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It Is Written

John Bradshaw

The Trail of Tears

Coming up next, please stay tuned for It Is Written, presented by Pastor John Bradshaw.

You can't hear the sounds now, but you can imagine.

For a time, for 1 people group, it was the center of the world.

In 1825, New Echota became the capital of the Cherokee Nation.

The first Indian language newspaper was printed here.

The home of missionary Samuel Worcester was here.

It was a small sort of settlement, but extraordinarily important.

And when councils were held here, hundreds of Cherokee would gather.

But eventually, soldiers would fill this place.

And the people for whom these lands had been home for hundreds or thousands of years would be removed and marched 800 miles on what the Cherokee would call Nunada'u Sunyi, the place where they cried.

Entire people groups would be dispossessed of their land.

Thousands would die in a series of acts of gross inhumanity.

The United States had been populated by Native Americans, American Indians.

Hundreds of tribes lived across what would become the 49 states, with Hawaii being the exception.

From the Wabanaki in Maine in the northeast, to the Navajo and the Chumash in the southwest, from the Muckleshoot and the Quinault in Washington, and the Aleuts and Athabaskans in Alaska to the Seminoles in Florida in the Southeast.

Europeans first came to what we'd now call the United States early in the 1500s.

Settling here didn't come easy, and to begin with, it didn't go well at all.

The Calusa people resisted attempts made by Ponce de León to settle in Florida, and he left.

Other conquistadors and explorers followed in his wake.

Berrizano, Gomez, de Soto explored the southeast from Florida to Arkansas, becoming likely the first European to cross the Mississippi.

And in 1585, British settlers attempted to establish a colony on Roanoke Island on what today we call the Outer Banks of North Carolina, incidentally, just 10 miles or so from where the Wright brothers would become the first in flight.

The first permanent European settlement in the Americas was Jamestown, near present-day Williamsburg, Virginia, established in 1607.

The Mayflower arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620, and there could be no going back.

For the settlers, there was a massive expense to explore and tame and colonize.

What to do about the people already living here?

American history is colored with stories romanticizing the early settlement of this country.

Stories about European native relations, Pocahontas and Squanto, and cowboys and Indians in the Wild West.

But what can be easy to overlook is that the earliest inhabitants of this land were real people with real families and a very real way of life.

This was going to get difficult, this question of the native peoples.

President George Washington favored assimilation, meaning that over time, the Native peoples and the Europeans would become so intertwined that they would basically become 1 people.

In other words, Indians would assimilate into the European culture.

Their own culture would basically die out, and the Europeans would end up with the land.

President Thomas Jefferson urged Indian tribes in the East to relocate to the West.

He hoped that the Louisiana Purchase would provide land for Eastern tribes to voluntarily relocate.

The government wanted Indians out of the East.

It's hard to say how many Indians were living in what became the United States when Europeans first arrived.

No question it was in the millions, Maybe tens of millions.

But once Europeans arrived, and along with them, disease epidemics, and then conquest, those numbers plunged.

But there were more than enough Indians in North America to, Well, to get in the way.

They were in the way of progress, as some saw it.

They were in the way of expansion and domination.

And they were in the way of power and wealth.

By the 19th century, there were 5 Native American tribes, or nations actually, in the southeast of the United States.

They were known as the 5 Civilized Tribes.

They were the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Creek, the Seminole, and the Cherokee.

They had adopted Christianity to some extent.

There was literacy, intermarriage with whites, and generally good relationships with Europeans and the United States government.

The Cherokee in particular had adopted many European ways.

But in the 19th century, the federal government initiated Indian Removal, the forced relocation of the tribes or nations living east of the Mississippi.

The government would compel people who had occupied certain territory for hundreds, thousands of years, to leave their homes, their possessions, their land and everything on it and everything below it, and move almost a thousand miles away on foot.

Obtaining Indian land had been a stated goal of the U.S.

Government since the 1790s, perhaps even before.

But in the 1800s, the whole process was kicked into high gear.

Almost 40 different treaties enacted between 1721 and 1819 saw Cherokee lands reduced drastically from what they were before European settlement.

Much of the Cherokee land in Tennessee had been lost.

The land in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia was lost.

The Cherokee lost 90 percent of their territory.

After he was elected the seventh president of the United States in 1829, Andrew Jackson said during his inaugural address that he wanted to, "...observe toward the Indian tribes within our limits a just and liberal policy, and to give that humane and considerate attention to their rights and their wants, which is consistent with the habits of our government and the feelings of our people." Some hoped this might mean the United States would honor the numerous agreements and treaties it had already signed with Native peoples.

Things became truly dire for the Cherokee in 1829, when gold was discovered in northern Georgia.

The Georgia state legislature enacted a series of draconian laws.

Cherokees could not dig for gold, for example.

A Cherokee couldn't testify against a white man in court.

Contracts between a Cherokee and a white man had to be witnessed by 2 whites.

Cherokee land was sold to European settlers through a lottery system.

Often their homes were looted and burned.

A year later, May 28, 1830, President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which stated the 5 civilized nations would have to leave their ancestral lands and move to present-day Oklahoma.

In 1835, a group of Cherokees signed the Treaty of New Echota in a home right here, making the Trail of Tears an inevitability.

And God watched on, hoping to see humanity rise to the occasion, strengthening those in the position of weakness, and hoping that those in authority would be humble enough to act with dignity and fairness and honor.

There is power in the Word of God and power available to you through the promises of God.

God wants you to experience that power and so do I.

I'd like you to have today's free offer, Promises of power, new from It Is Written.

To receive Promises of Power, call 800-253-3000.

You could write to the address on your screen or visit us online at www.iiw-offer.com.

And be sure you receive promises of power.

The New World was a vast expanse, promising wealth and opportunity to those who settled here.

But the reality for those who came to this new land was that they'd invited themselves into someone else's backyard.

So the government of the United States, along with state governments, were determined to move the original habitants of this continent off their ancestral land.

President Jackson's Indian removal bill, signed in 1830, passed in the House of Representatives by just 5 votes.

The Cherokee took the state of Georgia to court.

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