Alabama to
complain that the government of the United States has been remiss or
neglectful in protecting them from Indian hostilities. The fact is
directly the reverse. The people of Alabama and Georgia are now
suffering the recoil of their own unlawful weapons. Georgia, sir,
Georgia, by trampling upon the faith of our national treaties with the
Indian tribes, and by subjecting them to her state laws, first set the
example of that policy which is now in the process of consummation by
this Indian war. In setting this example she bade defiance to the
authority of the government of this nation. She nullified your laws; she
set at naught your executive and judicial guardians of the common
constitution of the land. To what extent she carried this policy, the
dungeons of her prisons, and the records of the Supreme Judicial Court
of the United States, can tell.

"To those prisons she committed inoffensive, innocent, pious ministers
of the Gospel of truth, for carrying the light, the comforts, the
consolations of that Gospel, to the hearts and minds of those unhappy
Indians. A solemn decision of the Supreme Court of the United States
pronounced that act a violation of your treaties and your laws. Georgia
defied that decision. Your executive government never carried it into
execution. The imprisoned missionaries of the Gospel were compelled to
purchase their ransom from perpetual captivity by sacrificing their
rights as freemen to the meekness of their principles as Christians: and
you have sanctioned all these outrages upon justice, law, and humanity,
by succumbing to the power and the policy of Georgia; by accommodating
your legislation to her arbitrary will; by tearing to tatters your old
treaties with the Indians, and by constraining them, under _peine
forte et dure_, to the mockery of signing other treaties with you,
which, at the first moment when it shall suit your purpose, you will
again tear to tatters, and scatter to the four winds of heaven; till the
Indian race shall be extinct upon this continent, and it shall become a
problem, beyond the solution of antiquaries and historical societies,
_what_ the red man of the forest was.

"This, sir, is the remote and primitive cause of the present Indian
war--your own injustice sanctioning and sustaining that of Georgia and
Alabama. This system of policy was first introduced by the present
administration of your national government. It is directly the reverse
of that system w