This is a long excerpt from the “Protest against the Removal of the Cherokee Indians
from the State of Georgia,” a letter written by Ralph Waldo Emerson to President Martin
Van Buren on April 23, 1838.
“The newspapers now inform us that, in December, 1835, a treaty contracting for the exchange
of all the Cherokee territory was pre-tended to be made by an agent on the part of the
United States with some persons appearing on the part of the Cherokees; that the facts
afterwards transpired that these deputies did by no means represent the will of the
nation; and that out of 18,000 souls composing the nation, 15,668 have protested against
the so-called treaty.
It now appears that the government of the United States, chose to hold the Cherokees
to this sham treaty, and are proceeding to execute the same.
“Almost the entire Cherokee Nation stand up and say, ‘This is not our act.
Behold us.
We are here.
Do not mistake that handful of deserters for us’; and the American president and Cabinet,
the Senate, and the House of Representatives, neither hear these men nor see them, and are
contracting to put this active nation into carts and boats and to drag them over mountains
and rivers to a wilderness at a vast distance beyond the Mississippi.
And a paper purporting to be an army order fixes a month from this day as the hour for
this doleful removal.
“In the name of God, sir, we ask you if this be so.
Do the newspapers rightly inform us?
Men and women with pale and perplexed faces meet one another in the streets and churches
here, and ask if this be so.
We have inquired if this be a gross misrepresentation from the party opposed to the government and
anxious to blacken it with the people.
We have looked in the newspapers of different parties and find a horrid confirmation of
the tale.
“We are slow to believe it.
We hoped the Indians were misinformed and that their remonstrance was premature and
will turn out to be a needless act of terror.
The piety, the principle that is left in the United States, if only in its coarsest form,
a regard to the speech of men, forbid us to entertain it as a fact.
Such a dereliction of all faith and virtue, such a denial of justice, and such deafness
to screams for mercy were never heard of in times of peace and in the dealing of a nation
with its own allies and wards, since the earth was made.
“Sir, does this government think that the people of the United States are become savage
and mad?
From their mind the sentiments of love and a good nature wiped clean out?
The soul of man, the justice, the mercy that is the heart’s heart of all men from Maine
to Georgia does abhor this business.
In speaking thus the sentiments of my neighbors and my own, perhaps I overstep the bounds
of decorum.
But would it not be a higher indecorum coldly to argue a matter like this?
We only state the fact that a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude,
- a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country.
“For how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government,
or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more?
You, sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal
is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet
omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.
You will not do us the injustice of connecting this remonstrance with any sectional and party
feeling.
It is in our hearts the simplest commandment of brotherly love.
We will not have this great and solemn claim upon national and human justice huddled aside
under the flimsy pleas of its being a party act.
“Sir, to us the questions upon which government and the people have been agitated during the
past year, touching the prostration of the currency and of trade, seem but motes in comparison.
These hard times, it is true, have brought the discussion home to every farmhouse and
poor man’s house in this town; but it is the chirping of grasshoppers beside the immortal
question whether justice shall be done by the race of civilized men to the race of savage
man, - whether all the attributes of reason, of civility, of justice, and even of mercy,
shall be put off by the American people, and so vast an outrage upon the Cherokee Nation
and upon human nature shall be consummated.
“One circumstance lessens the reluctance with which I intrude on your time and your
attention: my conviction that the government ought to be admonished of a new historical
fact, which the discussion of this question has disclosed, namely that there exists in
a great part of the Northern people a gloomy diffidence in the moral character of the government.
“On the broaching of this question, a general expression of despondency, of disbelief that
any good will will accrue from a remonstrance on an act of fraud and robbery, appeared in
those men to whom we naturally turn for aid and counsel.
Will the American government steal?
Will it lie?
Will it kill?
We ask triumphantly.
Our counsellors and old statesmen here say that 10 years ago they would have staked their
lives on the affirmation that the proposed Indian measures could not be executed; that
the unanimous country would put them down.
And now the steps of this crime follow each other so fast, at such fatally quick time,
that the millions of virtuous citizens, whose agents the government are, have no place to
interpose, and must shut their eyes until the last howl and wailing of these tormented
villages and tribes shall afflict the ear of the world.
“I will not hide from you, as an indication of the alarming distrust, that a letter addressed
as mine is, and suggesting to the mind of the Executive the plain obligations of man,
has a burlesque character in the apprehensions of some of my friends.
I, sir, will not beforehand treat you with the contumely of this distrust.
I will at least state to you this fact, and show you how plain and humane people, whose
love would be honor, regard the policy of the government, and what injurious inferences
they draw as to the minds of the governors.
“A man with your experience in affairs must have seen cause to appreciate the futility
of opposition to the moral sentiment.
However feeble the sufferer and however great the oppressor, it is in the nature of things
that the blow should recoil upon the aggressor.
For God is in the sentiment, and it cannot be withstood.
The potentate and the people perish before it, but with it and as its executor they are
omnipotent.
“I write thus, sir, to inform you of the state of mind these Indian tidings have awakened
here, and to pray with one voice more that you, whose hands are strong with the delegated
power of 15 millions of men, will avert with that might the terrific injury which threatens
the Cherokee tribe.”