I’m the great great grandson of William Potter Ross, the chief of the Cherokee shortly after the relocation. John Ross, the chief during the relocation, was my great great great great uncle.
I have to say that I agree with the comparison to the Bataan Death March. The intent of the Trail of Tears was not to exterminate the Cherokee, merely to shift them off the prime land in the east. Their final destination in Indian Territory was not bad land, and the tribe did well enough in their new home. But the move itself was horribly unjust, and it was executed callously and with inadequate preparation. The intent may not have been to kill as many Cherokee as possible, but the way in which the relocation was carried out was guaranteed to result in numerous deaths.
Bartman:
I don’t know enough about the Trail of Tears to make a comment. But I’ve studied the Bataan Death March closely, and I do feel confident in saying that it was intended just to move them.
General Kawane’s plan anticipated 25,000 prisoners. This number is right in line with the Japanese force assessment numbers. The Japanese assumed that the Americans only had US troops and a handful of Filipino forces. The idea that there were 76,000 men on Bataan came as a total shock to them. Such a force should have been able to run the Japanese off of the peninsula. So the US couldn’t have that large of a force. Or at least that was the circular logic that they had been using for months. The idea that it was a large, but under nourished and badly supplied wasn’t guessed at.
And that basic logic turned the whole thing into a sick joke. Kawane expected the men to be in fairly good condition. He expected them to be able to use their own rations for the first day. He expected them to be able to march a full day’s march (19 miles). All of this was quite reasonable in light of other Allied surrenders. Every other surrender was of men who could have complied Kawane’s expectations. Of course all of this was a dream. The men were on the edge of starvation, they had no supplies. And they were moving at a fraction of the speed expected. And there was no food or water supplied for the men that took three days to do that first march to Balanga. And while supplies were better on the later legs, the very fact that the men had to march at all condemned a lot of them to death.
But all that said there was a minority of the senior commanders who did want to punish the Americans. There were commands given to kill prisoners. But only a minority of commanders received such orders and a lot of them refused. And everyone agreed that the orders did not come from the commanding General, Homma, but instead by lower officers.
So yes there was some intentional savagery inflicted on the marchers. But the majority of the deaths were due to simple mistaken assumptions.
Yeah, the Japanese didn’t start systematically murdering and torturing their prisoners until they had them in the POW camps.
Human_Action:
I’d go with “because it wasn’t a genocide”. It’s a well-known historical event, and a black mark on American history, but a forced relocation is different from the systematic mass murder of the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, or Rwandan Genocide.
Sometimes forced relocation is called ethnic cleansing and the death associated with that ethnic cleansing is sometimes called genocide.
ETA:
I see iiandi already got it in post 10.