"I do not doubt but that your Excellency will think it proper to give some further encouragement to those honest people. The high prices they complain of are the necessary effect of the war. Whatever presents may be sent for them through my hands shall be distributed with prudence and fidelity. I have the honour of being
"Your Excellency's most obedient and most humble servant,
"James Craufurd."
This chapter of Congress vengeance to exterminate the Six Nations of Indians, and of its writers to picture them as human monsters, cannot be better concluded than in the words of the historian of Brant,[100] and of the Border Wars of the American Revolution:
"No Indian pen traces the history of their tribes and nations, or records the deeds of their warriors and chiefs, their prowess and their wrongs. Their spoilers have been their historians; and although a reluctant assent has been awarded to some of the nobler traits of their nature, yet, without yielding a due allowance for the peculiarities of their situation, the Indian character has been presented with singular uniformity as being cold, cruel, morose, and revengeful; unrelieved by any of those varying traits and characteristics, those lights and shadows which are admitted in respect to other people no less wild and uncivilized than they.
"Without pausing to reflect that, even when most cruel, they have been practising the trade of war—always dreadful—as much in conformity to their own usages and laws as have their more civilized antagonists, the white historian has drawn them with the characteristics of demons. Forgetting that the second of Hebrew monarchs did not scruple to saw his prisoners with saws, and harrow them with harrows of iron; forgetful likewise of the scenes of Smithfield, under the direction of our own British ancestors; the historians of the poor untutored Indians, almost with one accord, have denounced them as monsters sui generis, of unparalleled and unapproachable barbarity; as though the summary tomahawk were worse than the iron tortures of the harrow, and the torch of the Mohawk hotter than the faggots of Queen Mary.
"Nor does it seem to have occurred to the 'pale-faced' writers that the identical cruelties, the records and descriptions of which enter so largely into the composition of the earlier volumes of American history, were not barbarities in the estimation of those who practised them. The scalp lock was an emblem of chivalry. Every warrior shaving his head for battle was careful to leave the lock of defiance upon his crown, as for the bravado, 'Take it if you can.' The stake and the torture were identified with their rude notions of the power of endurance. They were inflicted upon captives of their own race, as well as upon whites; and with their own braves these trials were courted, to enable the sufferer to exhibit the courage and fortitude with which they could be borne—the proud scorn with which all the pain that a foe might inflict could be endured.
"But (it is said) they fell upon slumbering hamlets in the night and massacred defenceless women and children. This, again, was their own mode of warfare, as honourable in their estimation as the more courteous methods of committing wholesale murder laid down in the books.
"But of one enormity they were ever innocent. Whatever degree of personal hardship and suffering their female captives were compelled to endure, their persons were never dishonoured by violence; a fact which can be predicated, we apprehend, of no other victorious soldiery that ever lived.
"In regard, moreover, to the countless acts of cruelty alleged to have been perpetrated by the savages, it must still be borne in mind that the Indians have had no writer to relate their own side of the story. The annals of man, probably, do not attest a more kindly reception of intruding foreigners than was given to the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth by the faithful Massassoit, and the tribes under his jurisdiction. Nor did the forest kings take up arms until they but too clearly saw that either their visitors or themselves must be driven from the soil which was their own—the fee of which was derived from the Great Spirit. And the nation is yet to be discovered that will not fight for their homes, the graves of their fathers, and their family altars. Cruel they were in the prosecution of their contests; but it would require the aggregate of a large number of predatory incursions and isolated burnings to balance the awful scene of conflagration and blood which at once extinguished the power of Sassacus, and the brave and indomitable Narragansets over whom he reigned. No! until it is forgotten that by some Christians in infant Massachusetts it was held to be right to kill Indians, as the agents and familiars of Azazel; until the early records of even tolerant Connecticut, which disclose the fact that the Indians were seized by the Puritans, transported to the British West Indies, and sold as slaves, are lost; until the Amazon and La Plata shall have washed away the bloody history of the Spanish American conquest; and until the fact that Cortez stretched the unhappy Guatimozin naked upon a bed of burning coals (or General Sullivan's devastation of the Six Indian Nations) is proved to be a fiction, let not the American Indians be pronounced the most cruel of men."[101]