r by a
merchant, his master, and afterwards enfranchised. He had understanding
enough to post up his leger from his journal, but not enough to bear
up against hypochrondriac affections, and the gloomy forebodings they
inspire. He became crazy, foggy, his head always in the clouds, and
rhapsodizing what neither himself nor any one else could understand.
I think he told me he had visited you personally while you were in the
administration, and wrote you letters, which you have probably forgotten
in the mass of the correspondences of that crazy class, of whose
complaints, and terrors, and mysticisms, the several Presidents have
been the regular depositories. Macpherson was too honest to be molested
by any body, and too inoffensive to be a subject for the mad-house;
although, I believe, we are told in the old book, that 'every man that
is mad, and maketh himself a prophet, thou shouldst put him in prison
and in the stocks.'

The Wabash prophet is a very different character, more rogue than fool,
if to be a rogue is not the greatest of all follies. He arose to notice
while I was in the administration, and became, of course, a proper
subject of inquiry for me. The inquiry was made with diligence. His
declared object was the reformation of his red brethren, and their
return to their pristine manner of living. He pretended to be in
constant communication with the Great Spirit; that he was instructed by
him to make known to the Indians that they were created by him distinct
from the whites, of different natures, for different purposes, and
placed under different circumstances, adapted to their nature and
destinies; that they must return from all the ways of the whites to the
habits and opinions of their forefathers; they must not eat the flesh
of hogs, of bullocks, of sheep, &c. the deer and buffalo having been
created for their food; they must not make bread of wheat, but of Indian
corn; they must not wear linen nor woollen, but dress like their fathers
in the skins and furs of animals; they must not drink ardent spirits:
and I do not remember whether he extended his inhibitions to the gun and
gunpowder, in favor of the bow and arrow. I concluded from all this that
he was a visionary, enveloped in the clouds of their antiquities, and
vainly endeavoring to lead back his brethren to the fancied beatitudes
of their golden age. I thought there was little danger of his making
many proselytes from the habits and comforts they had lea