"By the time Jackson became president, only 125,000 Native Americans still lived east of the Mississippi River. Warfare and disease had greatly reduced the number of Indians in the East. Others had sold their lands and moved across the Mississippi. One of Jackson’s goals was to remove the remaining Indians to a new Indian Territory in the West. Most of the eastern Indians lived in the South. They belonged to five groups, called tribes by the whites: the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole. Hoping to remain in their homelands, these Indians had adopted many white ways. Most had given up hunting to become farmers. Many had learned to read and write. The Cherokee even had their own written language, a newspaper, and a constitution modeled on the U. S. Constitution. Whites called these Indians the "Five Civilized Tribes." While the Five Civilized Tribes may have hoped to live in peace with their neighbors, whites did not share this goal. As the cotton kingdom spread westward, wealthy planters and poor settlers alike looked greedily at Indian homelands. The Indians, they decided, had to go."
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