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own. Let us then inquire, whether it be practicable, under any system of persuasion or coercion, to preserve this indigenous race. The success of the Spaniards and Portuguese in incorporating the South American and Mexican natives, under their colonial governments, is far from being a conclusive experiment on this question. They conquered a people already possessing some elements of civilization, and in this beyond any thing, the difficulty is, to begin.

To obtain a satisfactory result, we must look anew into the state of the tribes included within our territorial limits. For what Europeans, and, indeed, what most Americans have written concerning the Indians, is only calculated to give false ideas of their actual state, and of the best means of ameliorating their condition. One class of these writers, has represented them as little better than cannibals, while the more amiable enthusiasts have appropriated the sentiments which they have derived from poetic descriptions of the chivalrous age of modern Europe, and the golden age of the ancients, to these fierce and perfidious barbarians. But with all the aid of imagination, I could not discern, among the Cherokees, a single trace of that generous heroism, and romantic fidelity, which are universally ascribed to the primitive stages of society: and I am much persuaded, that Hesiod's golden age of the Greeks would have presented to an actual observer nearly the same mixture of insensibility, vulgarity, and vice, that we found to exist, among our less classical brethren of the woods, Archeela-Akarouka, and Qu-ut-a-qu-us-kee.* Ovid's self-congratulation that he was reserved to a later period was not without reason,

Prisca juvent alios, ego me nunc denique natum

Gratulor.

The faults and the crimes of these poor Indians are not peculiar to them-they are the faults and the crimes of human nature, wherever it exists under similar circumstances.

The territory of the Cherokees, which, before the treaties of 1805 and 1807 with the United States, was much larger, now ex

* At the house of this chief (Qu-ut-a-qu-us-kee) better known by the name of Mac Intosh, an incident occurred characteristic of Indian manners. We were recommended to his hospitality by the politeness of Mr. Meigs, the agent of govern ment with the Cherokees. The chief, therefore, felt himself bound to honour, by every mark of distinction, his new guests. It was near sunset when we arrived. When he learned who we were, and saw the obligation he was under to entertain us for the night, he took his rifle as I supposed to shoot some wild game which might be near. But while we were standing in a sort of porch attached to his hut, he discharged it at a cow which was eating grass immediately before our eyes; he only wounded the poor animal, which ran bellowing and frantic about the yard. In this situation, two or three half naked negroes, who stood at the corner of the house to enjoy the bloody spectacle, fell upon the cow with axes; cleaved it to the ground; butchered it immediately, and, in two hours after our arrival, part of the very cow which we had found browsing happily on the grass, was stewed for our supper. I need not assure you how utterly unable we were to eat a morsel of an animal which we had seen thus barbarously butchered. But what had sickened and disgusted us, sharpened the appetites of the young warriors, who devoured the flesh with a ferocious avidity.

tends from the borders of Broad river, to the Chickasaw boundary below the Muscle Shoals, on the left bank of the Tennessee river: and off the river to the south, to the head waters of the Koosee, the Talapoosee, and the Tombigbee, including a space about half the size of the state of Tennessee. This country is the termination of that mountainous region which extends from New Hampshire in a south-western direction, half across our continent. The hills, though not high, are bold and prominent; the bottoms broad and rich; the forests heavy and majestic. The streams, both because they flow in rocky channels and because their banks are yet unbroken by the plough, are remarkably limpid: the Tennessee rolls with an air of magnificence its heavy torrent, from the sides of the Allegany and Cumberland mountains. The succession of ridges rising in height as they recede from the river, and finally attaining a great elevation, forms the sublimest and most beautiful landscape on our continent. It has been well described by a distinguished philosopher and traveller as an Anacreontic Swisserland.'* The climate which is tempered by the sun of 35 degrees, while it is uninfected by the miasmata of marshes, is soft, dry and genial. The sky is of a pure and brilliant azure; the clouds are rich and varied in their tints, and all things conspire to sustain the romantic feelings with which we penetrate a virgin forest, except the miserable and squalid appearance of the inhabitants.

