ns to receive exclusively to themselves the whole of the sums
stipulated by the commissioners of the United States in payment _for
all_ the lands of the Creek Nation which were ceded by the terms of the
treaty. And they have claimed the stipulation of the eighth article,
that the United States would "_protect_ the emigrating party against the
encroachments, hostilities, and impositions of the whites and of all
others," as an engagement by which the United States were bound to
become the instruments of their vengeance and to inflict upon the
majority of the Creek Nation the punishment of Indian retribution to
gratify the vindictive fury of an impotent and helpless minority of
their own tribe.

In this state of things the question is not whether the treaty of the
12th of February last shall or shall not be executed. So far as the
United States were or could be bound by it I have been anxiously
desirous of carrying it into execution. But, like other treaties, its
fulfillment depends upon the will not of one but of both the parties to
it. The parties on the face of the treaty are the United States and the
Creek Nation, and however desirous one of them may be to give it effect,
this wish must prove abortive while the other party refuses to perform
its stipulations and disavows its obligations. By the refusal of the
Creek Nation to perform their part of the treaty the United States are
absolved from all its engagements on their part, and the alternative
left them is either to resort to measures of war to secure by force the
advantages stipulated to them in the treaty or to attempt the adjustment
of the interest by a new compact. In the preference dictated by the
nature of our institutions and by the sentiments of justice and humanity
which the occasion requires for measures of peace the treaty herewith
transmitted has been concluded, and is submitted to the decision of the
Senate. After exhausting every effort in our power to obtain the
acquiescence of the Creek Nation to the treaty of the 12th of February,
I entertained for some time the hope that their assent might at least
have been given to a new treaty, by which all their lands within the
State of Georgia should have been ceded. This has also proved
impracticable, and although the excepted portion is of comparatively
small amount and importance, I have assented to its exception so far as
to place it before the Senate only from a conviction that between it and
a resort to