Book dossier

Indian removal

by Grant Foreman

"This book is the account of the removal of the southern Indians. In the North weaker and more primitive tribes yielded with comparatively small resistance to the power and chicane of the white man. A different situation in the southern states called into requisition different methods and resulted in a more complicated story. At least four of the tribes of southern Indians had so far advanced in learning and culture as to establish themselves permanently on the soil, build homes and farms, cultivate the land, raise herds and varied crops, including cotton which they carded, spun, and wove into cloth with which they clothed themselves. They laid out roads, built mills, engaged in commerce, and sent their children to schools conducted by the missionaries ... Naturally, a people of such achievements, aware of their rights under prior possession and treaty guarantees with the national government, stubbornly resisted the aggressions of the whites. The forcible uprooting and expulsion of sixty thousand such people over a period of more than a decade, developed a story without parallel in the history of this country and resulted in a vast accumulation of manuscript material from which this account is mainly written"--Preface.