Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/522

502 and other agents was supreme. After the bloody massacre at the Cedars, where Indians under a British officer murdered several American prisoners, Congress took active measures to enlist and employ and pay the natives who were willing to enter our service, and authorized Washingt e o n to follow up these measures. These Indians were to receive the same pay as our own soldiers, with extra bounties for British prisoners. Yet we had through the whole war but very little, if any, help from the forest warriors. Rather did our frontiers suffer devastation and many a shuddering horror from their insidious onsets, as they fought from a love of cruelty, and their ferocity was fed by the hope of plunder. We gave the British the odium for instigating these atrocities, and rage on that score helped to embitter our strife as it proceeded. Happily, among the causes of self-reproach for the treatment of the Indians by our Government, we have not to add that of ingratitude for any good service done us in the war, either that of the Revolution or that of 1812. This ingratitude was charged severely upon the British.

Before Congress had taken the steps just mentioned, the subject of employing the Indians had been, as before stated, under warm discussion in Parliament. It was known that the ministry had authorized their generals here to engage their aid. Burke, in denouncing the act as criminal, said that while the ministry had made such alliances through the whole country, the Americans had only sought from the Indians promises of neutrality, which British officers were bribing them to break. He thought, even, that the Americans would be more justified in employing their savage countrymen against armed and trained soldiers than the British were in goading them against poor defenceless men, women, and children in their scattered homes. Lord George Germain, the war minister, insisted that we had already solicited and secured Indian helpers in our rebellion, and that it was not