Elizabeth's Exile, a Novel of a Cherokee Refugee, by Stan Rice, part two. What Was the Motivation for the Trail of Tears?

Author Stan Rice has just published the second of three novels (Elizabeth’s Exile) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. This second novel is about a Cherokee woman, Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit who, in middle age, walked with a contingent of other Cherokees on the infamous Trail of Tears from the Appalachians to what is now Oklahoma, after losing their land and possessions. As Rice’s novel explains, this was totally illegal, as the law under which Andrew Jackson prosecuted this Trail of Tears was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

As explained in a previous essay, the United States federal government spent a lot of money forcing the Cherokees out of Appalachia and into what is now Oklahoma, while most of the financial and political benefits went to the state of Georgia. Profit may have motivated the Georgians, but if profit was the motivation for the federal government, it was a miserable failure.

The principal reason is that the land now called Oklahoma already belonged to other tribes, mainly the Osage, Caddo, and Comanche. The Cherokees were ordered to move to land already belonging to these other tribes. The Osage, Caddo, and the famously fierce Comanche did not want the Cherokees (and Choctaws, and Chickasaws, and Muskogees) to come. So, at taxpayer expense, the feds had to build forts and supply soldiers to protect the Cherokees from the tribes who already lived there. These forts included Ft. Gibson, Ft. Washita, Ft. Holmes, and Ft. Towson, all in present-day Oklahoma.

It can be argued that the federal government wanted the territory now known as Oklahoma. But this does not explain the Trail of Tears. The federal government could have more cheaply and easily just taken the land from the Comanches. Furthermore, at the time, the land now called Oklahoma was considered practically worthless. They would not have given it to the Cherokees if the soils and forests had been of high quality. Oil was eventually discovered there, but it was too late—the government had already given the land to the Native tribes. This means the federal government had to use other methods, more devious but no less cruel, to take back the Oklahoma land they had given to the Cherokees. This is the main idea of Rice’s third Trail of Tears novel, Edd’s Land, reviewed in a later essay in this blog.

As nearly as I can determine it, after reading Rice’s novel, the federal government was motivated mainly by racism and hatred, and they were willing to spend a lot of taxpayer money to beat the Cherokees into submission.