Indian Removal Act

28 May 1830, Washington

President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, S. 102, into law in Washington on 28 May 1830. The Senate had carried it 28–19 and the House 102–97.

The law authorized the president to exchange land west of the Mississippi for land occupied by Native nations inside existing states and territories, and to provide assistance for removal and first-year subsistence.

A promise written into the statute

Congress appropriated $500,000 to implement the act, while stating that existing treaties were not to be violated.

The nations in its path — the Cherokee, Muscogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole among others — argued that the policy violated exactly those treaties. A Cherokee memorial had told Congress that the threatened land held their ancestors' ashes and was the land of their birth.

What the signature started, and what it did not

The statute handed the executive branch authority to negotiate removal treaties. No mass removal and no Trail of Tears march began on the signing date itself.

The act's language of exchange and assistance is not evidence that what followed was voluntary. Treaties, coercion, litigation and military removals ran across the years afterward, and the Cherokee removal came in 1838–1839.

David Crockett, an Anti-Jacksonian representative from Tennessee, was among the House opponents.