admitted that the settlement could not have taken place save after war.  The whites might be to blame in some cases, and the Indians in others; but under no combination of circumstances was it possible to obtain possession of the country save as the result of war, or of a peace obtained by the fear of war.  Any peace which did not surrender the land was sure in the end to be broken by the whites; and a peace which did surrender the land would be broken by the Indians.  The history of Tennessee during the dozen years from 1785 to 1796 offers an admirable case in point.  In 1785 the United States Commissioners concluded the treaty of Hopewell with the Indians, and solemnly guaranteed them certain lands.  The whites contemptuously disregarded this treaty and seized the lands which it guaranteed to the Indians, being themselves the aggressors, and paying no heed to the plighted word of the Government, while the Government itself was too weak to make the frontiersmen keep faith.  The treaties of New York and of Holston with the Creeks and Cherokees in 1790 and 1791 were fairly entered into by fully authorized representatives of the tribes.  Under them, for a valuable consideration, and of their own motion, the Creeks and Cherokees solemnly surrendered all title to what is now the territory of Tennessee, save to a few tracts mostly in the west and southeast; and much of the land which was thus ceded they had ceded before.  Nevertheless, the peace thus solemnly made was immediately violated by the Indians themselves.  The whites were not the aggressors in any way, and, on the contrary, thanks to the wish of the United States authorities for peace, and to the care with which Blount strove to carry out the will of the Federal Government, they for a long time refrained even from retaliating when injured; yet the Indians robbed and plundered them even more freely than when the whites themselves had been the aggressors and had broken the treaty.

    Confusion of the Treaties.

Before making the treaty of Holston Blount had been in correspondence with Benjamin Hawkins, a man who had always been greatly interested in Indian affairs.  He was a prominent politician in North Carolina, and afterwards for many years agent among the Southern Indians.  He had been concerned in several of the treaties.  He warned Blount that since the treaty of Hopewell the whites, and not the Indians, had been the aggressors; and also warned him not to try to get too much land from the Indians, or to take away too great an extent of their hunting grounds, which would only help the great land companies, but to be content with the thirty-fifth parallel for a southern boundary. [Footnote:  Blount MSS., Hawkins to Blount, March 10, 1791.] Blount paid much heed to this advice, and by the treaty of Holston he obtained from the Indians little more than what the tribes had previously granted; except that they confirmed to the whites the country upon which the pioneers were