Broken Promises, Stolen Lands: The Shame of the Trail of Tears

This past weekend the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum in Duluth finished hosting an exhibit titled "Man's Inhumanity Towards Man," featuring sections on violence, religious oppression, slavery, treaties, and inequality. There are so many heartbreaking chapters in human history, with this collection touching but a portion. The invention of the guillotine and its use during the Reign of Terror during the Frech Revolution is but one example of what humans are capable of. A spotlight on the Manson family is similarly revealing. Both of these show what can happen when lawlessness runs amuck.

What sets the Trail of Tears apart from the episodes noted above is that it was initiated by our government, and enforced by our government. 

According to documents acquired by Karpeles, a soldier named John G. Burnett, a captain in Abraham McClellan's company who was assigned to help translate on the Trail of Tears, recorded his memories of the Trail on his 80th birthday. He refers to the Trail as the "most brutal order in the History of American Warfare."

While his recorded memories provide many deeply moving and personal details from the Trail, the weather is perhaps the brutal element of the Trail that he refers to the most. In May of 1838, the Cherokee were rounded up and put into stockades in Cleveland, Tennessee, until October of that year, when they finally began the Trail. This means that they completed the thousand-mile journey in the dead of winter. As Burnett remembers, many were forced to walk in bare feet with only the thinnest blankets for warmth as the sleet and snow fell on them. Due to the cold and exposure, many contracted illnesses like pneumonia and died as a result.

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Having read a few books on this unfortunate chapter of our history, one of the things that stands out is that many of these native peoples had already been assimilated into American culture. They were second generation Americans with land, homes and bank accounts.  

Why was it done? Land and power. White settlers coveted the fertile Southeast, especially after gold was found in Georgia in 1829. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, pushed by President Andrew Jackson, codified this lust, framing it as “progress.” Southern states, eager to expand slavery and cotton, pressured the federal government to clear the way. It wasn’t ignorance—it was deliberate, a calculated ethnic cleansing sold as Manifest Destiny. The government knew the cost in lives and chose profit over principle, staining its legacy with a wound still felt today.

The Trail of Tears stands as a shameful chapter in U.S. history due to its brutal execution, the betrayal of trust, and the sheer scale of suffering it inflicted on Native American tribes, particularly the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole—the "Five Civilized Tribes." This forced relocation, spanning 1830 to 1850, saw over 60,000 people uprooted from their ancestral lands in the Southeast to desolate territory west of the Mississippi, in what’s now Oklahoma. The shame lies in the government’s callous disregard for human lives, broken promises, and the naked greed driving it all.

What made it so egregious? First, the conditions: thousands—estimates range from 4,000 to 15,000—died from starvation, disease (cholera, dysentery), and exposure during treks of up to 1,200 miles, often in winter. Families were rounded up at gunpoint, homes burned, and livestock seized, with little time to gather belongings. Survivors recount children and elders collapsing on muddy trails, bodies left unburied. 

The Cherokee’s 1838-1839 march alone claimed around 4,000 lives, a quarter of their population. Second, it was a betrayal. Many of these tribes had adopted European ways—farming, literacy, even Christianity—and signed treaties guaranteeing their lands. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), ruled these treaties valid, yet President Andrew Jackson ignored the decision, famously quipping, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”