.MTA1Nw.NzEyNTY
To the Hon: Lewis Cass, Secy of War
Washington City Brown's Hotel February 25th, 1835
Sir, We have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communication of the 16th inst. in answer to our letter of the 14th. -It is with the utmost regret & astonishment we are informed by you, that the president considers the proposition which we offered as a basis for an adjustment of our national difficulties, to be inadmissible. We need not assure you of this well known fact,- that nothing but the most sincere desire on our part to harmonize the good feelings of the citizens of the border states and to remove all reasonable grounds of objection on the part of the President and to relive the Cherokee people from the almost insufferable oppression under which they are placed & the multiplying injuries which are inflicted upon them by the states & their citizens, could ever have induced us to have consented to offer a cession of any part of our territory.
It is not our intention nor desire to renew the discussion of the subject, of the protection which the Cherokee people had a right to have expected from the treaties now subsisting between the United States & their nation and the Laws of Congress heretofore enacted for carrying those treaty stipulations into full effect;- nor will we pretend now to determine whether the Cherokee people could be prosperous in the country they now inhabit or not, provided the protection promised has been extended.
But this much we must be permitted to say - that whilst those treaties & laws were enforced (from the time they were made, up to a very recent period) and particularly since the treaty of 1819 to the year 1830, - no people improved more rapidly in civilization, the arts & agriculture; - and they were both prosperous and happy, although surrounded all the time by a white population, and as much in its "midst" as they would now be, provided the benefits of those laws & treaty stipulations were extended to them.- From the time of the withdrawal of that protection, we admit that our people have