The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 6 (of 9): Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and PrivateJefferson, Thomas
History
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 6 (of 9): Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private
Jefferson, Thomas
United States -- Politics and government -- 1775-1783; United States -- Politics and government -- 1783-1865
the bearer to me in the Elysian fields fifty years hence.
You know, my friend, the benevolent plan we were pursuing here for the
happiness of the aboriginal inhabitants in our vicinities. We spared
nothing to keep them at peace with one another. To teach them agriculture
and the rudiments of the most necessary arts, and to encourage industry
by establishing among them separate property. In this way they would
have been enabled to subsist and multiply on a moderate scale of landed
possession. They would have mixed their blood with ours, and been
amalgamated and identified with us within no distant period of time. On
the commencement of our present war, we pressed on them the observance
of peace and neutrality, but the interested and unprincipled policy of
England has defeated all our labors for the salvation of these unfortunate
people. They have seduced the greater part of the tribes within our
neighborhood, to take up the hatchet against us, and the cruel massacres
they have committed on the women and children of our frontiers taken by
surprise, will oblige us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive
them to new seats beyond our reach. Already we have driven their patrons
and seducers into Montreal, and the opening season will force them to
their last refuge, the walls of Quebec. We have cut off all possibility
of intercourse and of mutual aid, and may pursue at our leisure whatever
plan we find necessary to secure ourselves against the future effects
of their savage and ruthless warfare. The confirmed brutalization, if
not the extermination of this race in our America, is therefore to form
an additional chapter in the English history of the same colored man in
Asia, and of the brethren of their own color in Ireland, and wherever else
Anglo-mercantile cupidity can find a two-penny interest in deluging the
earth with human blood. But let us turn from the loathsome contemplation
of the degrading effects of commercial avarice.
That their Arrowsmith should have stolen your Map of Mexico, was in the
piratical spirit of his country. But I should be sincerely sorry if our
Pike has made an ungenerous use of your candid communications here; and
the more so as he died in the arms of victory gained over the enemies of
his country. Whatever he did was on a principle of enlarging knowledge,
and not for filthy shillings and pence of which he made none from that
work. If what he has borrowed has any effect it will be to excite an
appeal in his readers from his defective information to the copious
volumes of it with which you have enriched the world. I am sorry he
omitted even to acknowledge the source of his information. It has been
an oversight, and not at all in the spirit of his generous nature. Let
me solicit your forgiveness then of a deceased hero, of an honest and
zealous patriot, who lived and died for his country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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