The Trail of Tears Begins Here

The Cherokee had farmed and governed themselves in Tennessee for generations before the United States began pushing them out. They had adopted a written constitution. They had won a case before the United States Supreme Court.

Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in eighteen thirty-two, in Worcester versus Georgia, that the Cherokee Nation was a distinct community in which the laws of Georgia could have no force. President Andrew Jackson, who had built his career fighting alongside and against Indigenous peoples in these very hills, reportedly responded that Marshall had made his decision and now let him enforce it. The quotation may be apocryphal, but the policy was real.

The Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty gave Jackson the legal framework he wanted. The Treaty of New Echota, signed in eighteen thirty-five by a small unauthorized faction of Cherokee, ceded all remaining Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi. The principal chief, John Ross, immediately protested that the treaty represented no legitimate Cherokee authority.

Sixteen thousand people signed his petition. Congress ratified the treaty anyway. Removal began in eighteen thirty-eight.

United States Army soldiers and Georgia militia rounded up Cherokee families from their homes across East Tennessee, North Georgia, Alabama, and North Carolina. They were held in stockade forts, several of them in Tennessee, at Fort Cass near Charleston, at Fort Loudoun, at Rattlesnake Springs. Conditions were brutal.

Disease spread quickly. The march west began that autumn. Of roughly sixteen thousand people forced from their homelands, somewhere between four thousand and eight thousand died, historians' estimates vary and the full death toll is not definitively established, from cold, illness, and exhaustion.

The Cherokee called it Nunna daul Tsuny: the trail where they cried.