March of Tears: The Price of Cherokee Removal

A fascinating economic study by Matthew T. Gregg & David M. Wishart, titled “The Price of Cherokee Removal,” revisits one of the saddest chapters in U.S. history. These natives were forced off their lands and relocated to Oklahoma.

Gregg and Wishart note that Cherokees were quite European in their development. They had a banking system, and adopted Euro-American legal traditions such as a constitution and a bicameral legislature (in the 1820s).

Forced to sign the 1835 Treaty, the Cherokee nation received $5 million in exchange for their possessions and public domain that totaled 7,882,240 acres in parts of Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

But according to Gregg and Wishart, these terms significantly underpaid the Cherokees for their losses.

Here are Gregg and Wishart’s concluding remarks, quoted:

While the humanitarian tragedy reflected in the Cherokee removal is widely emphasized in the literature, the extent of the tragedy has been understated because the economic consequences have not been examined thoroughly. It has been well-documented that economic development in the Cherokee Nation before removal manifested in a variety of ways including the production of food surpluses, expanded literacy in English and Cherokee, and a widening skill set among the population that included competent slaveowning planters, mechanics, as well as spinners and weavers.

Removal clearly interrupted the economic progress of the Cherokee Nation by reducing the level of human capital, undercompensating the Cherokees for ceded property, and by imposing other transaction costs, such as the need to make new farms on less fertile land in the uncertain political environment that characterized the post-removal period in the newly-coalesced Cherokee Nation.

Moreover, the financial stipulations in the removal treaty negotiated by the federal government imposed a large burden on American taxpayers. The approach we have taken to estimate the cost of Cherokee removal allows us to identify the differential burden of these costs on American taxpayers and the Cherokees.

Our research shows that the total social cost of removing the Cherokees was roughly $9.24 million in 1838 dollars. Though American taxpayers paid some 40% of these social costs, the largest cost of removal borne by the Cherokees was the uncompensated value of ceding their property to the U.S. government.

The next largest cost borne by the Cherokees was the value of lost agricultural production, followed by the death costs. Although the death costs are no less morally repugnant, their economic impact is relatively lower because an accurate estimate of the Cherokee death toll is less than the conventional estimate by more than 1000.