No other conquering and colonizing nation has ever treated the original savage owners of the soil with such generosity as has the United States.
Teddy Roosevelt
The Public Record
Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909. A member of the Republican Party, he was born on October 27, 1858, in New York. Roosevelt was a prominent leader of the Progressive Movement, advocating for domestic policies that included trust-busting, regulation of corporations, and conservation of natural resources. His administration is noted for significant reforms and the establishment of national parks and forests.
gutenberg.org
In return the Indians were determined at all costs and hazards to keep the men of chain and compass, and of axe and rifle, and the forest-felling settlers who followed them, out of their vast and lonely hunting-grounds.
The white settlers were unflinchingly bent on seizing the land over which the Indians roamed but which they did not in any true sense own or occupy.
His speeches showed, as his deeds had already shown, in a high degree, that loftiness of courage, and stern, uncomplaining acceptance of the decrees of a hostile fate, which so often ennobled the otherwise gloomy and repellent traits of…
They hated the Indians, and, as a rule, were brutally indifferent to their rights, while they looked down on the Federal Government as impotent.
The worst foes, not only of humanity and civilization, but especially of the white race in America, were those white men who brought slaves from Africa, and who fostered the spread of slavery in the States and territories of the American…
There may be differences of opinion as to how to solve the problem; but there can be none whatever as to the evil wrought by those who brought about that problem; and it was only the slave-holders and the slave-traders who were guilty on…
From this point of view the presence of the negro is the real problem; slavery is merely the worst possible method of solving the problem.
From the standpoint of the master caste it is to condemned even more strongly because it invariably in the end threatens the very existence of that master caste.
Slavery is ethically abhorrent to all right-minded men; and it is to be condemned without stint on this ground alone.
He actually has supplanted him in certain of the West Indian islands, where the sin of the white in enslaving the black has been visited upon the head of the wrongdoer by his victim with a dramatically terrible completeness of revenge.
He holds his own; indeed, under the conditions of American slavery he increased faster than the white, threatening to supplant him.
Moreover, the negro, unlike so many of the inferior races, does not dwindle away in the presence of the white man.
Slavery must of necessity exercise the most baleful influence upon any slave-holding people, and especially upon those members of the dominant caste who do not themselves own slaves.
Boone's creed in matters of morality and religion was as simple and straightforward as his own character.
The borderer, rude, suspicious, and impatient of discipline, looks with distrust and with a mixture of sneering envy and of hostility upon the officer; while the latter, with his rigid training and his fixed ideals, feels little sympathy…
The regular army officer and the frontiersman are trained in fashions so diametrically opposite that, though the two men be brothers, they must yet necessarily in all their thoughts and instincts and ways of looking at life, be as alien as…
A class of gentlefolks soon sprang up in the land, whose members were not so separated from other citizens as to be in any way alien to them, and who yet stood sufficiently above the mass to be recognized as the natural leaders, social and…
The opinion of any mere passer-through a country is always less valuable than that of an intelligent man who dwells and works among the people, and who possesses both insight and sympathy.
Moreover, the clergyman and the school-teacher, the two beings who had done so much for colonial civilization on the seaboard, were already becoming important factors in the life of the frontier communities.
But there came early into the land many men of high purpose and pure life whose influence upon their fellows, though quiet, was very great.
Accordingly the audacious and enterprising business men who would nowadays go into speculation in stocks, were then forced into speculation in land.
If he lived elsewhere, his one chance of acquiring great wealth, and his best chance to acquire even moderate wealth without long and plodding labor, was to speculate in wild land.
It was the one commodity the management of which opened chances of procuring vast wealth, and especially vast speculative wealth.
It was the one commodity which appealed to the ambitious and adventurous side of the industrial character at that time and in that place.
Politicians like Teddy Roosevelt
