Thirty Years' View (Vol. 2 of 2): or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850Benton, Thomas Hart
History
Thirty Years' View (Vol. 2 of 2): or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850
Benton, Thomas Hart
United States -- Politics and government -- 1815-1861
public money; pursued into the detail, and these expenditures will
be found to have been made for great national objects--objects which
no man would have undone, to get back the money, even if it was
possible to get back the money by undoing the objects. No one, for
example, would be willing to bring back the Creeks, the Cherokees,
the Choctaws, and Chickasaws into Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia,
Tennessee and North Carolina, even if the tens of millions which it
has cost to remove them could be got back by that means; and so of
the other expenditures: yet these eternal croakers about expense are
blaming the government for these expenditures.
Sir, I have gone over the answers, which I proposed to make to the
accusations of the senators from New Jersey and South Carolina. I
have shown them to be totally mistaken in all their assumptions
and imputations. I have shown that there was no fraud upon the
Indians in the treaty at Fort Gibson--that the identical chiefs
who made that treaty have since been the hostile chiefs--that the
assassination and massacre of an agent, two government expresses,
an artillery officer, five citizens, and one hundred and twelve men
of Major Dade's command, caused the war--that our troops are not
subject to censure for inefficiency--that General Jesup has been
wrongfully denounced upon this floor--and that even the expense of
the Florida war, resting as it does in figures and in documents, has
been vastly overstated to produce effect upon the public mind. All
these things I have shown; and I conclude with saying that cost,
and time, and loss of men, are all out of the question; that, for
outrages so wanton and so horrible as those which occasioned this
war, the national honor requires the most ample amends; and the
national safety requires a future guarantee in prosecuting this war
to a successful close, and completely clearing the peninsula of
Florida of all the Indians that are upon it.
CHAPTER XX.
RESUMPTION OF SPECIE PAYMENTS BY THE NEW YORK BANKS.
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