Note 75 — Chapter XXXIII

"Reading at the present day, we can see how the passionate and declamatory rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence has left its stain to this hour on most of the political writing and oratory of America, and may wish that the birth of a nation had not been screamed into the world after this fashion. Nothing could have been easier than, in the like rhetorical language, to draw up a list of lawlessness and utter outrage committed by the colonists. Some of the charges will not bear examination.

"For instance, the aid of the Indians had been willingly accepted by the colonists in the Canadian expedition since September, 1775; the general question of their employment had been considered by Washington in conference with a Committee of Congress and delegates of New England Governments in October of the same year; and the main objection which Washington and other officers urged against it, as shown by a letter of his to General Schuyler, January 27, 1776, and the answer from the latter, was that of expense. He had, nevertheless (April 19, 1776), advised Congress 'to engage them on our side,' as 'they must, and no doubt soon will, take an active part either for or against us;' and the Congress itself had, on June 3rd—not a month before the Declaration of Independence was actually accepted—passed a resolution to raise 2,000 Indians for the Canadian service, which, shortly afterwards, was extended by another (referred to in a letter of Washington's of June 20), authorizing General Washington to employ such Indians as he should take into the service in any place where he might think that they would be most useful, and to offer them bounties, not indeed for scalps, but for every officer and soldier of the King's troops whom they might capture in the Indian country or on the frontiers of the colonies. When all this had been done, it needed the forgetfulness and the blind hypocrisy of passion to denounce the King to the world for having 'endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages;' yet the American people have never had the self-respect to erase this charge from a document generally printed in the fore-front of their Constitution and Laws, and with which every schoolboy is sedulously made familiar.

"Perhaps, indeed, it would have been otherwise had not the charge been one which circumstances appeared to confirm. For, in fact, owing to causes already indicated, the Americans never could make friends of the Indians in the contest, and consequently the 'merciless savages' continue in history to figure on the side of the British. Who could wonder at it? At the date of the Declaration of Independence, the Indian child had only just reached man's estate, who in the year of his birth might have escaped being a victim to the bounty of £20, held out for the scalp of every Indian woman and child, by Massachusetts, in 1775, whilst one of £40 had been offered for that of his father, raised in 1776 to £300. It did not require the retentive memory of the redskin to make him look with suspicion on solicitations of friendship from men who might have been parties to such schemes of extermination to his race." (The Ludlow's History of the War of Independence, 1777-1783, Chap. v., pp. 124-126.)

"But Jefferson's violent pamphlet should, in fact, be looked upon less as a Declaration of Independence than as a Declaration of War—less as an assertion of right than as a cry of defiance uttered in the hour of grave peril, and in the face of a formidable foe."—Ib., p. 126.