l it closes over their heads and
bursts upon them in universal ruin and devastation. Their heroic
resistance to the invasion of the United States troops follows,
sublime from its very desperation. A more unequal contest was never
fought. On one side one of the mightiest powers on earth, with endless
stores of men and money at its beck,--and on the other a handful of
outcasts fighting for their homes, and the liberties, in no
metaphorical sense, of themselves, their wives, and their children,
and protracting the fight for as many years as the American Revolution
lasted.

Then succeeded the victory of Slavery, and the reduction to hopeless
bondage of multitudes who had been for generations free, on claim of
pretended descendants of imaginary owners, by the decision of petty
government-officials, without trial or real examination. More than
five hundred persons, some of them recent fugitives, but mostly men
born free, were thus reduced to slavery at a cost to us all of forty
millions of dollars, or eighty thousand dollars for each recovered
slave! Then comes their removal to the Cherokee lands, west of
Arkansas, under the pledge of the faith of the nation, plighted by
General Jessup, its authorized agent, that they should be sent to the
West, and settled in a village separate from the Seminole Indians, and
that, in the mean time, they should be protected, should not be
separated, "nor any of them be sold to white men or others." This,
however, was not a legitimate issue of a war waged solely for the
reduction of these exiles to slavery; and so the doubts of President
Polk as to the construction of this treaty were solved by Mr. John Y.
Mason, of Virginia, who was sandwiched in between two Free-State
Attorney-Generals for this single piece of dirty work, (of which
transaction see a most curious account, pp. 328-9 of this book,) and
who enlightened the Presidential mind by the information, that, though
the exiles were entitled to their freedom, under the treaty, and had a
right to remain in the towns assigned to them, "the Executive _could
not in any manner interfere to protect them_!"

The bordering Creeks, who by long slave-holding had sunk to the level
of the whites around them, longed to seize on these valuable
neighbors, and, indeed, they claimed rights of property in them as
fugitives in fact from themselves. The exiles were assured by the
President that they "_had the right to remain in their villages, free
from al