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The Cherokees, like most other Indian tribes, live in villages. The conjecture that towns were first built for security, seems extremely probable, and the necessity of such a defence constantly continuing, they have never been permitted to live otherwise. The hunting state of society too, though it preclude the possibility of large cities, renders villages expedient. For while it allows to a very limited extent the division of labour, it requires a division of spoil. Should each individual in such a state, persist in enjoy-ing to the exclusion of others, the fruits of his labour, a series of unsuccessful adventures would expose each to the dangers of famine: a division of the spoil, like dividing the loss on the insurance of houses, equalises the condition of the whole. The Cherokees at present have two towns more considerable than the rest; one in the upper, the other in the lower part of the nation. Besides these, there are many smaller villages containing 15 or 20 houses, and as many families. They rarely inhabit solitary houses; indeed, a family living apart in such a wilderness would not be safe from the violence and depredations of others of the same tribe. So true is it, that society which is reproached with generating vice, in fact restrains it. Few villains are so hardened as to steal or murder in public. This is a wise provision; for, the difficulty of obtaining the necessaries of life, increasing even in a greater ratio than its multiplication, a populous society would be

T country best deserving this description lies between the Holston and extending on their sides 50 or 60 miles above their junction.

intolerable, if the very circumstance which makes it more difficult to provide for our wants, did not also increase the facility of detecting, and the certainty of punishing crimes.

Mr. Jefferson in his notes on Virginia, has given three different computations of the numbers of the Cherokees; in one they are estimated at 1500; in another, at 2000; and in a third, at 3000. It is scarcely imaginable, that their change from hunters into breeders of cattle, which subsist altogether on the spontaneous productions of the forest could, in 34 years, even with the large accession of white emigrants who have settled among them, have increased their population from the greatest of these numbers to 13,000,* at which they were estimated by the more intelligent inhabitants in the year 1815. Whatever their actual numbers may be, more than a third are already more or less mixed with the European race.

It would be an interesting problem to ascertain what increase of population a change from the hunting to the grazing state has produced in one third of a century. The Cherokees do not furnish the data necessary for its solution. Too many extraneous causes would enter into the calculation;-their emigration to other territories, the settlement of the European race among them-the knowledge they have acquired by this intercourse which has enabled them to arrest the ravages of the small pox-and of other diseases which oppose still more directly, the progress of population.

Since they have become graziers, the game has nearly disappeared from their country. They now subsist on Indian corn, sweet potatoes, dried fruit, and on the cattle which run at large in the forests at all seasons. They burn the woods every year to ameliorate the pasturage: a circumstance which has contributed much to the expulsion and extinction of the game.

The regularity of their institutions, like every thing concerning the Indians, has been much misrepresented by news-paper writers and missionaries. It is a part of Indian manners never directly to oppose any proposition which a stranger makes to them. Missionaries anticipating open hostility to their schemes of reformation, have mistaken their supine indifference for an intelligent acquiescence; when the delusion has vanished, they accuse these poor people of insincerity, and hold them to be incorrigible barbarians, They are the dupes of their own sanguine credulity.

The Cherokees cannot be said to have any regular system of government, laws, or even permanent customs which supplies the place of laws in some nations. Such authority as exists, is in the chiefs, who are not, as has been imagined, made such by popular elections, but are called to this station by other chiefs in council. How they were originally appointed, cannot be ascertained; for their traditions scarcely ever extend back through three complete genera

* It has often been remarked how fallacious conjectures of population are. Cook estimated the number of inhabitants of Otaheité at 100,000. It has since been successively reduced to 49,000, 16,000, and finally to 5,000.

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tions. The authority of the chiefs can be exercised only in war or in council;* and even there, they have no other power than the indirect influence which superior age, wisdom, address, courage or eloquence confer in all societies.† In the year 1815, there were two principal chiefs; Too-che-la (flute) of the upper Cherokees, and Ne-nau-ta (path-killer) of the lower. These Agamemnons, who are represented by the romantic journalists of the time, as wide ruling kings, have in fact no superior power, rank, respectability or emolument, in peace or war; they enjoy by the courtesy of a tacit acquiescence, a kind of nominal dignity.

The nation is divided into clans or smaller associations. Matters of general interest are debated in the great national council which meets once a year: smaller affairs are adjusted by the clans which they more immediately concern. All the individuals composing a clan, are considered members of the same family, and marriage between them is regarded as a species of incest.

