3922. INDIANS, Great Britain and.—
You know the benevolent plan we were pursuing
here for the happiness of the aboriginal
inhabitants in our vicinities. We spared nothing
to keep them at peace with one another.
To teach them agriculture and the rudiments
of the most necessary arts, and to encourage
industry by establishing among them separate
property. In this way they would have been
enabled to subsist and multiply on a moderate
scale of landed possession. They would have
mixed their blood with ours, and been amalgamated
and indentified with us within no distant
period of time. On the commencement of the
present war[with Great Britain], we pressed
on them the observance of peace and neutrality,
but the interested and unprincipled policy of
England has defeated all our labors for the
salvation of these unfortunate people. They
have seduced the greater part of the tribes
within our neighborhood, to take up the hatchet
against us, and the cruel massacres they have
committed on the women and children of our
frontiers taken by surprise will oblige us now
to pursue them to extermination, or drive
them to new seats beyond our reach. * * *
The confirmed brutalization, if not the extermination
of this race in our America, is therefore
to form an additional chapter in the English
history of the same colored man in Asia,
and of the brethren of their own color in Ireland
and wherever else Anglo-mercantile cupidity
can find a two-penny interest in deluging
the earth with human blood.—
To Baron de Humboldt. Washington ed. vi, 269.
Ford ed., ix, 431.
(Dec. 1813)
