CONCORD, MASS., April 23, 1838.
SIR: The seat you fill places you in a relation of credit and nearness
to every citizen. By right and natural position, every citizen is your
friend. Before any acts contrary to his own judgment or interest have
repelled the affections of any man, each may look with trust and living
anticipation to your government. Each has the highest right to call
your attention to such subjects as are of a public nature, and properly
belong to the chief magistrate; and the good magistrate will feel a joy
in meeting such confidence. In this belief and at the instance of a few
of my friends and neighbors, I crave of your patience a short hearing for
their sentiments and my own: and the circumstance that my name will be
utterly unknown to you will only give the fairer chance to your equitable
construction of what I have to say.
Sir, my communication respects the sinister rumors that fill this part
of the country concerning the Cherokee people. The interest always
felt in the aboriginal population—an interest naturally growing as that
decays—has been heightened in regard to this tribe. Even in our distant
State some good rumor of their worth and civility has arrived. We have
learned with joy their improvement in the social arts. We have read their
newspapers. We have seen some of them in our schools and colleges. In
common with the great body of the American people, we have witnessed with
sympathy the painful labors of these red men to redeem their own race
from the doom of eternal inferiority, and to borrow and domesticate in
the tribe the arts and customs of the Caucasian race. And notwithstanding
the unaccountable apathy with which of late years the Indians have been
sometimes abandoned to their enemies, it is not to be doubted that it
is the good pleasure and the understanding of all humane persons in the
Republic, of the men and the matrons sitting in the thriving independent
families all over the land, that they shall be duly cared for; that they
shall taste justice and love from all to whom we have delegated the
office of dealing with them.
The newspapers now inform us that, in December, 1835, a treaty
contracting for the exchange of all the Cherokee territory was pretended
to be made by an agent on the part of the United States with some
persons appearing on the part of the Cherokees; that the fact afterwards
transpired that these deputies did by no means represent the will of the
nation; and that, out of eighteen thousand souls composing the nation,
fifteen thousand six hundred and sixty-eight have protested against the
so-called treaty. It now appears that the government of the United States
choose to hold the Cherokees to this sham treaty, and are proceeding to
execute the same. Almost the entire Cherokee Nation stand up and say,
“This is not our act. Behold us. Here are we. Do not mistake that handful
of deserters for us;” and the American President and the Cabinet, the
Senate and the House of Representatives, neither hear these men nor see
them, and are contracting to put this active nation into carts and boats,
and to drag them over mountains and rivers to a wilderness at a vast
distance beyond the Mississippi. And a paper purporting to be an army
order fixes a month from this day as the hour for this doleful removal.
In the name of God, sir, we ask you if this be so. Do the newspapers
rightly inform us? Men and women with pale and perplexed faces meet one
another in the streets and churches here, and ask if this be so. We have
inquired if this be a gross misrepresentation from the party opposed to
the government and anxious to blacken it with the people. We have looked
in the newspapers of different parties and find a horrid confirmation
of the tale. We are slow to believe it. We hoped the Indians were
misinformed, and that their remonstrance was premature, and will turn out
to be a needless act of terror.
The piety, the principle that is left in the United States, if only in
its coarsest form, a regard to the speech of men,—forbid us to entertain
it as a fact. Such a dereliction of all faith and virtue, such a denial
of justice, and such deafness to screams for mercy were never heard of
in times of peace and in the dealing of a nation with its own allies and
wards, since the earth was made. Sir, does this government think that the
people of the United States are become savage and mad? From their mind
are the sentiments of love and a good nature wiped clean out? The soul of
man, the justice, the mercy that is the heart’s heart in all men, from
Maine to Georgia, does abhor this business.
In speaking thus the sentiments of my neighbors and my own, perhaps I
overstep the bounds of decorum. But would it not be a higher indecorum
coldly to argue a matter like this? We only state the fact that a crime
is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude,—a crime
that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country? for how
could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our
government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying
imprecations our country, any more? You, sir, will bring down that
renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this
instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet
omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.
You will not do us the injustice of connecting this remonstrance with any
sectional and party feeling. It is in our hearts the simplest commandment
of brotherly love. We will not have this great and solemn claim upon
national and human justice huddled aside under the flimsy plea of its
being a party act. Sir, to us the questions upon which the government
and the people have been agitated during the past year, touching the
prostration of the currency and of trade, seem but motes in comparison.
These hard times, it is true, have brought the discussion home to every
farmhouse and poor man’s house in this town; but it is the chirping
of grasshoppers beside the immortal question whether justice shall be
done by the race of civilized to the race of savage man,—whether all
the attributes of reason, of civility, of justice, and even of mercy,
shall be put off by the American people, and so vast an outrage upon the
Cherokee Nation and upon human nature shall be consummated.
One circumstance lessens the reluctance with which I intrude at this
time on your attention my conviction that the government ought to be
admonished of a new historical fact, which the discussion of this
question has disclosed, namely, that there exists in a great part of
the Northern people a gloomy diffidence in the _moral_ character of the
government.
On the broaching of this question, a general expression of despondency,
of disbelief that any good will accrue from a remonstrance on an act of
fraud and robbery, appeared in those men to whom we naturally turn for
aid and counsel. Will the American government steal? Will it lie? Will it
kill?—We ask triumphantly. Our counsellors and old statesmen here say
that ten years ago they would have staked their lives on the affirmation
that the proposed Indian measures could not be executed; that the
unanimous country would put them down. And now the steps of this crime
follow each other so fast, at such fatally quick time, that the millions
of virtuous citizens, whose agents the government are, have no place to
interpose, and must shut their eyes until the last howl and wailing of
these tormented villages and tribes shall afflict the ear of the world.
I will not hide from you, as an indication of the alarming distrust,
that a letter addressed as mine is, and suggesting to the mind of the
Executive the plain obligations of man, has a burlesque character in the
apprehensions of some of my friends. I, sir, will not beforehand treat
you with the contumely of this distrust. I will at least state to you
this fact, and show you how plain and humane people, whose love would be
honor, regard the policy of the government, and what injurious inferences
they draw as to the minds of the governors. A man with your experience in
affairs must have seen cause to appreciate the futility of opposition to
the moral sentiment. However feeble the sufferer and however great the
oppressor, it is in the nature of things that the blow should recoil upon
the aggressor. For God is in the sentiment, and it cannot be withstood.
The potentate and the people perish before it; but with it, and as its
executor, they are omnipotent.
I write thus, sir, to inform you of the state of mind these Indian
tidings have awakened here, and to pray with one voice more that you,
whose hands are strong with the delegated power of fifteen millions of
men, will avert with that might the terrific injury which threatens the
Cherokee tribe.
With great respect, sir, I am your fellow citizen,