Expansion and Conflict.

The relentless pressure of westward expansion in the first quarter of the nineteenth century brought Euro-Americans and Native Americans into a conflict over who would control territory east of the Mississippi River that had, since long before the colonial period, been controlled by Indians. White Americans were eager to seize land from Native Americans in the Southeast, hoping to transform Indian towns into cotton farms to produce a crop that was then perhaps the most desirable in the Atlantic world. By the late 1820s the contest over land was particularly evident in Georgia, where the discovery of gold in 1828 only heightened whites' desire to push Indians out of the state.

The Civilized Tribes.

For much of the colonial and early republican periods Americans of European descent had argued that Indians needed the benefits that European culture could provide. Indians, so...