No Indian Removal; How Does the South Develop?

As others have alluded, you can't have a very meaningful discussion until you decide what happened instead of the Trail of Tears. Relocation to Florida, US Army protection, anarchy and chaos? It seems implausible for the US Army to be used to protect Indians from white would-be settlers, at least under Jackson.

Let's assume the Army sits on its hands; Jackson won't use them to enforce the Court ruling, but they also won't be used in blatant disregard of it. The Indians will fight a rearguard, evicting, harassing and occasionally killing white squatters, but the numbers are simply not in their favor. Over the 1830s they will be forced out of their land by the mob. However, they now have an ironclad court case against the states, and possibly the Federal government; they have lost their land, their gold, and possibly their slaves to Southerners in violation of the Neutrality Act (the tack I would take, but there are probably alternatives). The amount of cash they can get is staggering, and the federal government is likely to stipulate that the settlement be paid entirely from tariffs and excises on southern crop exports.

These tensions probably bring the ACW up several years early. In the end, though, you have an ethnic and religious minority in the south that has every reason to cooperate with the Union, and enough money and literacy to be significant players in the local economy. I wouldn't be surprised if the late 19th century Cherokee wind up referred to as "Georgia Jews", and the situation of Jews in western Europe seems an instructive model to me.
 
Ironically in some ways things might be relatively similar. The Five Tribes deeply imbibed from the culture of the Old South, slavery and all. The major difference would be non-English speaking landowners in terms of English-speakers. The devil is in the details of how one gets there.
 
Except the Indians would have a very strongly Unionist tradition.

How so? They were called the "Five Civilized Tribes" because really, their society wasn't all that different from the "civilized" white folks around them. They were farmers and slaveholders, and I think that by the time 1861 rolls around, there's no reason Cherokee, Choctaw et al. planters won't rally to defend slavery as much as their white neighbors. I figure that in the long run, what changes is that there's a part of the Southern elite that is a large part Native American and has kept quite a few Native traditions, but otherwise isn't all that much different from their neighbors. Maybe native languages are kept alive, maybe not. I'd bet on not :(.
 
How so? They were called the "Five Civilized Tribes" because really, their society wasn't all that different from the "civilized" white folks around them. They were farmers and slaveholders, and I think that by the time 1861 rolls around, there's no reason Cherokee, Choctaw et al. planters won't rally to defend slavery as much as their white neighbors.
Wasn't there at least one Cherokee unit from Oklahoma in the OTL CSA's army?
 
Wasn't there at least one Cherokee unit from Oklahoma in the OTL CSA's army?
Yeah, and the last general of the CSA to surrender was famously a Cherokee. If for some reason the South still rebelled against the Union I see no reason for the 5 Civilized Tribes to join the Union when even IOTL they fought for the South. It seems a bizarre amount of people here think that the CSA rebelled in the name of white nationalism rather than slavery.
 
It will also be interesting to see the effects on the settlement of southern homesteaders. More are likely to go north towards Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois.
 
If the Indians get maltreated by Southern whites even though they stay where they're at, that might lead to them having Unionist sympathies.

There are many degrees of treatment between equality and ethnic cleansing.

I remember reading somewhere that many of the Indians in Oklahoma were leery of Confederate overtures because they were the same state governments that screwed them not all that long before.

However, if anti-Indian sentiment is calmed somewhat (that whole "convert the tribes to corporations" thing that leads to the tribes renting land to whites), they might stick with the South on "this is our home" grounds.
 
If the Indians get maltreated by Southern whites even though they stay where they're at, that might lead to them having Unionist sympathies.

I remember reading somewhere that many of the Indians in Oklahoma were leery of Confederate overtures because they were the same state governments that screwed them not all that long before.
Which is why it'd do to actually know more of the premise here rather than just leaving it out there that the Indians stay. Does the government make a good faith effort to respect their boundaries? Do the white settlers leave them in peace for the most part? Do they make overtures to attempt to claim the land? Would there even still be a civil war with all these butterflies and if so would it even resemble the OTL war? I think it's a little too forward to blithely assume that their loyalties would swing around so dramatically without even having a clear explanation.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
I'm open to any POD after Mar. 4, 1828 that doesn't see Jackson send the Federal military down to ethnically cleanse the Natives.
 
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