The anger of the European has always raged with undefinable fury, when
once aroused, in these southern latitudes, and especially in the regions
in question. The spirit is the same, whether we review the cruel and
useless extermination of the Indians in Cuba or Florida; the massacres of
the Mexicans by the merciless Spaniards; the internecine slaughter of the
French, English, and Spaniards along the coasts of South Carolina,
Georgia, and Florida; the extermination of whole tribes, like the
Yemassee, or the forced removal of the red men from the broad lands of
their birthplace and inheritance. All show the implacable depth of his
avarice or his ire. It was not merely the honor of subjugation, of
conquering strange races, that was the object of the politics, and that
excited the emulation of these iron-mailed and iron-hearted men and their
descendants: it seems to have been an irresistible desire to immolate
human races, to glut with blood that thirst for destruction which arises
from depraved and burning hearts.
It was the same spirit, under the mask of avarice, that tore the
well-behaved Creeks and Cherokees from the homes of their ancestors, and
banished them to the prairies of the West; that hunted down the last
Seminole in the everglades of Florida, where there are to-day twenty
millions of acres of land unsold and unoccupied.
It was the same spirit that, in later times, recklessly and ruthlessly
destroyed, at Camp Sumter, an army of freemen, under the pretence of
treating them as prisoners of war.