andrew Jackson's request to Congress in December 1829 for federal monies to remove Southeast Indians beyond the Mississippi River generated the most intense public opposition that the United States had witnessed. In six short months, removal opponents launched massive petition drives that called on Congress to defeat removal and to uphold Indian rights to property. To block removal, Catharine Beecher and Lydia Sigourney organized the first national women's petition campaign and flooded Congress with antiremoval petitions, making a bold claim for women's place in national political discourse. The experience of opposing removal prompted some reformers to rethink their position on abolition and to reject African colonization in favor of immediatism.	1
The strength of antiremoval forces stunned Martin Van Buren who, writing of the events over twenty years later, portrayed the government's side as besieged from all quarters and stated flatly that "a more persevering opposition to a public measure had scarcely ever been made." Though Jackson's former vice president consistently defended removal, he believed that the issue of Indian removal "unlike histories of many great questions which agitate the public mind in their day will in all probability endure . . . as long as the government itself, and will in time occupy the minds and feelings of our people." It was an issue, Van Buren concluded, in which the nation was responsible "to the opinion of the great family of nations, as it involves the course we have pursued and shall pursue towards a people comparatively weak."1	2
Andrew Jackson had placed Indian removal at the top of his administration's priorities. Though Jackson himself wrote comparatively little about legislative goals, Martin Van Buren, who served as Jackson's secretary of state, vice president, and confidant, wrote of the Indian Removal Act that "no other subject was of greater importance than this. . . . General Jackson staked the success of his administration upon this measure." From the beginning of his administration, Van Buren wrote, the president's policy goals were plainly prioritized and Indian removal headed the legislative agenda: "First, the removal of the Indians from the vicinity of the white population and their settlement beyond the Mississippi. Second, to put a stop to the abuses of the Federal government in regard to internal improvements. . . . Third, to oppose as well the existing re-incorporation of the existing National Bank." When the removal bill was introduced into Congress, one representative noted that it "came recommended to us as the peculiar favorite of the executive."2	3
President Jackson's proposed legislation to move the Southeast Indians across the Mississippi was not new. The heart of Indian land policy had always been nothing less than massive Indian land cessions to white markets, and treaties were the preferred weapons of transfer. The removal crisis of Jackson's administration was precipitated by the Georgia Compact of 1802 between the national government and Georgia (an agreement to which no Indian group was party), which provided that Georgia would relinquish all claims to western lands in return for Washington's assuming the costs of moving Indians off land that Georgia claimed "as soon as the same can be peaceably obtained on reasonable terms." Between 1802 and 1819, federal treaties with the southern Indians transferred 20 million acres of land to white settlers, a greater expansion of the territory open to slaveholding than the Missouri Compromise had provided. By 1819 only 5 million acres of land were left to the Cherokee, and when they refused to cede any more land, Georgia officials called on the federal government to remove the Indians by force, if necessary. For years the federal government resisted those demands, but Jackson's election brought, for the first time, an executive who wholeheartedly favored such removal.3	. . .