The first "people's president," Andrew Jackson, didn't care about the rights of some of the people—the Native Americans . They weren't considered citizens. The new Americans wanted Indian land and they didn't know a fair way to share it. Promises and treaties were almost always broken. The problem with the Indians, said many white men and women, was they were "savages" and "uncivilized." They meant that the Indians did not do and think as the white people did. Jackson wrote: "Those tribes cannot exist surrounded by our settlements. They have neither the intelligence nor the moral habits…. Established in the midst of a superior race, they must disappear ."

The Cherokees—whose land stretched across the southern Appalachian Mountains in a semicircle that reached from Kentucky to Alabama—confounded the whites. Many of them did live as the whites did. They farmed, built schools, formed a government, and built a capital city. They became prosperous. But the wealthier the Cherokees became, the more anxious other people were to have their land .

In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. That law made it legal for the president to throw the natives off their land and move them west. In Georgia, the government held a lottery and gave the Cherokee land to white settlers. President Jackson said there was nothing he could do about it. The truth was, he didn't want to do anything about it.

Many Indians had seen what was coming. In 1805, the great orator Chief Red Jacket of the Iroquois spoke to a delegation of Christian ministers. He said: "Brothers, our seats were once large and yours were small. You have now become a great people, and we have scarcely a place left to spread our blankets. You have got our country but are not satisfied; you want to force your religion upon us…. Brothers … we only want to enjoy our own."

Now listen to Tecumseh, the great Shawnee warrior-leader, a few years later: "We gave them forest-clad mountains, valleys full of game. In return they gave us … rum and trinkets and a grave."

By the 1830s, not even John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, could protect the Cherokees' rights to their land, although he tried. In his written opinion in a famous court case, Marshall said: "The Cherokee nation … is a distinct community, occupying its own territory … in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter, but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves ."

The Supreme Court said that "the Indians have a present right of possession." In other words, it was unconstitutional to push the Indians from their land. The Cherokees had won the right to their own land. Only it didn't matter—because the president—Andrew Jackson (and his successor, Martin Van Buren)—refused to enforce the law. Our American system of checks and balances failed. It was a shameful moment in United States history.

A missionary named Evan Jones was an eyewitness to the removal. He wrote: "The Cherokees are nearly all prisoners. They have been dragged from their houses … [which] [are] left a prey to plunderers, who, like hungry wolves, follow in the train of the captors."

It was called the Trail of Tears. And it was a trail, a long trail west that the Indians were forced to walk. As they went, they wept. They didn't want to leave their homes, their farms, their hunting grounds, the land of their fathers and mothers. Evan Jones continued, "Females, who have habituated to comforts and comparative affluence, are driven on foot before the bayonets of brutal men ."

"It may be regarded as certain that not a foot of land will ever be taken from the Indians without their consent." Thomas Jefferson wrote those words in 1786. Forty-four years later, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was the law of the land. By 1840 most Indians in the eastern half of the United States had been driven west of the Mississippi .