Indian Removal Act signed

On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in Washington, D.C., after the House of Representatives and the Senate approved the measure by narrow margins. The law authorized the federal government to negotiate land-exchange treaties with the Cherokee Nation, the Creek Nation, the Choctaw Nation, the Chickasaw Nation, and the Seminole Nation for territory west of the Mississippi River. Jackson and his congressional allies presented the Indian Removal Act as a federal program of treaty negotiation, but the statute opened the way for the forced dispossession of Native nations from the American South.

The Indian Removal Act intensified the constitutional clash between federal treaty obligations and the expansionist demands of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Cherokee leaders such as John Ross argued that earlier treaties recognized the Cherokee Nation as a distinct political community, while Jackson supporters in Congress insisted that state authority and white settlement had to prevail in the Southeast. Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen attacked the bill in April 1830 as a violation of treaty faith, but Jackson's victory showed that the Democratic Party would place land hunger and state pressure above Native sovereignty.

The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in September 1830 and the Treaty of New Echota in December 1835 followed directly from the legal authority created by the Indian Removal Act. Those agreements led to the Choctaw removals, the Cherokee Trail of Tears in 1838-1839, and the Second Seminole War that began in 1835, making the 1830 statute a central step in the federal policy of Indian removal.