Regarding Jefferson and Indian policy, the Trail of Tears had its roots in
the immediate aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase – an event that
accelerated a longer-term shift in Jefferson’s attitude toward Native
Americans. This, in turn, was part of a larger debate about how the
Louisiana Purchase would effect the complexion of the nation.
    This is how I summarized Jefferson and Indian policy in relevant
paragraphs on pp 301-303 of my book _A Wilderness So Immense: The
Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America_ (Knopf 2003, Anchor
paperback 2004):

    . . . .
    The Federalists were not alone in their contention that the Louisiana
Purchase went against the Constitution. President Thomas Jefferson,
champion of limited government and a strict construction of the
Constitution, had his own doubts about its constitutionality—doubts
that he discussed openly with New Hampshire senator William Plumer, a
subsequent participant in the separatist reaction, and many others.
“The general government has no powers but such as the constitution has
given it,” Jefferson explained in letters to Pennsylvania statesman
John Dickinson, Kentucky senator John Breckenridge, and others, “and
it has not given it a power of holding foreign territory, and still
less of incorporating it into the Union.” The Louisiana Purchase
Treaty was an act “beyond the Constitution,” Jefferson believed. He
saw the adoption of a suitable amendment as the way for “the nation to
sanction an act done for its great good, without its previous
authority.”

    For seven weeks, from June 30 when the news had reached him in
Washington through August 17, Jefferson tinkered with an amendment to
set things right. The language to authorize the purchase itself came
easily. The difficulty for Jefferson and his New England critics lay
in the implications of Article III of the treaty, which provided “that
the inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the
Union of the United States and admitted. . . to the enjoyment of all
these rights, advantages and immunities of citizens of the United
States.” Civilized New Englanders wanted no truck with “the half
savage omnium gatherum of Louisiana,” with its “Frenchmen, Spaniards
and Indians,” with the prospective immigration of “United Irish and
rogues,” or with any “red, yellow or black brethren beyond the
Mississippi.” The Columbian Centinel and Massachusetts Federalist
complained that “the treaty changes the identity of our nation—the
United States are no longer the same.” President Jefferson was more
concerned about the Indians.

    Jefferson’s admiration for American Indians was rooted in his boy-
hood encounters with the Cherokee at Shadwell, his father’s home in
Albemarle County, near Monticello, and in the eloquence of Chief
Outacity, which he witnessed as a student at the College of William
and Mary. Admiration and optimism permeated his comments about Indians
in his Notes on Virginia, and for years Jefferson had advocated Indian
relations based on both justice and fear. “Fear to keep them from
attacking us,” he wrote from Paris in 1786, for after the injuries we
have done them, they cannot love us. . . . But justice is what we
should never lose sight of, and in time it may recover their esteem.
    Seventeen years later, the view from the White House was different.
While Livingston and Monroe were negotiating the Louisiana Purchase in
Paris, President Jefferson was advising William C. C. Claiborne,
governor of the Mississippi Territory, that it was “all important to
press on the Indians, as steadily and strenuously as they can bear.”
American settlements, the president informed General William Henry
Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory,
 will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will
in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States,
or remove beyond the Mississippi. . . . As to their fear, we presume
our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see
we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities
to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only.
“The preceding views,” Jefferson cautioned Claiborne, “are such as should
not be formally declared.”

    The Louisiana Purchase accelerated the shift in Jefferson’s policy.
His draft amendment to the Constitution would have given Congress
author- it>’ to take possession of Indian lands east of the
Mississippi and exchange them “for those of white inhabitants on the
West side thereof and above the latitude of 3]. degrees.” If Congress
acted “with the wisdom we have a right to expect,” the president wrote
to Horatio Gates in his July ii acknowledgment of the general’s praise
for America’s diplomatic triumph, “they may make [Louisiana] the means
of tempting all our Indians on the East side of the Mississippi to
remove to the West,” thereby “condensing instead of scattering our
population.” The sale of vacated Indian lands in the east, he
suggested in a similar letter to his old revolutionary colleague John
Dickinson, of Pennsylvania, might “pay the whole debt contracted
before it comes due.” The Louisiana Purchase prompted an ominous
transition in the government’s policies toward American Indians.
“Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet,”
Jefferson wrote with chilling prescience, “seizing the whole country
of the tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi. . . would be an
example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.”

    Years later, when President Andrew Jackson offered the Choctaw Indians
“a country beyond the Mississippi,” he described it as one of the
“valuable objects which Mr. Jefferson promised you.” America’s barely
visible first steps along the Trail of Tears were taken in the White
House as Thomas Jefferson pondered the implications of the Louisiana
Purchase.

=========

Among other sources (which are cited in the book), my summary relied on a
splendid article by Christian B. Keller, “Philanthropy Betrayed: Thoms
Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Origins of Federal Indian
Removal Policy,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society vol 144
(2000) – which I recommend as the place to start for anyone interested in
Jefferson and Indian policy.




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