This is the first, and hopefully only time I will ever speak or write these words: Indian Removal wasn't that bad.

Don't get me wrong. It was still horrendous and I find Jackson's feigned veneer of benevolence used to justify Removal particular vile.

But his numbers are way off. He's talking specifically about the "Trail of Tears." Well, technically, he's talking about the effects of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, in general, but he's using the "Trail of Tears" as an overarching label for those events and lumping them all into the year 1830. The Removal Era really spans almost two decades. At the time, the Cherokee, Creek and Choctaw were the largest nations affected by Removal and between them around 10,000 people died during removal. It's easier to find figures for the southern nations, but it's a lot harder to find decent numbers for the northern nations, who were generally smaller in size but there were a lot more of them. Adding up the casualties from the other nations, will give us another few thousand, but we're not going to hit even 100,000. Somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 is a far more reasonable estimate for the number of people who died due to Removal.

To put things into perspective, killing 150 million people in 1830, would have required every person in the United States to kill more than ten other people on average, since there were only 12.8 million Americans at the time.