The message recommended a friendly supervision over the Indian tribes removed to the West of the Mississippi, with the important suggestion of preventing intestine war by military interference, as well as improving their condition by all the usual means. On these points, it said:
"The national policy, founded alike in interest and in humanity, so long and so steadily pursued by this government, for the removal of the Indian tribes originally settled on this side of the Mississippi, to the west of that river, may be said to have been consummated by the conclusion of the late treaty with the Cherokees. The measures taken in the execution of that treaty, and in relation to our Indian affairs generally, will fully appear by referring to the accompanying papers. Without dwelling on the numerous and important topics embraced in them, I again invite your attention to the importance of providing a well-digested and comprehensive system for the protection, supervision and improvement of the various tribes now planted in the Indian country. The suggestions submitted by the commissioner of Indian affairs, and enforced by the secretary, on this subject, and also in regard to the establishment of additional military posts in the Indian country, are entitled to your profound consideration. Both measures are necessary for the double purpose of protecting the Indians from intestine war, and in other respects complying with our engagements to them, and of securing our Western frontier against incursions, which otherwise will assuredly be made on it. The best hopes of humanity, in regard to the aboriginal race, the welfare of our rapidly extending settlements, and the honor of the United States, are all deeply involved in the relations existing between this government and the emigrating tribes. I trust, therefore, that the various matters submitted in the accompanying documents, in respect to those relations, will receive your early and mature deliberation; and that it may issue in the adoption of legislative measures adapted to the circumstances and duties of the present crisis."
This suggestion of preventing intestine wars (as they are called) in the bosoms of the tribes, is founded equally in humanity to the Indians and duty to ourselves. Such wars are nothing but massacres, assassinations and confiscations. The stronger party oppress a hated, or feared minority or chief; and slay with impunity (in some of the tribes), where the assumption of a form of government, modelled after that of the white race, for which they have no capacity, gives the justification of executions to what is nothing but revenge and assassination. Under their own ancient laws, of blood for blood, and for the slain to avenge the wrong, this liability of personal responsibility restrained the killings to cases of public justifiable necessity. Since the removal of that responsibility, revenge, ambition, plunder, take their course: and the consequence is a series of assassinations which have been going on for a long time; and still continue. To aggravate many of these massacres, and to give their victims a stronger claim upon the protection of the United States, they are done upon those who are friends to the United States, upon accusations of having betrayed the interest of the tribe in some treaty for the sale of lands. The United States claim jurisdiction over their country, and exercise it in the punishment of some classes of criminals; and it would be good to extend it to the length recommended by President Jackson.
The message would have been incomplete without a renewal of the standing recommendation to take the presidential election out of the hands of intermediate bodies, and give it directly to the people. He earnestly urged an amendment to the constitution to that effect; but that remedy being of slow, difficult, and doubtful attainment, the more speedy process by the action of the people becomes the more necessary. Congressional caucuses were put down by the people in the election of 1824: their substitute and successor—national conventions—ruled by a minority, and managed by intrigue and corruption, are about as much worse than a Congress caucus as Congress itself would be if the members appointed, or contrived the appointment, of themselves, instead of being elected by the people. The message appropriately concluded with thanks to the people for the high honors to which they had lifted him, and their support under arduous circumstances, and said:
"Having now finished the observations deemed proper on this, the last occasion I shall have of communicating with the two Houses of Congress at their meeting, I cannot omit an expression of the gratitude which is due to the great body of my fellow citizens, in whose partiality and indulgence I have found encouragement and support in the many difficult and trying scenes through which it has been my lot to pass during my public career. Though deeply sensible that my exertions have not been crowned with a success corresponding to the degree of favor bestowed upon me, I am sure that they will be considered as having been directed by an earnest desire to promote the good of my country; and I am consoled by the persuasion that whatever errors have been committed will find a corrective in the intelligence and patriotism of those who will succeed us. All that has occurred during my administration is calculated to inspire me with increased confidence in the stability of our institutions, and should I be spared to enter upon that retirement which is so suitable to my age and infirm health, and so much desired by me in other respects, I shall not cease to invoke that beneficent Being to whose providence we are already so signally indebted for the continuance of his blessings on our beloved country."
CHAPTER CLIV.
FINAL REMOVAL OF THE INDIANS.
