he permission to assign my reasons for my vote, when the question was put upon those resolutions themselves.

Sir, it is a melancholy contemplation to me, and raises fearful forebodings in my mind when I consider the manner in which that Report and those Resolutions have been lisposed of by the House. I have twice asked permission I have twice asked permission of this House to offer two resolutions calling for information from the President upon subjects of infinite importance to this question of slavery, to our relations with Mexico, and to the peace of the country. When I last made the attempt, a majority of the House voted by yeas and nays to suspend the rules to enable me to offer one of the two resolutions--but the majority not amounting to two thirds, my resolution has not yet obtained from the House the favor of being considered. Had it been the pleasure of the House to indulge the call, or to allow me the privilege of assigning my reasons for my vote on the resolution this morning, the remarks that I have now made might have been deemed more appropriate to those topics of discussion, than to the question more immediately now before the committee. They are reflections, however, which I deem it no less indispensable make than they are painful to be made-extorted from me by a condition of public affairs unexampled in the history of this country. Heretofore, calls upon the Executive Department for information, such as that which I have proposed to make, were considered as among the rights of the members of this House, which it was scarcely deemed decent to resist. A previous question, smothering all discussion upon resolutions reported by a committee, affecting the vital principles of the Constitution, moved by one of the members who reported the resolutions, and sustained by the members of that committee itself, is an occurrence which never before happened in the annals of this Government. The adoption of those resolutions of the House had not even been moved. Upon the mere question whether an extra number of the report of the committee should be printed, a member moves the recommitment of the report, with instructions to report a new resolution. On this motion the previous question is moved, and the Speaker declares that the main question is not on the motion to recommit, not on the motion to print an extra number of copies of the report, but upon the adoption of three resolutions, reported, but never even moved in the House. If this is to be the sample of our future legislation, it is time to awake from the delusion that freedom of speech is among the rights of the members of the minority

of this House.

To return, Mr. Chairman, to the resolution before the committee. I shall vote for this application of moneys, levied by taxation upon my constituents, to feed the suffering and starving fugitives from Indian desperation and revenge. How deeply searching in the coffers of your Treasury this operation will ultimately be, no man can at this time foretell. The expenditure authorized by this resolution may be not in itself very considerable; but in its progress it has already stretched from Alabama to Georgia-how much further it may extend, will be seen hereafter. I turn my eyes away from the prospect of it now; but am prepared to meet the emergency, if it should come, with all the resources of the Treasury.

But, sir, I shall not vote for this relief to the suffering inhabitants of Alabama, and of Georgia, upon the ground on which the gentleman from Alabama, (Mr. LEWIS) and the gentleman from South Carolina, (Mr. THOMPSON) have been disposed to place it. Little reason have the inhabitants of Georgia and of Alabama to complain that the Government of the United States has been remiss or neglectful in protecting them from Indian hostilities: the fact is directly the reverse. The People of Alabama and Georgia are now suffering the recoil of their own unlawful weapons. Georgia, sir, Georgia, by trampling upon the faith of our national treaties with the Indian tribes and by subjecting them to her State laws, first set the example of that policy which is now in the process of consummation by this Indian war. In setting this example, she bade defiance to the authority of the Government of the nation; she nullified your laws: she set at naught your Executive and judicial guardians of the common Constitution of the land. To what extent she carried this policy, the dunof her prisons and the records of the Supreme Judicial Court of the United States can tell. To those pri

geons

sons she committed inoffensive, innocent, pious ministers of the Gospel of Truth, for carrying the light, the com forts, and the consolations of that Gospel to the hearts and minds of these unhappy Indians. A solemn decision of the Supreme Court of the United States pronounced that act a violation of your treaties and of your laws. Georgia defied that decision: your Executive Government never carried it into execution: the imprisoned missionaries of the Gospel were compelled to purchase their ransom from perpetual captivity by sacrificing their rights as freemen to the meekness of their principles as Christians; and you have sanctioned all these outrages upon justice, law, and humanity, by succumbing to the power and the policy of Georgia, by accommodating your legislation to her arbitrary will; by tearing to tatters your old treaties with the Indians, and by constraining them, under peine forte et dure, to the mockery of signing other treaties with you, which, at the first moment when it shall suit your purpose, you will again tear to tatters and scatter to the four winds of Heaven, till the Indian race shall be extinct upon this continent, and it shall become a problem beyond the solution of antiquaries and historical societies what the red man of the forest was.

This, sir, is the remote and primitive cause of the present Indian war: your own injustice, sanctioning and sustaining that of Georgia and Alabama. This system of po licy was first introduced by the present Administration of your National Government. It is directly the reverse of that system which had been pursued by all the preceding Administrations of this Government under the present Constitution. That system consisted in the most anxious and persevering efforts to civilize the Indians; to attach them to the soil upon which they lived; to enlighten their minds; to soften and humanize their hearts; to fix in permanency their habitations; and to turn them from the wandering and precarious pursuits of the hunter, to the tillage of the ground; to the cultivation of corn and cotton; to the comforts of the fire-side; to the delights of home. This was the system of Washington and of Jefferson, steadily pursued by all their successors, and to which all your treaties and all your laws of intercourse with the Indian tribes were accommodated. The whole system is now broken up; and instead of it you have adopted that of expelling by force or by compact, all the Indian tribes from their own territories and dwellings, to a region beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Missouri, beyond the Arkansas, bordering upon Mexico; and there you have deluded them with the hope that they will find a permanent abode--a final resting-place from your never-ending rapacity and persccution. There you have undertaken to lead the willing and to drive the reluctant, by fraud or by force; by treaty, or by the sword and the rifle; all the remnants of the Seminoles, of the Creeks, of the Cherokees, of the Choctaws, and of how many other tribes I cannot now stop to enumerate. In the process of this violent and heartless operation, you have met with all the resistance which men in so helpless a condition as that of the Indian tribes could make. Of the immediate causes of the war we are not yet fully informed; but I fear you will find them, like the remoter causes, all attributable to yourselves. It is in the last agonies of a people, forcibly torn and driven from the soil which they had inherited from their fathers, and which your own example, and exhortations, and instructions, and treaties, had rivetted more closely to their hearts; it is in the last convulsive struggles of their despair, that this war has originated; and if it brings with it some portion of the retributive justice of Heaven upon our own People, it is our melancholy duty to mitigate, as far as the public resources of the National Treasury will permit, the distresses of the innocent of our own kindred and blood, suffering under the necessary consequences of our own wrong. I shall vote for the resolution.

[NOTE. This Speech was delivered without premeditation or notes. No report of it was made by any of the usual reporters for the newspapers. Mr. ADAMS has written it out, himself, from recollection, at the request of several of his friends, for publication. It is, of course, not in the precise language used by him in the House. There is some amplification of the arguments which he used, and, perhaps, some omissions which have escaped his recollection. The substance of the Speech is the same.]