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[104] Mr. Adams, to be held good against him not only, but all future “ Yankee” and “ Puritan” aspirants to the Presidency.

General Jackson was chosen President in 1828, receiving more than two-thirds of the Electoral votes, including those of all the Slave States but Delaware and a part of Maryland. In Georgia, there were two Jackson Electoral tickets run, but none for Adams. And the first Annual Message of the new President gave the Indians due notice that Georgia had not so voted from blind impulse — that their dearest rights, their most cherished possessions, were among her “spoils of victory.” In this Message, the solemn obligations which our Government had volunteered to assume, in treaty after treaty with the Creeks and Cherokees, were utterly ignored, and the rights and possessions of the Indians dealt with precisely as if no such treaties had ever existed! Georgia had herself, through her citizens, participated in negotiating, and, through her Senators, united in ratifying those treaties; yet not only was she held at liberty to disobey and trample on them, but the United States was regarded as equally absolved, by the convenient fiction of State Sovereignty, from all liability to maintain and enforce them! No one could deny that we had solemnly engaged, by repeated treaties, to protect the Indians in the undisturbed use and enjoyment forever of the lands which we had admitted to be, and marked out as, theirs. No one could deny that we had obtained large cessions of valuable lands by these treaties. No one doubted that Georgia had urged us to make these treaties, and had eagerly appropriated the lands thus obtained by the Union, and passed directly over to her: but then, Georgia was a sovereign State, and entitled to do as she liked with all the lands within her borders, and all the people living thereon, no matter if in flagrant violation of the laws and treaties of the United States! And the new President did not scruple to assert and reiterate the untruth that the Creeks and Cherokees respectively were attempting to “erect an independent government within the limits of Georgia and Alabama,” ringing all possible changes on the falsehood, and gravely quoting from the Constitution that “No new State shall be formed or erected within the limits of any other State,” as precluding the maintenance by the Creeks and Cherokees of their governments in territories which they had possessed and governed long before Georgia had been colonized, or the name Alabama invented.

This deliberate and flagrant perversion of the question to be decided was persisted in through several pages of the Message. Says the President:

Actuated by this view of the subject, I informed the Indians inhabiting parts of Georgia and Alabama that their attempt to establish an independent government would not be countenanced by the Executive of the United States, and advised them to emigrate beyond the Mississippi, or submit to the laws of those States.

What the Indians demanded was simply that the portion of their immemorial possessions which they had reserved for their own use and enjoyment in making liberal cessions to our Government, should still be left to them — that they should be protected

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