This is no exaggerated picture.  Fraud, oppression and violence, have characterized our intercourse with the Indians, and it is in vain to hope for any amelioration of their savage condition, so long as an intercourse of this kind is permitted.  In the very nature of things, the plan of civilizing the Indians, by forming a confederacy of them, beyond the limits of the United States, will prove unsuccessful, unless they are surrounded by a cordon of military posts, and the whites are stayed, by physical force, from entering their territories for any purpose whatever.

It is to this intercourse that the Indian wars, which have so frequently caused the blood of the white and the red man to flow in torrents, upon our frontier, are mainly to be attributed.  It has been asserted, even by those who claim to be the grave historians of this unfortunate people, that these wars are almost without exception, the result of that cruelty and insatiable thirst for blood which belong to the Indian character.  One of these writers, the Rev. Timothy Flint, in his “Indian Wars of the West,” says, “We affirm an undoubting belief, from no unfrequent, nor inconsiderable means of observation, that aggression has commenced, in the account current of mutual crime, as a hundred to one, on the part of the Indians.”  We do not question the sincerity of this belief, but we do question, entirely, the correctness of the conclusion to which the writer brings his mind:  we affirm without hesitation, that it is a conclusion that cannot be sustained by testimony.  If the individual making it, had looked less superficially at the case, and had gone to the primary causes that have produced the bloody collisions between his countrymen and the Indians, he could never have made so great a mistake as the one he has committed in the paragraph quoted above.  If kindness, good faith and honesty of dealing, had marked our social, political and commercial intercourse with the Indians, few, if any of these bloody wars would have occurred; and these people, instead of being debased by our intercourse with them, would have been improved and elevated in the scale of civilization.  The history of the early settlement of Pennsylvania and its illustrious founder, affords the strongest testimony on this point.  The justice, benevolence and kindness which marked the conduct of Penn towards the Indians, shielded his infant colony from aggression, and won for him personally, a generous affection, that would have been creditable to any race of people.

Upon this point it has been well and forcibly remarked by a philanthropic writer,[17] of our country, that,