Then succeeded the victory of Slavery, and the reduction to hopeless bondage of multitudes who had been for generations free, on claim of pretended descendants of imaginary owners, by the decision of petty government-officials, without trial or real examination.  More than five hundred persons, some of them recent fugitives, but mostly men born free, were thus reduced to slavery at a cost to us all of forty millions of dollars, or eighty thousand dollars for each recovered slave!  Then comes their removal to the Cherokee lands, west of Arkansas, under the pledge of the faith of the nation, plighted by General Jessup, its authorized agent, that they should be sent to the West, and settled in a village separate from the Seminole Indians, and that, in the mean time, they should be protected, should not be separated, “nor any of them be sold to white men or others.”  This, however, was not a legitimate issue of a war waged solely for the reduction of these exiles to slavery; and so the doubts of President Polk as to the construction of this treaty were solved by Mr. John Y. Mason, of Virginia, who was sandwiched in between two Free-State Attorney-Generals for this single piece of dirty work, (of which transaction see a most curious account, pp. 328-9 of this book,) and who enlightened the Presidential mind by the information, that, though the exiles were entitled to their freedom, under the treaty, and had a right to remain in the towns assigned to them, “the Executive could not in any manner interfere to protect them!”

The bordering Creeks, who by long slave-holding had sunk to the level of the whites around them, longed to seize on these valuable neighbors, and, indeed, they claimed rights of property in them as fugitives in fact from themselves.  The exiles were assured by the President that they “had the right to remain in their villages, free from all interference or interruption from the Creeks.”  Trusting to the plighted word of the Head of the Nation, they built their huts and planted their ground, and began again their little industries and enjoyments.

But the sight of so many able-bodied negroes, belonging only to themselves, and setting an evil example to the slaves in the spectacle of an independent colony of blacks, was too tempting and too irritating to be resisted.  A slave-dealer appeared amongst the Creeks and offered to pay one hundred dollars for every Floridian exile they would seize and deliver to him,—­he taking the risk of the title.  Two hundred armed Creek warriors made a foray into the colony and seized all they could secure.  They were repulsed, but carried their prisoners with them and delivered them to the tempter, receiving the stipulated pieces of silver for their reward.  The Seminole agent had the prisoners brought before the nearest Arkansas judge by Habeas Corpus, and the whole matter was reviewed by this infamous magistrate, who overruled the opinion of the Attorney-General