First post here, hope I followed all the rules.

Essentially his argument was that the death toll and human tragedy of the Trail of Tears unfairly oversimplifies and vilifies Jackson, who is more accurately understood as genuinely trying to work out a mutually beneficial solution to a swell in violence against Native Americans. He fully acknowledged that the Trail of Tears was not a "solution" in that sense and that the pain, suffering, and death of thousands of Native Americans was not and cannot be justified, but was also sympathetic to Jackson's position of needing to make a decision on the problem.

I was somewhat skeptical of this as it sounded like the beginnings of arguments that I have heard elsewhere attempting to explain away the racial dimension of the tensions between Native American and white settlers for political reasons, but I did not have time to press him on the topic and do not know much about this area.

I did some initial searching online, but most of the articles I have found so far seem to focus much more heavily on the issues like the questionable legality of the Trail of Tears, the human tragedy of the removal, or the effects on specific Native American groups. The subject of Jackson's motives is either handled very superficially or not at all, seemingly because the articles I have found assume the reader already has a strong opinion.

I understand that questions of motive are difficult to discuss objectively and can be speculative, but I would like to know more about the state of Native American relations at the time. Was there really enough uncontrolled, one sided violence against Native Americans that it could have seemed reasonable at the time to believe that they needed the government's protection from white settlers and speculators? Is there evidence that anyone at the time genuinely believed in removal purely on "humanitarian" grounds and not out of greed, and if so, how widespread was this belief? What evidence do we have to establish Jackson's motives behind the Trail of Tears that is not merely speculative? How should we try to understand Jackson and the Trail of Tears historically without placing either too much or too little emphasis on the suffering and death of thousands of Native Americans?

I hope that is not too much all at once, and thank you to those that read and answer!