refuse in 1835 to attend a memorial meeting in
the great jurist's honor. But these considerations do not wholly cover
the case. All that the historian can say is that the President chose
to take notice of the threats and acts of South Carolina and to ignore
the threats and acts of Georgia, without ever being troubled by the
inconsistency of his course. His political career affords many such
illustrations of the arbitrary and even erratic character of his mind.

Meanwhile the great Indian migration was setting in. Emulating the
example of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi extended their laws over
all of the Indian lands within their boundaries; and in all parts of
the South the red folk--some of them joyously, but most of them
sorrowfully--prepared to take up their long journey. In 1832 the
Creeks yielded to the United States all of their remaining lands east
of the Mississippi. By the spring of 1833 the Choctaws and Chickasaws
had done the same thing and were on their way westward. Only the
Cherokees remained, and in his message of December 3, 1833, Jackson
reiterated his earlier arguments for their removal. Realizing that
further resistance was useless, a portion of the tribe signified its
readiness to go. The remainder, however, held out, and it was only at
the close of 1835 that the long-desired treaty of cession could be
secured. All Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi were now
relinquished to the United States, which agreed to pay five million
dollars for them, to provide an adequate home in the new Indian
Territory created by Congress during the preceding year, and to bear
all the costs of removing the tribe thither.

It was not alone the South, however, that witnessed widespread
displacements of Indian populations in the Jacksonian period. How the
Black Hawk War of 1832 grew out of, and in turn led to, removals in
the remoter Northwest has been related in another volume in this
series.[13] And, in almost every western State, surviving Indian
titles were rapidly extinguished. Between 1829 and 1837 ninety-four
Indian treaties, most of them providing for transfers of territory,
were concluded; and before Jackson went out of office he was able to
report to Congress that, "with the exception of two small bands living
in Ohio and Indiana, not exceeding fifteen hundred persons, and of the
Cherokees, all of the tribes on the east side of the Mississippi, and
extending from Lake Michigan to Florida, have entered into