And the red man of the forest! the indigenous inhabitant of this western hemisphere! the primative possessor of our native soil! Dispossessed, not without reason, but, perhaps without adequate compensation by our forefathers, of his inheritance, bounded only by the oceans and the lakes; straitened in his hunting grounds, by the necessary and unavoidable progress of civilization and tillage, there was yet ample room left him, in the immeasurable regions of the south and west, for his continual enjoyment of the hunter's state, and even for his own transformation into a tenant of the soil and a tiller of the ground. To this beneficent change of his condition, all the labours, and all the exertions of Washington and of Jefferson had been devoted. The remnants of his allodial right, rescued from the grasp of the Anglo-Saxon planter and farmer, had been secured to him at the price of his surrender of all the rest, by solemn treaties pledging the faith of the nation, and by laws interdicting upon severe penalties the intrusions of the white man upon his domain. In contempt of those treaties, in defiance of those laws, the sovereign state of Georgia extended her jurisdiction over those Indian lands, and lavished in lottery tickets to her people, the cultivated fields, the growing harvests, and the furnished dwellings of the Cherokees; imprisoned in a dungeon the pious missionaries preaching among them the gospel of Christ, and set at nought the solemn ajudication of the Supreme Court of the United States, pronouncing this licensed robbery alike lawless and unconstitutional.

And what in this emergency was the conduct of the executive administration of this Union? Not content with truckling to the usurpations of Georgia, it made itself instrumental to the consummation of her wrong. Not content with abandoning the Indians to their hopeless fate, and leaving unexecuted the sentence of the laws, it forced by an admixture of fraud and violence, upon the whole Cherokee nation, a mock treaty of New Echota, pretending to bind the whole nation to a compact concluded with less than three hundred unauthorized individuals. And when fifteen thousand of this cheated and plundered people complained of this in the humble attitude of petitioners to congress for redress, and when thousands upon thousands of petitioners among our own people, joined in supplications with them, to avert this overwhelming ruin, and redeem our violated faith, a momentary semblance of attention was given to their claims, by a refusal to lay them on the table, carried by a majority of one vote, yet the next day that vote was changed; a reconsideration was moved and carried, and by vote of yeas ans nays, at the motion of a member from Georgia, the whole subject was laid upon the table.

In treatment of the African and the native American races, we have thus subverted the maxims, and degenerated from the virtues of our fathers; and for all this, the last and present administrations are emphatically responsible. The political system of Washington and Jefferson was merciful to the African, and liberal to the native American race. Eternal slavery for mercy, extermination for liberality, were the substitutes of the last administration; and the present chief magistrate can discern no path to glory but in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor."