them a happy, prosperous people. I
have endeavored to impress upon them my own solemn convictions of the
duties and powers of the General Government in relation to the State
authorities. For the justice of the laws passed by the States within the
scope of their reserved powers they are not responsible to this
Government. As individuals we may entertain and express our opinions of
their acts, but as a Government we have as little right to control them
as we have to prescribe laws for other nations.

With a full understanding of the subject, the Choctaw and the Chickasaw
tribes have with great unanimity determined to avail themselves of the
liberal offers presented by the act of Congress, and have agreed to
remove beyond the Mississippi River. Treaties have been made with them,
which in due season will be submitted for consideration. In negotiating
these treaties they were made to understand their true condition, and
they have preferred maintaining their independence in the Western
forests to submitting to the laws of the States in which they now
reside. These treaties, being probably the last which will ever be made
with them, are characterized by great liberality on the part of the
Government. They give the Indians a liberal sum in consideration of
their removal, and comfortable subsistence on their arrival at their new
homes. If it be their real interest to maintain a separate existence,
they will there be at liberty to do so without the inconveniences and
vexations to which they would unavoidably have been subject in Alabama
and Mississippi.

Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country,
and Philanthropy has been long busily employed in devising means to
avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one
by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth. To follow
to the tomb the last of his race and to tread on the graves of extinct
nations excite melancholy reflections. But true philanthropy reconciles
the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one
generation to make room for another. In the monuments and fortresses of
an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we
behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated or
has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes. Nor is
there anything in this which, upon a comprehensive view of the general
interests of the human race, is to be regre