The Memories of Fifty Years / Containing Brief Biographical Notices of Distinguished Americans, and Anecdotes of Remarkable Men; Interspersed with Scenes and Incidents Occurring during a Long Life of Observation Chiefly Spent in the Southwest

by W. H. Sparks

It was very well understood that the coming men were Clay, Jackson, and Calhoun. Clarke and his friends were ardent supporters of Calhoun, and it was thought they had won the favor of the Administration. Mr. Clay was strongly opposed to the execution of the old treaty, and had, by this means, drawn upon himself the opposition of the Crawford, or Troup party. These facts show the condition of public opinion in the State, and conclusively establish the fact, that but for this division of the people, and the check held by this upon the action of the masses and their leaders, fearful consequences would assuredly have ensued.

The reasons influencing the joint action of Mr. Adams and Mr. Clay in opposition to the execution of the old treaty were very different. Mr. Clay was honest and patriotic. He had no ulterior views to subserve. His policy was national. He desired the prosperity and advancement of his country to greatness and power among the nations of the earth. His fame was that of the nation; already it was identified with it. His ambition was a noble and a grand one. He wished his name identified with his acts, and these to constitute the fame and glory of the nation. He ever felt what subsequently he so nobly expressed, "That he would rather be right than be President." He had no petty selfishness—no pitiful revenges to exhaust with the hand of power—no contemptible motives for elevating or advancing the interests of one section of his country by oppressing another. "All his aims were his country's," and his whole country's. He desired that every act of that country should bear the broadest light, and challenge the closest and most searching scrutiny; that each should be a new and brighter gem in the diadem of her glory, and that her magnanimity should be most conspicuous in her transactions with the weakest. This he especially desired, and labored to effect, in all her transactions with the Indians. He viewed these as the primitive proprietors of the soil, and possessors of the entire country. He knew they were fading away before a civilization they were by nature incapacitated to emulate, and this, he felt, was in obedience to the inexorable laws of Divine Providence; and, in the wonderfully capacious compassion of his nature, he desired, in the accomplishment of this fate, that no act of national injustice to them should stain the nation's escutcheon, and determined to signalize this desire in every act of his when giving form and shape to national policy. He had generously lent a listening ear to the protests of the chiefs, seconded by that of their agent, and sincerely believed the treaty had been effected by fraud, and was wrong and oppressive, and, therefore, he opposed its execution, and was the main instrument in forming a new one. The draft of this was from his own pen, and he was solicitous that it should supersede the old one, as an expression of the Indians' desire.

Mr. Adams was, equally with Mr. Clay, opposed to the treaty as ratified, though, as was his constitutional duty, he had sent the instrument for the action of the Senate. In heart he was opposed to any treaty which would remove the aborigines from this territory at this time, and, in consequence of the action of Georgia, it was anticipated that, at no very distant day, the entire Indian population east of the Mississippi River, in the South, would be removed, unless some policy of the Government should be adopted which would prevent it; and those of the North, who felt desirous of crippling the territorial progress of the South, and, of consequence, her augmentation of population, supposed the most effectual means of accomplishing this would be to educate and Christianize the Indian. To do this, they insisted he must remain upon the territory he now occupied. This would bring him into immediate contact with the civilized white, where he could be most readily approached by missionaries and schoolmasters, and be instructed by the force of example. At the same time, he was to remain under the sole protection of the United States Government, without any of the privileges of civil government to be exercised as a citizen of the United States or the State upon whose soil he was located. This was ennobled as the sentiment of Christian benevolence, while its real intention was to withhold the land from the occupancy of the people of Georgia, and in so much retard the growth and increase of the white population of the State. To carry out this scheme, missionary establishments sprang up among the Indians in every part of the South, but especially within the limits of the State of Georgia, filled with Northern fanatics, who employed themselves most actively in prejudicing the minds of the savages against the people who were their neighbors, and preparing them to refuse to treat for the sale of any of their territory.

