Bills granting payment of these claims, which originally amounted to $12,676,000, passed Congress twice, and were vetoed first by President Polk and then by President Pierce. If ever there was a just claim brought before Congress, these French spoliation claims deserve the title, and it is a historical disgrace to the government of the United States that the payment of them was delayed for nearly a hundred years.[74]
CHAPTER VII.
INDIANS IN THE REVOLUTION.
The writers of American histories severely condemn the British government for employing Indians in the war of the Revolution as well as in 1812, and give unstinted praise to the Americans for humanity in refusing to make use of the warlike but undisciplined and cruel Indian as an ally in the activities of a military campaign. Either an attempt is made to suppress the whole truth of this matter, or the writers have failed in their duty to thoroughly investigate sources of history easily accessible to the honest historian.
The fact is, that in the incipient stage of the Revolutionary war, overtures were made by the political disturbers and leading instigators of trouble to win over to the side of the American party the fiercest, if not the most numerous Indian nation on the North American continent.
From Concord, on the fourth of April, 1775, the Provincial Congress thought fit, with cunning prudence, to address the sachem of the Mohawks, with the rest of the Iroquois tribes, in the following words:
"Brother, they have made a law to establish the religion of the pope in Canada, which lies near you. We much fear some of your children may be induced, instead of worshipping the only true God, to pay his due to images, made with their own hands."[75]
Here, then, a religious reason was advanced, in lieu of the real one, why the Indians should oppose the British, by whom they had always been generously treated. The response to the insinuating address was not encouraging. May it not be assumed that these Indians had already experienced some of the same kind of love, generosity and good faith, as later every tribe has received from every government at Washington, from the days of the first president to the latest, through the past "century of dishonor."