ABSTRACT
By the early nineteenth century the superior arms of the white settlers, as well as the diseases they carried for which the Indians had no immunity, had decimated the tribes on the East Coast of the United States. The events of the 1820s set the stage for the Cherokee cases in the 1830s, and then the tragic Cherokee removal under President Martin Van Buren. The Cherokee and Creek tribes had resisted efforts to be moved, and Georgia used the false treaty as the lever to get Indian lands that white settlers had long coveted. In 1827, when the Cherokee adopted a constitution, it was based on their treaty rights, which not only affirmed their claims to the land, but also insisted that, as an independent nation, they were not subject to the laws of any other state or nation.
