signal and inexcusable failures. The laws enacted by congress for the
protection of the rights of the Indians, and to promote their comfort
and civilization, have, in a great variety of cases, remained a dead
letter upon the statute book. The agents of the government have often
proved unfaithful, and have looked much more to their own pecuniary
interests, than to the honest execution of the public trusts confided
to them. Nor is this all. There has ever been found upon the western
frontiers, a band of unprincipled men who have set at defiance the laws
of the United States, debauched the Indians with ardent spirits,
cheated them of their property, and then committed upon them
aggressions marked with all the cruelty and wanton bloodshed which have
distinguished the career of the savage. The history of these
aggressions would fill a volume. It is only necessary to recall to the
mind of the reader, the horrible murder of the Conestoga Indians, in
December 1763, by some Pennsylvanians; the dark tragedy enacted on the
banks of he Muskingum, at a later period, when the Moravian Indians, at
the three villages of Schoenbrun, Salem, and Gnadenhuetten, were first
disarmed and then deliberately tomahawked by Williamson and his
associates; the unprovoked murder of the family of Logan; the
assassination of Bald Eagle, of the gallant and high-souled Cornstalk,
and his son Elinipsico: we need but recall these, from the long
catalogue of similar cases, to satisfy every candid mind, that rapine,
cruelty and a thirst for human blood are not peculiarly the attributes
of the American Indian.

But there are still other causes which have aroused and kept in
activity, the warlike passions of the Indians. They have been
successively subjected to English, Dutch, French and Spanish influence.
The agents of these different powers, as well as the emigrants from
them, either from interest or a spirit of mischievous hostility, have