Indian Removal

As president in the 1830s, Jackson took Monroe's injunction to its harsh but logical extreme. With the authority granted him under the Removal Act of 1830, and by employing varying degrees of duress, Jackson swept the roving tribes of the Old Northwest beyond the Mississippi River. When southerners pressured him to open Indian lands in Alabama and Georgia, Jackson also uprooted the so-called Five Civilized Tribes--the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, Cherokees, and Seminoles--and resettled them west of the Mississippi River in Indian Territory, an unsustainably large tract spreading over several future states, which was gradually reduced to comprise solely present-day Oklahoma.

--Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West (New York: Vintage Books, 2017), 14.