William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 1

[316] the great Father in Washington, who takes away his own lands and forests, made over to him by treaty, in exchange for other lands and forests, to be his own, according to Indian usages, “ as long as grain grows and water runs,” should give the Black man so many rights and privileges, that he is everywhere equal, in many places superior, to the White men. Creeks and Cherokees give up the puzzle. In Taliquah, chief camp of the Cherokees nation, a little sheet of news is printed by a mixed blood editor, from which I cut this paragraph — a summary of the Red Question, as the matters strike an educated Cherokee:

“ As a people we are not prepared for American citizenship. Not that we are not sufficiently intelligent, or honest, or industrious, or lack much of any of those substantial qualities which go to make a person fit to be free anywhere. But that we have not that training in and experience of those arts of guile which a condition of freedom authorizes, if it does not encourage, to be employed against the unsuspecting-both being equally free to cheat and be cheated — as a national right.”