The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
INDIGENOUS AMERICAN TRIBES / COEXISTENCE WITH
Your favor of October 31st has been duly received, and I thank you
for the communication of the report of the Committee of Friends. It
gives me great satisfaction to see that we are likely to render our
Indian neighbors happier in themselves and well affected to us; that
the measures we are pursuing are prescribed equally by our duty to
them, and by the good of our own country. It is a proof the more of
the indissoluble alliance between our duties and interest, which if
ever they appear to lead in opposite directions, we may be assured it
is from our own defective views. It is evident that your society has
begun at the right end for civilizing these people. Habits of
industry, easy subsistence, attachment to property, are necessary to
prepare their minds for the first elements of science, and afterwards
for moral and religious instruction. To begin with the last has ever
ended either in effecting nothing, or ingrafting bigotry on ignorance,
and setting them to tomahawking and burning old women and others as
witches, of which we have seen a commencement among them.
to James Pemberton, 16 November 1807
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