interest by a new compact.  In the preference dictated by the nature of our institutions and by the sentiments of justice and humanity which the occasion requires for measures of peace the treaty herewith transmitted has been concluded, and is submitted to the decision of the Senate.  After exhausting every effort in our power to obtain the acquiescence of the Creek Nation to the treaty of the 12th of February, I entertained for some time the hope that their assent might at least have been given to a new treaty, by which all their lands within the State of Georgia should have been ceded.  This has also proved impracticable, and although the excepted portion is of comparatively small amount and importance, I have assented to its exception so far as to place it before the Senate only from a conviction that between it and a resort to the forcible expulsion of the Creeks from their habitations and lands within the State of Georgia there was no middle term.

The deputation with which this treaty has been concluded consists of the principal chiefs of the nation—­able not only to negotiate but to carry into effect the stipulations to which they have agreed.  There is a deputation also here from the small party which undertook to contract for the whole nation at the treaty of the 12th of February, but the number of which, according to the information collected by General Gaines, does not exceed 400.  They represent themselves, indeed, to be far more numerous, but whatever their number may be their interests have been provided for in the treaty now submitted.  Their subscriptions to it would also have been received but for unreasonable pretensions raised by them after all the arrangements of the treaty had been agreed upon and it was actually signed.  Whatever their merits may have been in the facility with which they ceded all the lands of their nation within the State of Georgia, their utter inability to perform the engagements which they so readily contracted and the exorbitancy of their demands when compared with the inefficiency of their own means of performance leave them with no claims upon the United States other than of impartial and rigorous justice.

In referring to the impressions under which I ratified the treaty of the 12th of February last, I do not deem it necessary to decide upon the propriety of the manner in which it was negotiated.  Deeply regretting the recriminations and recriminations to which these events have given rise, I believe the public interest will best be consulted by discarding them altogether from the discussion of the subject.  The great body of the Creek Nation inflexibly refuse to acknowledge or to execute that treaty.  Upon this ground it will be set aside, should the Senate advise and consent to the ratification of that now communicated, without looking back to the means by which the other was effected.  And in the adjustment of the terms of the present treaty I have been peculiarly anxious to dispense a measure of great liberality to both parties of the Creek Nation, rather than to extort from them a bargain of which the advantages on our part could only be purchased by hardship on theirs.