Their civil jurisprudence has been imported among them by the white emigrants, and is peculiar to the Cherokees. A debt which can be proved to be due, is exacted from an unwilling debtor by an application on the part of the creditor to the justices in Eyre, who are a troop of light horse called un-ut-le-ke-haw-kee (or riders of the circuit.) These seize as much of the property of the debtor as will satisfy the demand. I did not understand that they had a right to confine the person in case he had no property. In this respect, their laws are more humane than our own. They ride their judicial circuits once a year regularly, and oftener if occasion require.

Retaliation is the principle of their criminal code. When an individual is killed, a relative of the deceased kills the murderer. Public opinion does not require a smaller injury than the murder of a relation to be resented. Even in this case, the power of the nation is not pledged to stop the evil at the first retaliation, for a relation of the person last killed may still revenge the death of his friend, and so on, without end. Hence, if the family of the first murderer be most powerful, the crime goes unpunished, or the guilty person ransoms his own life by offering in atonement that of a slave, instead of a pecuniary compensation, as among the early Germans. Of this, a memorable instance happened but a little while before our visit. There was a rich and powerful leader of the name of Van, who had long tyrannised over his neighbours by committing acts of the most wanton barbarity; one of them was, that of shooting a person sitting in his own door, for the sake of trying a newly purchased gun. None of these outrages had been resented; for his wealth, his power, his courage, and the number of his dependants had made his name terrible to all around him. At length there arose a rival chieftain, with a soul as dark, and as

* Cæsar says of the Germans in pace nullus communis est magistratus.' (De Bel. Gal. lib. vi. c. 23.)

Like the ancient German chiefs they govern auctoritate suadendi, magis quam jubendi potestate.' Tac. de Mor. Ger. c. ii.

implacable; as cruel and capricious in its resentments-his name was Saunders. He had already butchered Double Head, [chu-qua-lutau-gee,] by shooting and tomahawking him with circumstances too barbarous to be related. He waited with a cowardly prudence his opportunity to kill Van: he shot him when he was drunk.Fearing that the terror of his name and the power of his clan, might prove unavailing against the fury of Van's family, exasperated as it was by the perfidy of the act, he propitiated their vengeance by offering them a negro man as an expiatory sacrifice.The offer was accepted-a negro slave for a murdered father, husband and brother; and the poor negro was butchered in turn, by having a tomahawk driven to his heart.

It is no excuse of a homicide, that it is accidental. A husband by mischance killed his wife with a ball that glanced obliquely from a tree; a brother of the wife thought it his duty to shoot the husband in retaliation. It is certain that crimes are often concealed, even in the most enlightened nations, under the pretext of accident. Before the Code Napoleon was in force in France, it had been observed, that cases of parricide were more frequent there, in proportion to other murders, than in the adjoining nations. By the new code, even accidental parricide was punished with death. From that moment the accident became less frequent, The law was the less cruel in its operation; as in cases in which the accident was manifest, the emperor could pardon the accused.

The Cherokees estimate relationship through the maternal line only. A son therefore is not allowed to revenge the murder of a father, though he is required to punish that of a mother, a sister, or a brother.

Their ideas of property are extremely rude. The land is the domain of the nation in its aggregate character. An individual has only the dominium utile in as much as he can enclose. In the hunting state the property in the land ought of course to be common, for the land is only of use because it furnishes game; and as the right to the game as long as it is at large, is common to all, it becomes vested in a particular person, only by possession. Those who have disputed (and Mr. Locke is one of them) whether the right of property was originally founded in consent, or prior occupancy, have forgotten that the very recognition of occupancy as deciding the right, implies a consent that such shall be the rule. This acquiescence among the Cherokees extends to but a few objects, and is doubtless the result of that moral arithmetic which in things essential to our existence, induces us to observe its rules, without the sanction of a coercive authority: just as principles of politeness are held sacred by well educated gentlemen.

The property of husband and wife (a relation which I shall presently explain) is as distinct as that of any other individuals: they have scarcely any thing in common.

There is no established order of inheritance. After the death of the parents, the relations of the father or mother take away from the children whatever they wish. Montesquieu has said, no

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