The Indian Removal Act of 1830 gave the President the authority to settle Indian peoples on tribal lands located within states to territorial lands outside of state borders. In short, it empowered Andrew Jackson to remove, through force and negotiation, Indian peoples, who would be sent to "Indian territory" in modern-day Oklahoma. Its effects on Indian people, especially in the Southwest (the modern-day Southeast) were profound. Many, including the Choctaws and Chickasaws, who lived in Mississippi, moved to Indian Territory more or less voluntarily. Others, like the Creeks and the Seminoles, were removed (with some exceptions) without their consent. The Cherokee, who lived in northwestern Georgia, eastern Tennessee, and western North Carolina, divided into factions, with one group accepting removal and another, with far broader popular support within the Cherokee nation, opposing it. A Supreme Court decision in Worcester v Georgia (1832) seemed to support the claims of the anti-removal faction, but the US government held that a treaty negotiated with their rivals was binding on the entire nation. The Cherokee were forcibly removed by the US Army and sent on the disastrous "Trail of Tears" to Indian Territory in 1838. So the effect of the Indian Removal Act, and Jackson's Indian policy more broadly, was the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of Native peoples to distant lands in the west.
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