The vast majority of southerners were not officers in any government, Sherman Logan. You immediately resort to assumption of government force any time a group of people is mentioned. You’ve really internalized the Federal leviathan and apparently cannot envision any other means of interrelation bewteen people.
Some of us know that southerners and native tribes got along rather well, and in many instances extremely well, since they’re in our family trees. Yes, there were attacks. Neither side was innocent. Mass expulsion was fought by the people. Churches fought it, mountain people fought it.
You go right ahead and prattle on about treaties and government edicts, and those of us who descend from these people will continue to relate the histories that we know because our people who went before lived it, on a human, interpersonal scale.
You may sugar-coat the southern relationship with the Indian all you like. You are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.
The stubborn fact is that the Cherokee removal was engineered by southerners, especially the Georgia state legislature, elected by the people, or more accurately by the white men. This campaign went on more than a decade, and the people had plenty of opportunity to vote them out had they disagreed.
You are accurate that not all southerners supported it. Davy Crockett opposed it in Congress, but it is relevant that he, as a direct result, lost his bid for re-election.
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/ArticlePrintable.jsp?id=h-2722
There appears to have been a good deal more intermarriage in the South than in northern or border states, but this is probably at least partly because the southern tribes were more acculturated than the northern ones. They weren’t as “different.”
BTW, northern tribes, during the period of independence, were not exterminated. Most were “removed” just as the southern tribes were, to the Trans-Mississippi, eventually to Oklahoma.
Also BTW, during most of this period the federal government was largely controlled by southerners. You seem to classify federal actions as “northern” by definition, and that just wasn’t true at this time. Similar to the way liberals classify past liberal mistakes or evils as “American,” while claiming liberal positive achievements as “liberal.”
Excellent!
And you must never forget that the history books are written by the winners (ask the Germans and Japanese - and yourselves).
Keep your own history as clean and true as you can, teach it to your young, learn from it's lessons....and never give up.