THOMAS JEFERSON WAS THE FOUNDING FATHER OF NATIVE AMERICAN REMOVAL

It was not President Andrew Turd Jackson who instigated the removal of native Americans from their ancient ancestral lands they had lived on for thousands of years to make way for the white man and his war machine of today. It was in fact Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson first instructed his agents to persuade Indians to adopt agriculture. That new way of life, the agents explained, would require less land than hunting. With no need for their vast forests, the Indians were encouraged to sell their uncultivated territories for 25 cents per acre, the profits of which Indian farmers could use to purchase agricultural tools and manufactured goods. To stimulate Indian consumerism, Jefferson increased the number of government trading houses located near Native villages, arguing publicly that the establishments enabled Indians to share in the fruits of white "civilization." But it was a ploy. His real motive, he confided in 1803, was to lure Indians into spending themselves into debt, obligations that would be paid off through the sale of tribal lands.

...Jefferson began raising the specter of Indian removal in private letters written in 1803. Native resistance to European-style farming and to land sales, as well as white settlers' disrespect for Indian property rights, appears to have disposed Jefferson to doubt the feasibility of assimilating Native people into American life. Would it not be better to move Indians out of harm's way, he wondered, to exchange tribal lands in the east for lands west of the Mississippi? He reasoned that Native people, safely ensconced in the west, could live peacefully, moving from "savagery" to "civilization" at their own pace, while at the same time enabling frontier whites to take over the Indians' old homelands back east. The "best use we can make of" the Louisiana Territory, he declared, "will be to give establishments in it to the Indians on the East side of the Mississippi, in exchange for their present country."

The idea of emigrating to the West was suggested to the Cherokees during the twilight of Jefferson's presidency, in 1808-1809, but treaty provisions for removal did not emerge until the War of 1812, after Jefferson returned to Monticello. Yet the Pandora's Box of removal was now open, and it would not be easily closed. Clamor for removing Indians from the east grew quickly in the years that followed, particularly among white settlers in Georgia and the newly created states of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. Ultimately, no fewer than 76 Indian treaties prescribed emigration, and more than 100,000 Native people from 28 tribes would be removed west of the Mississippi between 1816 and 1850. Ironically, the notorious Indian removals of the 1830s targeted the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Creeks–tribes that had heeded Jefferson's call to assimilate into American life.

Jefferson was not responsible for the Trail of Tears. But by raising the specter of Indian removal, America's greatest champion of liberty made it possible for President Andrew Jackson to turn an odious idea into a formal national policy.

Mark Hirsch is an historian in the Research Unit of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. He has a Ph.D. in American history from Harvard University.

[source : Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father of Indian Removal, Mark Hirsch, http://westgatehouse.com/art263.html, Accessed 25th October 2015]

NB : the 5 states named are Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee, all Confederate states. What is it that is in their blood that drives native Americans off their lands to replace it with brutal bloody slavery and then bloody rebellion to defend that slavery?

And you can find similar sentiments everywhere else: Jefferson began ideas of removal, British agents Turd Jackson and van Buren implemented it big stylee, but sadly the heroes of the US Civil War, Lincoln and Grant, finished the removal off.

PS all of the above Presidents were white.