Digital
History>eXplorations>Indian
Removal>Thomas Jefferson Defines
American Indian Policy>President
Thomas Jefferson to William Henry Harrison
President
Thomas Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, Governor of the Indiana
Territory, 1803
You
will receive from the Secretary of War … from time to
time information and instructions as to our Indian affairs.
These communications being for the public records, are restrained
always to particular objects and occasions; but this letter
being unofficial and private, I may with safety give you a more
extensive view of our policy respecting the Indians, that you
may the better comprehend the parts dealt out to you in detail
through the official channel, and observing the system of which
they make a part, conduct yourself in unison with it in cases
where you are obliged to act without instruction. Our system
is to live in perpetual peace with the Indians, to cultivate
an affectionate attachment from them, by everything just and
liberal which we can do for them within the bounds of reason,
and by giving them effectual protection against wrongs from
our own people. The decrease of game rendering their subsistence
by hunting insufficient, we wish to draw them to agriculture,
to spinning and weaving. The latter branches they take up with
great readiness, because they fall to the women, who gain by
quitting the labors of the field for, those which are exercised
within doors. When they withdraw themselves to the culture of
a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them
are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pare them
off from time to time in exchange for necessaries for their
farms and families. To promote this disposition to exchange
lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries,
which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading
uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals
among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts
get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing
to lop them off by a cession of lands. At our trading houses,
too, we mean to sell so low as merely to repay us cost and charges,
so as neither to lessen or enlarge our capital. This is what
private traders cannot do, for they must gain; they will consequently
retire from the competition, and we shall thus get clear of
this pest without giving offence or umbrage to the Indians.
In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and
approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate
with us a citizens or the United States, or remove beyond the
Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their
history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course
of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their
fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now
so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand
to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed
from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy
enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole
country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi,
as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others,
and a furtherance of our final consolidation.
|