276 CHEROKEE NATION OF INDIANS. 
on the part of the executive authority to enter into a discussion of 
Cherokee affairs predicated upon any other basis than an abandonment 
by them of their homes and country east of the Mississippi, presented? 
a memorial to Congress complaining of the injuries done them and 
praying forredress. Without affecting to pass judgment on the merits 
of the controversy, the writer thinks this memorial well deserving of re- 
production here as evidencing the devoted and pathetic attachment with 
which the Cherokees clung to the land of their fathers, and, remembering 
the wrongs and humiliations of the past, refused to be convinced that 
justice, prosperity, and happiness awaited them beyond the Mississippi. 
The memorial of the Cherokee Nation respectfully showeth, that they approach 
your honorable bodies as the representatives of the people of the United States, in- 
trusted by them under the Constitution with the exercise of their sovereign power, to 
ask for protection of the rights of your memorialists and redress of their grievances. 
They respectfully represent that their rights, being stipulated by numerous solemn 
treaties, which guaranteed to them protection, and guarded as they supposed by laws 
enacted by Congress, they had hoped that the approach of danger would be pre- 
vented by the interposition of the power of the Executive charged with the execu- 
iion of treaties and Jaws; and that when their rights should come in question they 
would be finally and authoritatively decided by the judiciary, whose decrees it 
would be the duty of the Executive to see carried into effect. For many years these 
their just hopes were not disappointed. 
The publie faith of the United States, solemnly pledged to them, was duly kept in 
form and substance. Happy under the parental guardianship of the United States, 
they applied themselves assiduously and successfully to learn the lessons of civiliza- 
tion and peace, which,in the prosecution of a humane and Christian policy, the , 
United States caused to be taught them. Of the advances they have made under the 
inflnence of this benevolent system, they might a few years ago have been tempted 
to speak with pride and satisfaction and with grateful hearts to those who have 
been their instructors. They could have pointed with pleasure to the houses they 
had built, the improvements they had made, the fields they were cultivating; they 
could hays exhibited their domestic establishments, and shown how from wandering 
in the forests many of them had become the heads of families, with fixed habitations, 
each the center of a domestic cirele like that which forms the happiness of civilized 
man. They could have shown, too, how the arts of industry, human knowledge, and 
letters had been introduced amongst them, and how the highest of all the knowledge 
had come to bless them, teaching them to know and to worship the Christian’s God, 
bowing down to Him at the same seasons and in the same spirit with millions of His 
creatures who inhabit Christendom, and with them embracing the hopes and promises 
of the Gospel. 
But now each of these blessings has been made to them an instrument of the keen- 
est torture. Cupidity has fastened its eye upon their lands and their homes, and is 
seeking by force and by every variety of oppression and wrong to expel them from 
their lands and their homes and to tear them from all that has become endeared to 
them. Of what they have already suffered it is impossible for them to give the de- 
tails, as they would make a history. Of what they are menaced with by unlawful 
power, every citizen of the United States who reads the public journals is aware. In 
this their distress they hay appealed to the judiciary of the United States, where their 
rights have been solemnly established. They have appealed to the Executive of the 
United States to protect these rights according to the obligations of treaties and the 
injunctions of the laws. But this appeal to the Executive has been made in vain. 

‘May 17, 1834. 

