Meanwhile difficulties arose in performance of the terms of the treaty between England and the United States.  They appear to have originated in a dispute in regard to an article contained in the treaty, providing that the British army should not carry away with them any negroes or other property belonging to the American inhabitants.  In consequence of what they deemed an infraction of this article, the Virginians refused to comply with another, which stipulated for the repeal of acts prohibiting the collection of debts due to British subjects.  The British, on the other hand, refused to evacuate the western posts till this article was complied with.  It was natural that the intercourse which had always existed between the Indians and the garrisons of these posts, during the period they had acted as allies, should continue, and it did.

In the unwritten history of the difficulties of the United States Government with the Indian tribes within her established boundaries, nothing appears clearer than this truth:  that the fierce and sanguinary resistance of the aborigines to the encroachments of the Anglo-Americans has ever been begun and continued more through the instigations of outlawed white men, who had sought protection among them from the arm of the law or the knife of individual vengeance, and been adopted into their tribes, than from the promptings of their own judgments, their disregard of death, their thirst for the blood of their oppressors, or their love of country.[46]

That their sense of wrong has at all times been keen, their hate deadly, and their bravery great, is a fact beyond dispute; and that they have prized highly their old hunting-grounds, and felt a warm and lively attachment to their beautiful village-sites, and regarded with especial veneration the burial-places of their fathers, their whole history attests; but of their own weakness in war, before the arms and numbers of their enemies, they must have been convinced at a very early period:  and they were neither so dull in apprehension, nor so weak in intellect, as not soon to have perceived the utter hopelessness, and felt the mad folly, of a continued contest with their invaders.  Long before the settlement of the whites upon this continent, the Indians had been subject to bloody and exterminating wars among themselves; and such conflicts had generally resulted in the flight of the weaker party toward the West, and the occupancy of their lands by the conquerors.  Many of the tribes had a tradition among them, and regarded it as their unchangeable destiny, that they were to journey from the rising to the setting sun, on their way to the bright waters and the green forests of the “Spirit Land;” and the working out of this destiny seems apparent, if not in the location, course, and character of the tumult and other remains of the great aboriginal nations of whom even tradition furnishes no account, certainly in what we know of the history of the tribes found on the Atlantic coast by the first European settlers.