"This study is the first to show how state courts enabled the mass expulsion of Native Americans from their southern homelands in the 1830s. Our understanding of that infamous period, argues Tim Alan Garrison, is too often molded around the towering personalities of the Indian removal debate, including President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee leader John Ross, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall.

This common view minimizes the impact on Indian sovereignty of some little-known legal cases at the state level." "Readers will gain a broader perspective on the racial views of the southern legal elite and on the logical inconsistencies of southern law and politics during this formative period of anti-Indian and proslavery ideologies."--BOOK JACKET.