Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/527

Rh over all other intending purchasers. This right was made over to us; but under the loose articles of our Confederation, the consequent pre-emptory privileges belonged to the respective States within which the lands lay. So in the Legislature of New York, acting under the assumption that in subduing Great Britain and her Indian allies that State had come into possession of the Indian's lands, there were some who proposed to drive off the Six Nations from their remaining territory. A similar measure, on like grounds, was proposed in other States. General Schuyler, thinking this would be an outrage, impolitic, inhuman, and iniquitous, memorialized Congress against the design. Washington heartily accorded with Schuyler, and stood successfully for condoning the offence of the Indians, waiving the right to drive them over the Lakes with those whose allies they had been, and allowing them to remain, thinking by a conciliatory course to get from them cessions of lands as they should be needed for settlement.

But then arose another difficulty still consequent on the entail of trouble which Britain had left for us. In the treaty at Fort Stanwix, in 1784, the savages, observing what power the Americans derived from their federation as one people, began then and thenceforward to feel that they too would be strong if they acted in concert. Some of the chiefs of the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix objected to making a separate agreement with the United States about land, and proposed a general, comprehensive disposal of the matter of boundaries with all the native tribes. But the Commissioners of the United States secured a separate bargain, as alone then possible, leaving open matter for later animosities. As a matter of course, England was on the ground when the conspiracy of Tecumseh at the South and West, in full vigor before the war of 1812, gave her another opportunity, alike from Canada and the Gulf, to renew her alliances with the savages, and to ply and pay and arm them against us.