Established in the midst of another and a superior race…they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.”įrom 1830 to 1840, the U.S. In his annual address to Congress in 1833, Jackson denounced Indians, stating, “They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. In Jackson’s thinking, more than three dozen eastern tribes stood in the way of what he saw as the settlers’ divinely ordained rights to clear the wilderness, build homes and grow cotton and other crops. Despite being assailed by many legislators as immoral, the bill finally passed in the Senate by nine votes, 29 to 17, and by an even smaller margin in the House. One of the most bitterly debated issues on the floor of Congress was the Indian Removal Bill of 1830, pushed hard by then-President Andrew Jackson. By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people remained, a sharp decline from the estimated 5 million to 15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492.Ī painting depicting the Trail of Tears, when Native Americans were forced by law to leave their homelands and move to designated territory in the west Forced Removal government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its Indigenous people. While Mary was ultimately returned to her white family-and some evidence points to her having lived happily with her adopted Indian tribe-stories such as hers became a cautionary tale among white settlers, stoking fear of “savage” Indians and creating a paranoia that escalated into all-out Indian hating.įrom the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier-the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world-became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. She was among the first of some 200 known cases of white captives, many of whom became pawns in an ongoing power struggle that included European powers, American colonists and Indigenous peoples straining to maintain their population, their land and way of life. In a few moments, Mary Campbell’s life changed forever when Delaware Indians kidnapped her and absorbed her into their community for the next six years. On a cool May day in 1758, a 10-year girl with red hair and freckles was caring for her neighbor’s children in rural western Pennsylvania.

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