It has ever been the practice of the Puritan to propagate the vilest heresies, and for the vilest purposes, under the name of philanthropy and religion. It has burned its enemy at the stake, as, assembled around, they sang psalms, and sanctified the vilest cruelties with the name of God's vengeance. It was their great prototype, Cotton Mather, who blasphemously proclaimed, after the most inhuman massacre of several hundred Indians, that they, the Puritans of Massachusetts, "had sent, as a savory scent to the nostrils of God, two hundred or more of the reeking souls of the godless heathen."

This, ostensibly, was deemed a pious act, and a discharge of a pious duty, when, in truth, the only motive was to take his home and country, and appropriate it to their own people. It seems almost impossible to the race to come squarely up to truth and honesty, in word or act, in any transaction, as a man or as a people. Sinister and subtle, expediency, and not principle, seems to be their universal rule of action. Cold and passionless, incapable of generous emotions, he is necessarily vindictive and cruel. Patient and persevering, bigoted and selfish, eschewing as a crime an honorable resentment, he creeps to his ends like a serpent, with all his cunning and all his venom.

John Quincy Adams, in his nature, was much more like his mother than his father. His features were those of his mother, and the cold, persevering hatred of his nature was hers. From his boyhood he was in the habit of recording, for future use, the most confidential conversations of his friends, as also all that incautiously fell from an occasional interview with those less intimate. Had this been done for future reference only to establish facts in his own mind, there could have been no objection to the act; but this was not the motive. These memoranda were to rise up in vengeance when necessary to gratify his spleen or vengeance. He was naturally suspicious. He gave no man his confidence, and won the friendship of no one. Malignant and unforgiving, he watched his opportunity, and never failed to gratify his revengeful nature, whenever his victim was in his power. The furtive wariness of his small gray eye, his pinched nose, receding forehead, and thin, compressed lips, indicated the malignant nature of his soul. Unfaithful to friends, and only constant in selfishness—unconscious of obligation, and ungrateful for favors—fanatical only in hatred—pretending to religious morality, yet pursuing unceasingly, with merciless revenge, those whom he supposed to be his enemies, he combined all the elements of Puritan bigotry and Puritan hate in devilish intensity. He deserted the Federal party in their greatest need, and meanly betrayed them to Mr. Jefferson, whom, from his boyhood, he had hated and reviled in doggerel rhymes and the bitterest prose his genius could suggest.

The conduct of Mr. Adams, after he had been President, as the representative of Massachusetts in Congress, is the best evidence of the motives which influenced his conduct in the matter of these two treaties. He never lost an opportunity to assail the interests and the institutions of the South. He hated her, and to him, more than to any other, is due the conduct of the Northern people toward the South which precipitated the late war, and has destroyed the harmony once existing between the people.

His father had been repudiated by the South for a more trusted son of her own. This was a treasured hatred; and when he shared his father's fate, this became the pervading essence of his nature.

He returned to Congress, after his defeat for the Presidency, for no other purpose than to give shape and direction to a sentiment which he felt must ultimately result in her ruin, and to accomplish this he was more than willing to hazard that of the Government. He felt, should this follow, his own people would be in a condition to dictate and control a government of their own creation, and which should embody their peculiar views, rather than the pure and unselfish principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, and preserved in the Constitution of the United States.

The sagacity of George M. Troup was the first to discover this in his conduct as President, and to sound the alarm as Governor of Georgia. He came directly in contact with him, and determined he should be defeated in one of his means for injury to the South. Troup knew and felt the right was with him, and maintained it with the honest boldness of a true man. He triumphed, and the doctrine of State rights was rescued from a fatally aimed blow, and reaffirmed, gave renewed popularity and strength to its supporters. The election of General Jackson soon after followed, and, as the embodiment of the principle, rallied around him its supporters from every section. With these, and his immense popularity personally, he scotched, for a time, the Puritan snake; but, true to its instincts, it struggled to bite, though its head was off.