Census Clues: Removal and the Cotton Frontier, 1803–1850

Where Did the Land Come From?

1In 1803 the United States bought the Louisiana Territory from France for about $15 million, roughly doubling the nation's size. In 1804 President Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark up the Missouri River. Besides mapping rivers and recording plants and animals, they were told to inform the Native nations they met that the United States now claimed the land and wished to trade with them. Those nations had had no part in the sale.

2Jefferson also suggested that the new western land could someday hold Native nations moved from the East. In 1830 that idea became law. In the Southeast, the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations still held millions of acres. Cotton planters wanted these lands because cotton grew well in their rich soil and long, warm summers, and because mills in Britain and the North kept buying more cotton. The Indian Removal Act, signed by President Andrew Jackson in 1830, let the government trade land west of the Mississippi River for Native lands in the East.

3The Muscogee Nation's homeland covered much of what is now Alabama and Georgia. In an 1832 treaty, Muscogee leaders gave up their nation's remaining land in Alabama, but the treaty promised that Muscogee families could keep their own plots and live under Alabama law. Instead, land speculators and settlers used fraud and force to take many of those plots. After fighting broke out in 1836, the U.S. Army forced most Muscogee people west. Historians estimate that more than 20,000 Muscogee people were removed in 1836 and 1837, and thousands died from disease, hunger and cold on the way or soon after arriving.

4As the Muscogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee were forced out, settlers poured into the lands they left. Many brought enslaved African Americans with them. Others bought enslaved people who had been sold away from older states such as Virginia. Enslaved workers cleared the land and planted and picked the cotton. Census takers counted free and enslaved people, but they generally did not count Native people living in their own nations.

5In 1845 a newspaper editor, John O'Sullivan, wrote that it was America's "manifest destiny" to spread across the continent, and by 1848 the nation reached the Pacific. The removed nations rebuilt in Indian Territory. The Muscogee made Okmulgee their capital, naming it for the Ocmulgee River in their Georgia homeland, and in 1878 they built a stone council house there. Today the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, still governed from Okmulgee, is one of the largest tribal nations in the United States.