century:
Early in the 19th century, while the rapidly-growing United States expanded into the lower South, white settlers faced what they considered an obstacle. This area was home to the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chicasaw and Seminole nations. These Indian nations, in the view of the settlers and many other white Americans, were standing in the way of progress. Eager for land to raise cotton, the settlers pressured the federal government to acquire Indian territory.
Andrew Jackson, from Tennessee, was a forceful proponent of Indian removal. In 1814 he commanded the U.S. military forces that defeated a faction of the Creek nation. In their defeat, the Creeks lost 22 million acres of land in southern Georgia and central Alabama. The U.S. acquired more land in 1818 when, spurred in part by the motivation to punish the Seminoles for their practice of harboring fugitive slaves, Jackson's troops invaded Spanish Florida (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2959.html).
Part of the motivation for forcing American Indians off their land may well have been a conflict over slavery and much of it was simple greed for land, but the settlers also felt entitled to the land that the Indians were living on. Between 1814 and 1824, Jackson helped create legal fictions to take land in the South away from the Cherokees and other Indians in a pattern that was repeated throughout the West. Su
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