Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/184

 party spirit on these varied issues were brought to a focus in the canvass for the Presidential election, which occurred in the same autumn as the election of Houston to the House of Representatives.

From the earliest settlement of the country opinion was divided as to the possibility of inspiring the roving Indian tribes with a love for civilized life, so that the two races, the red and the white, might dwell together in quiet side by side. The religious spirit, seen to be effective in the efforts of John Eliot in Massachusetts, of William Penn in Pennsylvania, of James Edward Oglethorpe and of the Wesleys in Georgia, maintained this doctrine: that the Indians, like the red races who peopled India and China, might be won over to the habits of industry and culture found among the people of Mexico held in subjection a century earlier by the Spaniards; as had been tested also by Jesuit missionaries already in the French provinces. On the other hand, as Bancroft has traced, the spirit of secular appropriation brought the white race into constant competition with the Indians in every experiment at agriculture; the superior race could not amalgamate or live in society with the inferior; some in Massachusetts, as well as in Virginia, favored the enslaving or extirpation of the Indian tribes on the precedent of the Israelites among the tribes of Canaan; and the result proved that constant war on the border and constant forcible removal of the Indians westward was "the law" that would rule. No man in the United States was better prepared by his wide experience to judge wisely on this question than Houston, and no more magnanimous spirit had ever been shown than Houston had exhibited, first in his intercourse as an agent's clerk, then as a soldier, then again as an army agent among them. His long apprenticeship among the Chickasaws in Western Tennessee before his enlistment as a soldier under Jackson, and his detail as a lieutenant after the war to serve as military agent among the Seminoles of Georgia, were reminiscences always fresh and fragrant in his after-life; and no man more than Houston appreciated the virtues of the Indian character which were to be fostered, and their vices which were to be forcibly restrained. This was the earliest question before the American people, and it will be one of the last to call forth balanced judgment and modified action. At the period of Houston's entrance into the House of Representatives there were two fields for the practical application of these principles. In the West the Indian tribes had consented to removal to their new territory west of the Mississippi, but two causes still created difficulty; first, disputes among the Indian tribes themselves as to their several allotments and as to mutual