But you told me, that when you first read my letter, you held up your hands, and exclaimed, “What! is the man a Traitor?” And you said that not one of my friends in Little Rock, and I had, you said, a great many, pretended to justify the letter.  You have never found a friend of mine, or an indifferent person, silly enough to think, like you, that it savored of treason.  It is only rarely one meets a man so scantily furnished with sense as to misunderstand and pervert what is written in plain English.  I was vindicating myself, and still more the Government, and persuading the Indians to remain loyal, notwithstanding the wrongs they had endured.  I, too, was an officer; and my acts had been the acts of the Government. My promises to them were its promises.  The procuring of supplies by me, was its act; and when, reaching or not reaching the frontier, the supplies were like the unlucky traveler, who journeyed from Jerusalem to Jericho, then the Government ceased to act, and unlicensed outrage took its place.  And, further, my act was the act of the Government, when I told the Indians why they had not received their supplies and money, and vindicated that Government at the expense of those who were guilty of the act; and who having done it and reaped the profit, should not be heard to object that all the world should know what they did, nor be allowed to escape the responsibility of all the consequences.

If to tell the Indians that other Generals had wrongfully stopped

their supplies, in any degree resembled Treason, that could only be so, because it was treason to do the act.  It cannot be wrong to make known what it was right and proper to do.  The truth is, that the acts done were outrages, which it was desirable for the doers to conceal from the Indians.  I refused to become a party to those outrages, by concealing them.  I would not agree in advance to be silent, when you should repeat and improve on those outrages, and consummate what had been so felicitously begun.

I do not doubt that there are assassins wearing uniforms, who are knaves enough to pretend to read my letter as you do, and to see in it the desire of a disappointed man to be revenged, even by the ruin of his country.  Power always has its pimps and catamites.  These would no doubt gladly have made my letter the means of murdering me by that devilish engine of Military despotism, a Military commission, that is ordered to preserve no records.  You, I think really look upon it with alarm.  It is, no doubt, very desirable to you, that the blame of losing the Indian Country, which, if not already a fact accomplished, is a fact inevitable, should be made to fall upon me.  You, as the pliant and useful implement of Gen. Hindman, are the cause of this loss; and you know I can prove it.  You and he have left nothing undone, that could