Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/523

Rh in their nature to remain idle and neutral when a fight was going on. Lord North admitted that the employment of Indians was bad, but affirmed that it was unavoidable.

Previous to the confederation of the thirteen colonies each one of them had assumed control of the natives within its bounds, either under instructions from the Crown, or by its own local legislatures. Our records, therefore, contain a long series of stipulations, provisional arrangements, and so-called treaties made with one or more tribes, disposing of troublesome issues as they rose, generally by a bargain, the consideration in which was either paid down or made a matter of annuities for a longer or a shorter period. When the English took possession of New York, over the Dutch, in 1664, they made a covenant with the Five Nations, which continued without a breach substantially down to our Revolution. The Indians asked to have the Duke of York's arms set upon their “castles.” But this was not so much for their love of the English as from their fear of the French. On this ground it certainly might have seemed that if either the mother country or the colonists were entitled to such benefit as might come from an Indian alliance, the former party was entitled to it. The colonists would have been more than content with the absolute neutrality of the savages; but as this could not be secured, the result was but one more of the aggravations of what was so often spoken of as “the unnatural quarrel between mother and daughter.” Candor will urge, and will scarcely grudge to allow, in a comparison of the treatment of the natives respectively by Great Britain and by our Government, that, in the matters of difficulty and responsibility when the Indians fell into our hands, our case had been sadly complicated and prejudiced by the state in which Britain had left her red allies. These malign influences affected our first treaty relations with the Indian tribes nearest to us, which began under the confederation in 1778. These were designed, as has been said, to secure