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.
XXII.
Yet this depraved fury does not appear to have been natural to the soil, climate, or the native races, as observed by the early navigators; although Ponce de Leon received his death-wound from them when he sought the fountain of youth in the everglades of Florida, and De Soto encountered fierce opposition from the red men of the forest when he pursued his way towards the Appalachian mountains in search of the mines of gold. But nevertheless the Europeans were treated almost always with kindness whenever they approached the Indian with good intentions.
Contrast the present time and the people with the period and the natives when the great Navigator discovered the adjacent isles. “Nature is here,” he exclaims, “so prolific, that property has not produced the feelings of avarice or cupidity. These people seem to live in a golden age, happy and quiet, amid open and endless gardens, neither surrounded by ditches, divided by fences, nor protected by walls. They behave honorably towards one another, without laws, without books, without judges. They consider him wicked who takes delight in harming another. This aversion of the good to the bad seems to be all their legislation.”
These people with natural sentiments have passed away, and new races, with strange and repulsive ideas, have taken their place. “Like the statue of Glaucus, that time, the sea, the storms have so disfigured that it resembles less a god than a ferocious beast, the human soul, altered in the bosom of society by a thousand causes rising without cessation, by the acquisition of a multitude of creeds and errors, by the changes produced in the constitution of bodies by the continual shock of passions, has caused a change in appearance almost unrecognizable; and we sooner find, instead of the being acting always by certain and invariable principles, instead of that celestial and majestic simplicity in which the Creator has left his impress, the deformed contrast of the understanding in delirium, and of the passion which pretends to reason.”
XXIII.
Wherever society forms and sustains itself, there must be adopted certain rules and laws to maintain it.
These seemingly arbitrary laws represent the interests, the passions, and opinions of those who establish them, and they differ widely, according to the nature of the men and the climate which they inhabit.