At the commencement of the annual session of 1836-'37, President Jackson had the gratification to make known to Congress the completion of the long-pursued policy of removing all the Indians in the States, and within the organized territories of the Union, to their new homes west of the Mississippi. It was a policy commencing with Jefferson, pursued by all succeeding Presidents, and accomplished by Jackson. The Creeks and Cherokees had withdrawn from Georgia and Alabama; the Chickasaws and Choctaws from Mississippi and Alabama; the Seminoles had stipulated to remove from Florida; Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri had all been relieved of their Indian population; Kentucky and Tennessee, by earlier treaties with the Chickasaws, had received the same advantage. This freed the slave States from an obstacle to their growth and prosperity, and left them free to expand, and to cultivate, to the full measure of their ample boundaries. All the free Atlantic States had long been relieved from their Indian populations, and in this respect the northern and southern States were now upon an equality. The result has been proved to be, what it was then believed it would be, beneficial to both parties; and still more so to the Indians than to the whites. With them it was a question of extinction, the time only the debatable point. They were daily wasting under contact with the whites, and had before their eyes the eventual but certain fate of the hundreds of tribes found by the early colonists on the Roanoke, the James River, the Potomac, the Susquehannah, the Delaware, the Connecticut, the Merrimac, the Kennebec and the Penobscot. The removal saved the southern tribes from that fate; and in giving them new and unmolested homes beyond the verge of the white man's settlement, in a country temperate in climate, fertile in soil, adapted to agriculture and to pasturage, with an outlet for hunting, abounding with salt water and salt springs—it left them to work out in peace the problem of Indian civilization. To all the relieved States the removal of the tribes within their borders was a great benefit—to the slave States transcendently and inappreciably great. The largest tribes were within their limits, and the best of their lands in the hands of the Indians, to the extent, in some of the States, as Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, of a third or a quarter of their whole area. I have heretofore shown, in the case of the Creeks and the Cherokees in Georgia, that the ratification of the treaties for the extinction of Indian claims within her limits, and which removed the tribes which encumbered her, received the cordial support of northern senators; and that, in fact, without that support these great objects could not have been accomplished. I have now to say the same of all the other slave States. They were all relieved in like manner. Chickasaws and Choctaws in Mississippi and Alabama; Chickasaw claims in Tennessee and Kentucky; Seminoles in Florida; Caddos and Quapaws in Louisiana and in Arkansas; Kickapoos, Delawares, Shawnees, Osages, Iowas, Pinkeshaws, Weas, Peorias, in Missouri; all underwent the same process, and with the same support and result. Northern votes, in the Senate, came to the ratification of every treaty, and to the passage of every necessary appropriation act in the House of Representatives. Northern men may be said to have made the treaties, and passed the acts, as without their aid it could not have been done, constituting, as they did, a large majority in the House, and being equal in the Senate, where a vote of two-thirds was wanting. I do not go over these treaties and laws one by one, to show their passage, and by what votes. I did that in the case of the Creek treaty and the Cherokee treaty, for the removal of these tribes from Georgia; and showed that the North was unanimous in one case, and nearly so in the other, while in both treaties there was a southern opposition, and in one of them (the Cherokee), both Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Clay in the negative: and these instances may stand for an illustration of the whole. And thus the area of slave population has been almost doubled in the slave States, by sending away the Indians to make room for their expansion; and it is unjust and cruel—unjust and cruel in itself, independent of the motive—to charge these Northern States with a design to abolish slavery in the South. If they had harbored such design—if they had been merely unfriendly to the growth and prosperity of these Southern States, there was an easy way to have gratified their feelings, without committing a breach of the constitution, or an aggression or encroachment upon these States: they had only to sit still and vote against the ratification of the treaties, and the enactment of the laws which effected this great removal. They did not do so—did not sit still and vote against their Southern brethren. On the contrary, they stood up and spoke aloud, and gave to these laws and treaties an effective and zealous support. And I, who was the Senate's chairman of the committee of Indian affairs at this time, and know how these things were done, and who was so thankful for northern help at the time; I, who know the truth and love justice, and cherish the harmony and union of the American people, feel it to be my duty and my privilege to note this great act of justice from the North to the South, to stand in history as a perpetual contradiction of all imputed design in the free States to abolish slavery in the slave States. I speak of States, not of individuals or societies.
I have shown that this policy of the universal removal of the Indians from the East to the West of the Mississippi originated with Mr. Jefferson, and from the most humane motives, and after having seen the extinction of more than forty tribes in his own State of Virginia; and had been followed up under all subsequent administrations. With General Jackson it was nothing but the continuation of an established policy, but one in which he heartily concurred, and of which his local position and his experience made him one of the safest of judges; but, like every other act of his administration, it was destined to obloquy and opposition, and to misrepresentations, which have survived the object of their creation, and gone into history. He was charged with injustice to the Indians, in not protecting them against the laws and jurisdiction of the States; with cruelty, in driving them away from the bones of their fathers; with robbery, in taking their lands for paltry considerations. Parts of the tribes were excited to resist the execution of the treaties, and it even became necessary to send troops and distinguished generals—Scott to the Cherokees, Jesup to the Creeks—to effect their removal; which, by the mildness and steadiness of these generals, and according to the humane spirit of their orders, was eventually accomplished without the aid of force. The outcry raised against General Jackson, on account of these measures, reached the ears of the French traveller and writer on American democracy (De Tocqueville), then sojourning among us and collecting materials for his work, and induced him to write thus in his chapter 18: