White settlement

“ It is more reasonable, therefore, to suppose that the whites, not believing that the savage roamers had a legal and inextinguishable claim to the whole or even any part of the territory, thought they were making a generous settlement of any doubt there might be in the case, by bounding a region here and there, and assuring it to the Indians. The pledges of these reservations use the phrase “for ever.” The tendency of modern thought and speculation is to regard nothing as eternal except eternity itself. ”

“ The settlements now in prospect to be made in that large extent of country, from the west side of the Allegany mountains to the Mississippi, on a breadth of four or five hundred miles, would afford a suitable and beneficial means of settlement for many of them among the white people, which would in all probability be as profitable to the negroes as to the new settlers. ”

“ By the end of the century the diminution of the tribes found the pendulum swinging back to open the area to white settlement which had once been reserved to the natives, yet still retaining the recognition of the Indian's right of occupation where tribes survived. With this survey of the problem of the red man's title to land, let us now turn to a consideration of the white man's title and how it was obtained in seventeenth-century Virginia. ”

“ If we seek in a general view of the mode of life and resources of the red men, in some favored localities, to find any radical disadvantage or disablement which put them below all communities of the whites which we call civilized, we can readily convince ourselves of our error by comparing the state of our Indians at the time of the settlement of this continent with that of communities of whites in Europe at the same time. ”

“ Though certain small areas of land in these rich territories are held by whites, the bulk of the country is reserved for the exclusive use and benefit of the natives, and it is not at all likely that any more land will be alienated for purposes of settlement by Europeans. ”

“ And they will solve this problem. It can never be settled, of course, till Southern white men acquiesce in its settlement. They will settle it in righteousness and will accept with gratefulness any suggestion which their fellow countrymen have to offer in a spirit of sympathy and helpfulness. But it may as well be understood that any such exhibition as the President's negro luncheon, which affronts the universal sentiment of the final arbiters of this question, must necessarily put further away the day of settlement. ”

“ When, in 1868, the treaty was framed, the progress of the white settlements westward had hardly, except in a very scattered way, reached the confines of the place selected for the Indian reservation. While this was true, the march of advancing civilization foreshadowed the fact that the wilderness, which lay on all sides of he point selected for the reservation, was destined to be occupied and settled by the white man, hence interfering with the hitherto untrammeled right of occupancy of the Indian. ”

“ In contrast with this the name 'American' is never denied to the Indian, but priority of settlement can hardly be argued in his favor, for by such reasoning the negro has superior claims over some of the 'elect' of the white elements among Americans. Negroes were sold into slavery in Virginia before the landing of the Pilgrims in 1790. The first census of the United States showed 759,208 negroes, and to-day they constitute nearly 13 per cent. of the entire population. ”

“ It might be argued against this plan for the final settlement of the Race Question that it is not only revolutionary but confiscatory in that it seeks to deprive the white citizens of the territory to be created into a Negroland, of their property without their consent. ”

“ It does not bring to mind those prosperous colonies whose lands, surveyed, secured by good legal titles, and freed from danger of savage inroads, have a permanent population busily engaged in founding homes. It takes us rather to the boundaries of the Indian reservations, along which scattered camps and settlements of white men are fringed; to lands which, though legally open for settlement, are constantly menaced by Indians ”

“ In a large number of instances the lands formerly occupied by the Indians have been purchased from them by the Government and thrown open to settlement by white people. The money due for these purchases has in several instances been paid to the Indians, either as tribes or individually, while in other cases it is still held in trust by the Government, and the interest on it used for the benefit of the original occupants of the land. ”

“ Their numbers have fallen off very fast in the face of the extension of the white settlements, partly on account of the fierce wars that have prevailed between them and the colonists, but more in consequence of the inroads of the vices and maladies which they have contracted from the whites. ”

“ Simply the fact that the Indians, finding themselves hemmed in on all sides by fast thickening white settlements, had taken a firm stand that they would give up no more land. So long as they would cede and cede, and grant and grant tract after tract, and had millions of acres still left to cede and grant, the selfishness of white men took no alarm; but once consolidated into an empire, with fixed and inalienable boundaries, powerful, recognized, and determined, the, Cherokee nation would be a thorn in the flesh to her white neighbors. ”

“ The tribes that owned these lands were forced either to remove elsewhere, or to sell their old hunting-grounds to the government for supplies or for an annuity. The tribes that sold, remaining near the settlements to enjoy their annuity, were more to be pitied than those that removed, which were destined to destruction by war. Harrison reported that contact with white settlements never failed to ruin them. ”

“ The principal sufferers on the outskirts of the province were not Quakers, but, as we have noticed, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. Though these venturesome pioneers themselves provoked the hate of the savages, they suffered as common victims of the great conspiracy of the tribes.
An important word, which we meet more frequently than any other in every historic reference to our Indian relations, is that word “Frontiers.” It is used to define a supposed and somewhat imaginary boundary line between the fixed white settlements and territory vacant or still occupied by the Indians. ”

“ The probability is that there has been more of organized and of administrative order in several of the tribes since the coming of the whites than there was before, and that modifications and adaptations of original Indian usages, or a recourse to some wholly new ones, have necessarily followed upon intimacy of relations with the strangers. When the whites wished to make a treaty with a tribe, to obtain a grant of land, or to execute any other like covenant, they would naturally call for such persons among them as had authority, executive and decisive, for acting for the tribe. ”

