It is interesting in this connection, as indicating the strong and
widespread public feeling manifested in the Cherokee question, to note
that it became in some sense a test question among leaders of the two
great political parties. The Democrats strenuously upheld the conduct
of President Jackson on the subject, and the Whigs assailed him with
extreme bitterness. The great Whig leader, Henry Clay, in replying[432]
to a letter received by him from John Gunter, a Cherokee, took occasion
to express his sympathy with the Cherokee people for the wrongs and
sufferings experienced by them. He regretted them not only because
of their injustice, but because they inflicted a deep wound on the
character of the American Republic. He supposed that the principles
which had uniformly governed our relations with the Indian nations had
been too long and too firmly established to be disturbed. They had been
proclaimed in the negotiation with Great Britain by the commissioners
who concluded the treaty of peace, of whom he was one, and any
violation of them by the United States he felt with sensibility. By
those principles the Cherokee Nation had a right to establish its own
form of government, to alter and amend it at pleasure, to live under
its own laws, to be exempt from the United States laws or the laws of
any individual State, and to claim the protection of the United States.
He considered that the Chief Magistrate and his subordinates had acted
in direct hostility to those principles and had thereby encouraged
Georgia to usurp powers of legislation over the Cherokee Nation which
she did not of right possess.