The Indian Removal Act of 28 May 1830 authorised the president to exchange western land for tribal territory within state boundaries, and the Supreme Court's ruling in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) that Indian nations were domestic dependent nations without standing in federal court removed a legal obstacle to state pressure. Removal followed by treaty, coercion and force: the Choctaw from 1831, the Creek and Chickasaw through the 1830s, the Cherokee under the disputed Treaty of New Echota after May 1838, when troops under General Winfield Scott held families in stockades before marching them west, and the Seminole only after the seven-year Second Seminole War of 1835-42. The National Park Service records more than 16,000 Cherokee removed and more than a thousand deaths on the journey itself, with several thousand more attributed to its consequences; Britannica states that up to a quarter of those displaced died. The removals opened roughly 25 million acres to settlement and cotton.
The United States federal government, acting under the Indian Removal Act, forced the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole nations and others from the eastern states to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi
Contemporary War Department and Indian Office estimates put the eastern Native population at roughly 120,000-125,000 in 1830. The five southeastern nations named in the removal treaties accounted for about 74,000 of that (Cherokee c.22,000, Muscogee c.22,700, Choctaw c.19,500, Chickasaw c.5,000, Seminole c.5,000); the rest were northern and Great Lakes nations also removed under the Act.
The low end aggregates the reasonably well-documented losses on individual removals, of which the Cherokee figure of more than a thousand dead on the road, recorded by the National Park Service, is the firmest. The high end follows Britannica's statement that up to 25 per cent of those displaced died, applied to the roughly 100,000 removed, and counts deaths in the holding stockades, on the routes and in the first years in Indian Territory from exposure, dysentery, cholera and starvation. No contemporary authority counted the dead.
The National Park Service and Britannica document the confinement of Cherokee families in stockades pending removal, the seizure and looting of houses, livestock and crops, and the use of shackles on some detachments.
United States of America