In this disposition
is included a force consisting of regulars and militia, embodied in the
Indiana Territory and marched toward our northwestern frontier. This
measure was made requisite by several murders and depredations committed
by Indians, but more especially by the menacing preparations and aspect
of a combination of them on the Wabash, under the influence and
direction of a fanatic of the Shawanese tribe. With these exceptions the
Indian tribes retain their peaceable dispositions toward us, and their
usual pursuits.
I must now add that the period is arrived which claims from the
legislative guardians of the national rights a system of more ample
provisions for maintaining them. Notwithstanding the scrupulous justice,
the protracted moderation, and the multiplied efforts on the part of the
United States to substitute for the accumulating dangers to the peace of
the two countries all the mutual advantages of reestablished friendship
and confidence, we have seen that the British cabinet perseveres not
only in withholding a remedy for other wrongs, so long and so loudly
calling for it, but in the execution, brought home to the threshold of
our territory, of measures which under existing circumstances have the
character as well as the effect of war on our lawful commerce.
With this evidence of hostile inflexibility in trampling on rights which
no independent nation can relinquish, Congress will feel the duty of
putting the United States into an armor and an attitude demanded by the
crisis, and corresponding with the national spirit and expectations.
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