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in their most important designs; but nations as well as men require time to learn, whatever may be their intelligence and their zeal. While the savages were engaged in the work of civilization, the Europeans continued to surround them on every side, and to confine them within narrower limits; the two races gradually met, and they are now in immediate juxtaposition to each other. The Indian is already superior to his barbarous parent, but he is still very far below his white neighbour. With their resources and acquired knowledge, the Europeans soon appropriated to themselves most of the advantages which the natives might have derived from the possession of the soil: they have settled in the country, they have purchased land at a very low rate or have occupied it by force, and the Indians have been ruined by a competition which they had not the means of resisting. They were isolated in their own country, and their race only constituted a colony of troublesome aliens in the midst of a numerous and domineering people.[1]
Washington said in one of his messages to congress, “We are more enlightened and powerful than the Indian nations, we are therefore bound in honour to treat them with kindness and even with generosity.” But this virtuous and high-minded policy has not been followed. The rapacity of the settlers is usually backed by the tyranny of the government. Although the Cherokees and the Creeks are established upon the territory which they inhabited before the settlement of the Europeans, and although the Americans have frequently treated with them as with foreign nations, the surrounding states have not consented to acknowledge them as independent peoples, and attempts have been made to subject these
- ↑
See in the legislative documents (21st congress, No. 89), instances of excesses of
every kind committed by the whites upon the territory of the Indians, either in taking
possession of a part of their lands, until compelled to retire by the troops of congress,
or carrying off their cattle, burning their houses, cutting down their corn, and doing
violence to their persons.
It appears, nevertheless, from all these documents, that the claims of the natives are constantly protected by the government from the abuse of force. The Union has a representative agent continually employed to reside among the Indians; and the report of the Cherokee agent, which is among the documents I have referred to, is almost always favourable to the Indians. “The intrusion of whites,” he says, “upon the lands of the Cherokee would cause ruin to the poor, helpless, and inoffensive inhabitants.” And he farther remarks upon the attempt of the state of Georgia to establish a division line for the purpose of limiting the boundaries of the Cherokees, that the line drawn having been made by the whites, and entirely upon exparte evidence of their several rights, was of no validity whatever.
