Such were the conditions obtaining among the Indians west of Missouri and Arkansas in the years immediately antedating the American Civil War; and, from such conditions, it may readily be inferred that the Indians were anything but satisfied with the treatment that had been and was being accorded them. They owed no great debt of gratitude to anybody. They were restless and unhappy among themselves. Their old way of living had been completely disorganized. They had nothing to go upon, so far as their relations with the white men were concerned, to make them hopeful of anything better in the future, rather the reverse. Indeed at the very opening of the year 1860, a year so full of distress to them because of the great drouth[90] that ravaged Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, the worst that had been known in thirty years, there came occasion for a new distrust. Proposals were made to the Creeks,[91] to the Choctaws,[92] and to the Chickasaws to allot their lands in severalty, notwithstanding the fact that one of the inducements offered by President Jackson to get them originally to remove had been, that they should be permitted to hold their land, as they had always held it, in common, forever. The Creeks now replied to the proposals of the Indian Office that they had had experience with individual reservations in their old eastern homes and had good reason to be prejudiced against them. The Indians, one and all, met the proposals with a downright refusal but they did not forget that they had been made, particularly when there came additional cause for apprehension. The cause for apprehension came with the presidential campaign of 1860 and from a passage in Seward's Chicago speech,[93] "The National Idea; Its Perils and Triumphs," expressive of opinions, false to the national trust but favorable to expansion in the direction of the Indian territory, most inopportune, to say the least, and foolish. Seward probably spoke in the enthusiasm of a heated moment; for the obnoxious sentiment, "The Indian territory, also, south of Kansas, must be vacated by the Indians," was very different in its tenor from equally strong expressions in his great Senate speech[94] on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, February 17, 1854. It soon proved, however, easy of quotation by the secessionists in their arguments with the Indians, it being offered by them as incontestable proof that the designs of the incoming administration were, in the highest degree, inimical to Indian treaty rights. At the time of its utterance, the Indians were intensely excited. The poor things had had so many and such bitter experiences with the bad faith of the white people that it took very little to arouse their suspicion. They had been told to contract their domain or to move on so often that they had become quite super-sensitive on the subject of land cessions and removals. Seward's speech was but another instance of idle words proving exceedingly fateful.