fail to excite
commiseration, it may reasonably be concluded that the perpetual
possession of this country by the aborigines would have been
incompatible with the designs of Providence in promoting the welfare of
mankind. A productive soil could make little return to a people so
destitute of the art and of the implements of agriculture, and
habitually indolent. Navigable rivers, the natural channels of commerce,
would have failed in their purpose had they borne no freight but that of
the rude canoe; primeval forests would have slept in gloomy inutility,
where the axe was unknown; and the mineral and metallic treasures of the
earth would have remained forever entombed. In Virginia, since the
aboriginal population was only about one to the square mile, they could
not be justly held occupants of the soil. However well-founded their
title to those narrow portions which they actually occupied, yet it was
found impossible to take possession of the open country, to which the
savages had no just claim, without also exterminating them from those
particular spots that rightfully belonged to them. This inevitable
necessity actuated the pious Puritans of Plymouth as well as the less
scrupulous settlers of Jamestown; and force was resorted to in all the
Anglo-American settlements except in that effected, at a later day, by
the gentle and sagacious Penn. The unrelenting hostility of the savages,
their perfidy and vindictive implacability, made sanguinary measures
necessary. In Virginia, the first settlers, a small company, in an
unknown wilderness, were repeatedly assaulted, so that resistance and
retaliation were demanded by the natural law of self-defence. Nor were
these settlers voluntary immigrants; the bulk of them had been sent
over, without regard to their choice, by the king or the Virginia
Company. Nor did the king or the company authorize any injustice or
cruelty to be exercised toward the natives; on the contrary, the
colonists, however unfit, were enjoined to introduce the Christian
religion among them, and to propitiate their good will by a humane and
lenient treatment. Smith and his comrades, so far from being encouraged
to maltreat the Indians, were often hampered in making a necessary
self-defence, by a fear of offending an arbitrary government at home.

It has been remarked by Mr. Jefferson,[168:A] that it is not so general
a truth, as has been supposed, that the lands of Virginia were taken
from the natives by conqu