Page "Indian removal" Paragraph 2

Since the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, America's policy had been to allow Native Americans to remain east of the Mississippi as long as they became assimilated or " civilized ".

His original plan was to guide the Natives towards adopting a sedentary agricultural lifestyle, in large part due to " the decrease of game rendering their subsistence by hunting insufficient ".

Jefferson's expectation was that by assimilating them into an agricultural lifestyle, they would become economically dependent on trade with white Americans, and would thereby be willing to give up land that they would otherwise not part with, in exchange for trade goods.

In an 1803 letter to William Henry Harrison, Jefferson wrote: