What made Removal policy seem especially harsh and hypocritical? Was chance there any that the Jackson's Indian tribes could have maintained their own lands and identities Cherokees and other civilized southeastern if Jackson had not defied the Supreme Court?

By the 1820's, Georgians had become alarmed over the failure of the United States to fulfill its obligations under the contract of 1802. Not only had a majority of Cherokees failed to remove West, but those who remained had set themselves upon a deliberate program of "civilization" on the white man's terms. Accepting the Jeffersonian ideal of the individual farmer, the Cherokees established successful farms, multiplied their livestock, began educating their children in missionary schools, and eventually, in 1827, developed a full-scale republican political organization with institutions patterned directly upon those of the United States. They adopted a written Constitution, and were soon to develop their own written language and alphabet and establish their own press. Every step toward "civilization" intensified their interest in retaining their homeland. News from the Cherokees in the West was discouraging about prospects there. Suspicions about treaties were heightened by some irregularities in the lines drawn in the most recent treaty of 1817, which ceded away Cherokee lands in proportion to those who emigrated west.

Cherokee "progress" was interpreted, unsympathetically, by land-hungry Georgians as "permanence." In the 1820's they began to put increasing pressure on the federal government to live up to its commitment under the 1802 compact. Presidents Monroe and John Quincy Adams were sympathetic to the basic idea of removal of all Indian tribes including the Cherokees, to the West, but their negotiations with the Cherokees failed to achieve major change and left Georgians intensely dissatisfied. In 1828, Andrew Jackson made Indian removal one of his major campaign issues, gaining heavy support in the south and West, not the least of which came from Georgia. With his inauguration in 1829, the process of Indian removal, particularly as it affected the Cherokees, entered a new stage.