hich had been pursued by all the preceding
administrations of this government under the present constitution. That
system consisted in the most anxious and persevering efforts to
civilize the Indians, to attach them to the soil upon which they lived,
to enlighten their minds, to soften and humanize their hearts, to fix
in permanency their habitations, and to turn them from the wandering
and precarious pursuits of the hunter to the tillage of the ground, to
the cultivation of corn and cotton, to the comforts of the fireside, to
the delights of _home_. This was the system of Washington and of
Jefferson, steadily pursued by all their successors, and to which all
your treaties and all your laws of intercourse with the Indian tribes
were accommodated. The whole system is now broken up, and instead of it
you have adopted that of expelling, by force or by compact, all the
Indian tribes from their own territories and dwellings to a region
beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Missouri, beyond the Arkansas,
bordering upon Mexico; and there you have deluded them with the hope
that they will find a permanent abode, a final resting-place from your
never-ending rapacity and persecution. There you have undertaken to
lead the willing, and drive the reluctant, by fraud or by force, by
treaty or by the sword and the rifle--all the remnants of the
Seminoles, the Creeks, of the Cherokees and the Choctaws, and of how
many other tribes I cannot now stop to enumerate. In the process of
this violent and heartless operation you have met with all the
resistance which men in so helpless a condition as that of the Indian
tribes can make.

"Of the _immediate_ causes of the war we are not yet fully informed;
but I fear you will find them, like the remoter causes, all attributable
to yourselves.

"It is in the last agonies of a people forcibly torn and driven from the
soil which they had inherited from their fathers, and which your own
example, and exhortations, and instructions, and treaties, had riveted
more closely to their hearts--it is in the last convulsive struggles of
their despair, that this war has originated; and, if it bring some
portion of the retributive justice of Heaven upon our own people, it is
our melancholy duty to mitigate, as far as the public resources of the
national treasury will permit, the distresses of our own kindred and
blood, suffering under the necessary consequences of our own wrong. I
shall vote for the resolution."