compassion of his nature, he desired, in the accomplishment of this fate, that no act of national injustice to them should stain the nation’s escutcheon, and determined to signalize this desire in every act of his when giving form and shape to national policy.  He had generously lent a listening ear to the protests of the chiefs, seconded by that of their agent, and sincerely believed the treaty had been effected by fraud, and was wrong and oppressive, and, therefore, he opposed its execution, and was the main instrument in forming a new one.  The draft of this was from his own pen, and he was solicitous that it should supersede the old one, as an expression of the Indians’ desire.

Mr. Adams was, equally with Mr. Clay, opposed to the treaty as ratified, though, as was his constitutional duty, he had sent the instrument for the action of the Senate.  In heart he was opposed to any treaty which would remove the aborigines from this territory at this time, and, in consequence of the action of Georgia, it was anticipated that, at no very distant day, the entire Indian population east of the Mississippi River, in the South, would be removed, unless some policy of the Government should be adopted which would prevent it; and those of the North, who felt desirous of crippling the territorial progress of the South, and, of consequence, her augmentation of population, supposed the most effectual means of accomplishing this would be to educate and Christianize the Indian.  To do this, they insisted he must remain upon the territory he now occupied.  This would bring him into immediate contact with the civilized white, where he could be most readily approached by missionaries and schoolmasters, and be instructed by the force of example.  At the same time, he was to remain under the sole protection of the United States Government, without any of the privileges of civil government to be exercised as a citizen of the United States or the State upon whose soil he was located.  This was ennobled as the sentiment of Christian benevolence, while its real intention was to withhold the land from the occupancy of the people of Georgia, and in so much retard the growth and increase of the white population of the State.  To carry out this scheme, missionary establishments sprang up among the Indians in every part of the South, but especially within the limits of the State of Georgia, filled with Northern fanatics, who employed themselves most actively in prejudicing the minds of the savages against the people who were their neighbors, and preparing them to refuse to treat for the sale of any of their territory.

It has ever been the practice of the Puritan to propagate the vilest heresies, and for the vilest purposes, under the name of philanthropy and religion.  It has burned its enemy at the stake, as, assembled around, they sang psalms, and sanctified the vilest cruelties with the name of God’s vengeance.  It was their great prototype, Cotton Mather, who blasphemously proclaimed, after the most inhuman massacre of several hundred Indians, that they, the Puritans of Massachusetts, “had sent, as a savory scent to the nostrils of God, two hundred or more of the reeking souls of the godless heathen.”