“This disaster of the Cherokees, brought to me by a sad friend to blacken
my days and nights! I can do nothing; why shriek? why strike ineffectual
blows? I stir in it for the sad reason that no other mortal will move,
and if I do not, why, it is left undone. The amount of it, to be sure, is
merely a scream; but sometimes a scream is better than a thesis....
“Yesterday wrote the letter to Van Buren,—a letter hated of me, a
deliverance that does not deliver the soul. I write my journal, I read
my lecture with joy; but this stirring in the philanthropic mud gives me
no peace. I will let the republic alone until the republic comes to me.
I fully sympathize, be sure, with the sentiments I write; but I accept
it rather from my friends than dictate it. It is not my impulse to say
it, and therefore my genius deserts me; no muse befriends; no music of
thought or word accompanies.”
Yet his conscience then, and many a time later, brought him to do the
brave, distasteful duty.