Western half of North America ( North America being divided by the Mississippi). They wanted to settle the Eastern portion of "their" land without the Indians revolting, getting in the way with their religions, and stirring up the general racism that the majority of the white settlers possessed in that time period. Basically, the whites did not want the Indians to live among them or near them, and the Indians did not want to simply give up their land and move hundreds of miles away. In the late 1700’s and early portion of the 1800’s, the Americans practiced an "unwritten removal policy", of unfairly acquiring Native American land, destroying Indian tribes, and forcing Natives to recede into the depths of the land they have lived upon for thousands of years. The Indians put up quite a resistance for a few hundred years, but the time had finally arrived when the whites were seriously thinking about passing a bill through their Congress that would demand that all Native Americans move on the Western side of the Mississippi River. For the Americans, influential scholars, military heroes, and religious leaders each had his own opinion on whether they had the right to pass a rather finalizing law on such a major issue. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which in short gives Americans the "legal" right to force Indians out of their present homes east of the Mississippi, onto a reservation west of the Mississippi. The margin of the Removal Act’s victory in Congress was very narrow. Influential Americans such as Lewis Cass, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Frelinghuysen, John Forsyth, John Ross, and others expressed their opinions to the public and Congress before the passage of the Removal Act. Lewis Cass, Andrew Jackson, and John Forsyth were three of the pro-removal leaders who helped influence Congress to ratify Removal Act. Each of these famous influences in American colonization expressed his strong opinion...
