President
Thomas Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, Governor of the Indiana Territory,
1803
You
will receive from the Secretary of War … from time to time information and
instructions as to our Indian affairs. These communications being
for the public records, are restrained always to particular objects and occasions; but this letter being unofficial and
private, I may with safety give you a more extensive view of our policy
respecting the Indians, that you may the better comprehend the parts dealt out
to you in detail through the official channel, and observing the system of which
they make a part, conduct yourself in unison with it in cases where you are
obliged to act without instruction. Our system is to live in perpetual peace
with the Indians, to cultivate an affectionate attachment from them, by
everything just and liberal which we can do for them within the bounds of
reason, and by giving them effectual protection against wrongs from our own
people. The decrease of game rendering their subsistence by hunting
insufficient, we wish to draw them to agriculture, to spinning and weaving. The
latter branches they take up with great readiness, because they fall to the
women, who gain by quitting the labors of the field for, those which are
exercised within doors. When they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small
piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive
forests, and will be willing to pare them off from time to time in exchange for
necessaries for their farms and families. To promote this disposition to
exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we
have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see
the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe
that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become
willing to lop them off by a cession of lands. At our trading houses, too, we
mean to sell so low as merely to repay us cost and charges, so as neither to
lessen or enlarge our capital. This is what private traders cannot do, for they
must gain; they will consequently retire from the competition, and we shall thus
get clear of this pest without giving offence or umbrage to the Indians. In this
way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and
they will in time either incorporate with us a citizens or the United States, or
remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most
happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to
cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their
weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to
crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure
humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at
any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across
the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to
others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.