now, wilson lumpkin protested the way the northerners were using indian. he said they were indicting his fellow georgians as quote atheist, it deists, infidels and sabbath breakers wavering under the curse of slavery. what i would suggest as a summation for the removal debate in the congress at least, is this. within the deck or his precincts of the u.s. capitol, -- fired in the nation's first civil war and the had won the opening round. but, i don't want tonight to explore the misery of the forced migration to oklahoma. i worry sometimes and i worried writing the book that we can become hard and to other people's pain if you dwell on it too thoroughly. for instance, in los angeles, when the police were accused of beating rodney king, a rather celebrated case at that time, the defense attorneys played the tape of the beating over and over and over. they found every pretext for introducing it again because they counted on it, that the horror of it or they discussed would wear away and the jurors would be left with boredom and indifference. and i think when

now, i mean, meacham is certainly entitled to his opinion but the fact is that men like wilson lumpkinand john ross and the cherokees side, they saw very clearly that this was an early attempt of the north to impose its values on the south and in the case of lumpkin, it was to be resisted. ross at first thought it was a good thing until a correspondent from philadelphia wrote that it was very bad to get the antislavery movement mixed up with the anti-removal movement because so many even in the north were not abolitionists. but what you watch -- i mean you have to start with the premise that in 1828, the campaign didn't even mention slavery, and yet by the time jackson left, it was at the forefront of the national debate. now something was happening during that period and the something was the mobilization of the quakers, the northern missionaries, the congregationalists against the removal but also against slavery. and i think it is not a -- but i think when he defied the supreme court, think that was a very important element in the thinking of the south and you know you can disagree

when wilson lumpkin, you, perhaps, many know of him, when he went to congress from georgia in 1827, his goal was to ec pell the cherokees from georgia. that was his goal. and he described his legislation, however, as indian reform. that was the way. but his opponents knew what his crusade was about. he put it this way, northern fanatics, male and female, had gone to work and got p -- gotten thousands of petitions protesting against the removal of the poor, dear indians from the states where they were located to west of the mississippi. now in president jackson lumpkin had a powerful ally. jackson had convinced himself that he was doing the cherokee a favor by insisting that they move. there was increing friction between the white settlers, excuse me, the white settlers and the cherokee, and jackson felt that his humane answer was to force the cherokees to live their -- leave their traditional tribal land. what he didn't ever hear was the response p of the cherokees themselves including school children. they learned that they might be driven west. their teacher told them, study hard beca