I thought this was an interesting premise. If I'm reading the review and the excerpt from the book correctly, the author argues a connection between the unsuccessful anti-Indian removal movement primarily emanating from New England and the later successful abolition movement, also primarily based in New England. I've never thought of it quite this way but it's an interesting idea. I may have to read this book.

Jim

Driven West: Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears to the Civil War by A.J.
Langguth

http://www.amazon.com/Driven-West-Andrew-Jackson-Trail/dp/B0058M57BM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333979106&sr=8-1

Book Description
Publication Date: November 9, 2010

By the acclaimed author of the classic Patriots and Union 1812, this major
work of narrative history portrays four of the most turbulent decades in the
growth of the American nation.

After the War of 1812, President Andrew Jackson and his successors led the
country to its manifest destiny across the continent. But that expansion
unleashed new regional hostilities that led inexorably to Civil War. The
earliest victims were the Cherokees and other tribes of the southeast who
had lived and prospered for centuries on land that became Alabama,
Mississippi, and Georgia.

Jackson, who had first gained fame as an Indian fighter, decreed that the
Cherokees be forcibly removed from their rich cotton fields to make way for
an exploding white population. His policy set off angry debates in Congress
and protests from such celebrated Northern writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Southern slave owners saw that defense of the Cherokees as linked to a
growing abolitionist movement. They understood that the protests would not
end with protecting a few Indian tribes.

Langguth tells the dramatic story of the desperate fate of the Cherokees as
they were driven out of Georgia at bayonet point by U.S. Army forces led by
General Winfield Scott. At the center of the story are the American
statesmen of the day-Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun-and
those Cherokee leaders who tried to save their people-Major Ridge, John
Ridge, Elias Boudinot, and John Ross.
Driven West presents wrenching firsthand accounts of the forced march across
the Mississippi along a path of misery and death that the Cherokees called
the Trail of Tears. Survivors reached the distant Oklahoma territory that
Jackson had marked out for them, only to find that the bloodiest days of
their ordeal still awaited them.

In time, the fierce national collision set off by Jackson's Indian policy
would encompass the Mexican War, the bloody frontier wars over the expansion
of slavery, the doctrines of nullification and secession, and, finally, the
Civil War itself.

In his masterly narrative of this saga, Langguth captures the idealism and
betrayals of headstrong leaders as they steered a raw and vibrant nation in
the rush to its destiny.