Don Wildman

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In 1831, the French political thinker and writer Alexis de Tocqueville visited Memphis, Tennessee.

As he stood on the banks of the Mississippi River, he caught sight of a horrendous scene.

Mass removals of native Choctaw people from their ancestral homelands.

In his book, Democracy in America, he described what he saw that day.

In the whole scene, there was an air of ruin and destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu one couldn't watch without feeling one's heart wrung.

He asked one man why they were leaving.

The answer came back simply, to be free.

What Tocqueville witnessed that day would come to be remembered as one of the darkest chapters of American history, the beginning of what is now commonly referred to as the Trail of Tears.