There were defenders of the Indians. Perhaps the most eloquent was Senator  Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, who told the Senate, debating removal:

“We have crowded the tribes upon a few miserable acres on our southern frontier; it is all that is left to them of their once boundless forest: and still, like the horse-leech, our insatiated cupidity cries, give! give! … Sir … Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin?”

1830. From Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States