“ Having reached the conclusion that the right of local tribes to portions of the territory on which the white men found them was the right of actual possession or occupancy for different and unknown terms of time of regions won by conquest and liable at any time to be yielded to a stronger party, another suggestion comes up, which seems to intimate an acknowledgment by the whites of a certain legality in their tenure of the soil by the Indians. ”

“ Further, why do they fill their Plantations with Black People, so unnatural to the Whites, the Proprietors of the different Colonies, when it seems no way difficult to obtain White People to serve free in their stead? ”

“ In time the tribes came, through advancing settlements, to be surrounded by a large and increasing white population, many of the whites entering their districts and living there-some as tenant farmers, stock growers and merchants, and others as mere adventurers. The United States then perceived a need for making a larger use of its power. ”

“ By our last census we had one hundred and fifty whites, and twelve negroes or mulattoes, to each Indian.
We are experiencing, in our joint interests as a nation and in those of a common civilization, the embarrassments attending this system of reservations. The single States and Territories in whose bounds they lie are subjected by them to all sorts of annoyances, complications, and practical evils. It is found to be utterly impossible to restrict the Indians to them. In some treaties a conditional privilege has been covenanted to the occupants of hunting beyond them ”

“ The policy of the United States government has always been, so soon as a State became pretty well settled by the white man, to remove—either by persuasion or force—those Indians who still remained within its limits, to the great North-west Territory. For it is a well-established fact that the contiguity of the two races is advantageous to neither, and is especially injurious to the red man, whose love of “fire-water,” and disposition to confound the rights of meum and tuum, constantly bring him into collision with the settler. ”

“ And this is the ground upon which we of the South place our cherished institutions. We maintain that these justifying circumstances do exist in relation to our institution of negro slavery. They consist in the unfitness of the black race for a condition higher than that of slavery. Our proposition is, that when these two races are brought into contact, the supremacy of the white man must be acknowledged, and his right to govern both races with reference to the happiness of both. This is the principle upon which, until recently, the legislation of all your northern States was founded. ”

“ Thus I answered in 1902, in Southside, Virginia. After further travel, I amend: Negroes do not wish to work for white land-owners; they wish to remain in the South or to return to the South, [Pg 400] as land-owners. They are acquiring considerable property. But, generally speaking, they are thinning out. One may journey miles along Southern railroads and see but few in fields where once were thousands. In Northern cities and pleasure resorts negroes increase. The race problem is broadening, changing territory. ”

“ The white races are but one third of the population of the globe,—or one of them to two of us,—and it cannot much longer continue that two thirds will passively submit to the universal domination of this one third. And it is notorious that the only progress made in territorial domain, in the last three centuries, by the whites, has been a usurpation and encroachment on the rights and native soil of some of the colored races. ”

“ The North believed that the Negro was, or might be made, the actual equal of the White, and that the South not only rejected this dogma, but, further, did not accept emancipation with sincerity, and would do all in its power to nullify the work which had already been accomplished, and hold the Negroes in quasi-servitude. The South held that the Negro was not the equal of the white, and further held that, suddenly released from slavery, he must, to prevent his becoming a burden and a menace, be controlled and compelled to work. ”

“ Confining ourselves to the territory which became the United States, we may say that the first attempt was made to enslave the Indians, and when this failed to work, white people were imported from Europe as chattel slaves. All through the colonial period this importation continued with its consequent effects on the social and political life of the colonies. Most people will be surprised to learn that the first Fugitive Slave Law was framed, not in the south, but in the north, and was made not for black but for white laborers. ”

“ We have made with them solemn covenants, pledging to them their territory as reservations, and we have broken these covenants as wisps of straw. We have agreed to defend their lands against encroachments by the whites; and then when settlers, surveyors, miners, and railroad engineers have invaded them, we have sent our armies to protect, not the Indians, but the white men. Our national Government has made treaties with tribes, reserving to them territories that soon after were found to lie within the bounds of newly created States, which at once claimed supreme rights of domain. ”

“ In the first place, the colonies of the North were settled by people from the lower and middle classes, who had been accustomed to working for themselves and who thus had no use for slaves, while the South was settled largely by adventurers, who had never worked and who looked upon labor as dishonorable. In the second place, the North had a temperate climate in which any man could safely work, while the heat of the South was so intense that a white man endangered his life by working in it, whereas the Negro was protected by facility of acclimation. ”

“ In the original design and planning of these reservations — except in the case of such town-lots as Massachusetts assigned to the Indians under training, and the circumscribed territory which New York set apart for the Six Nations; in fact, in all the reservations for the Indians made by our Government — the intention was to leave the natives free to their own habits and mode of life; to subsist, if they pleased, without labor, by hunting and fishing; keeping aloof from the whites, or maintaining traffic with them in peltries. ”

“ The men who were engaged in tearing unoffending Africans from their native home were some time learning that this colony was at this time a ready market for their helpless victims. Whatever feeling or scruple, if such ever existed, the colonists had in reference to the subject of dealing in the slave-trade, was destroyed at conception by the golden hopes of large gains. The latitude, the products of the soil, the demand for labor, the custom of the indenture of white servants, were abundant reasons why the Negro should be doomed to bondage for life. ”