Excerpt from Speeches on the Passage of the Bill for the Removal of the Indians: Delivered in the Congress of the United States, April and May, 1830
From the first settlement of North America by Englishmen, it has been the practice to obtain Indian lands through the medium of treaties or voluntary purchases. In a few cases, lands were wrested from the original possessors in war; but the colonists never avowed the desire of conquest as a justifiable cause of war.
Though nearly all the parts of the United States, which are now inhabited by whites, were purchased from Indians, yet it does not follow that undue measures were not frequently resorted to, in order to induce a sale. Among these measures, unreasonable importunity deserves to be reckoned. New lands were obtained more rapidly than the necessities of the whites demanded; and the eagerness, with which acquisitions of territory were made from the Indians, naturally caused a good deal of apprehension in their minds.
As the British power on this continent increased, the claims and rights of the Indians were generally admitted. No pretensions were made to the right of taking their land from them without their consent. If they sold any part of their territory, they were required to sell it to the government, or the validity of the sale was not acknowledged by the British tribunals. This was the state of things at the commencement of the revolutionary war.
As soon as the Continental Congress began to act as the organ of the United States, (that is, as the organ of a nation which had just sprung into existence,) measures were taken to conciliate the favor of the Indians. They were addressed as independent sovereignties. They were entreated to remain neutral. Their territorial rights were guarantied to them; and they were dealt with, in all respects, as capable of making treaties, and of retaining forever their original rights of territory and government.
After the peace of 1783, the Confederated States entered into treaties with the large south-western tribes, the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws and Chickasaws. In this manner boundaries were fixed, and an implicit guaranty of territory was given. At the adoption of the Federal Constitution, all these treaties were confirmed and ratified not by the nation merely, as a whole, but by each State, as it performed the solemn act of coming into the Union.
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