Protest against the Trail of Tears

Protest against the Trail of Tears
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.”