These weather-beaten backwoods warriors, who held their deliberations in the open air, showed that they had in them good stuff out of which to build a free government.

They were men of genuine force of character, and they behaved with a dignity and wisdom that would have well become any legislative body.

This last point is curious as showing how instantly and naturally the colonists succeeded not only to the lands of the Indians, but also to their habits of thought; regarding intrusion by outsiders upon their hunting-grounds with the same…

The great western drift of our people began almost at the moment when they became Americans, and ceased to be merely British colonists.

They crossed the great divide which sundered the springs of the seaboard rivers from the sources of the western waters about the time that American citizens first publicly acted as American freemen, knit together by common ties, and with…

The movement which was to make the future nation a continental power was begun immediately after the hitherto separate colonies had taken the first step towards solidification.

From that moment our politics became national, and the fate of each portion of our country was thenceforth in some sort dependent upon the welfare of every other.

Each section had its own work to do; the east won independence while the west began to conquer the continent.

Nevertheless this very ferocity was not only inevitable, but it was in a certain sense proper; or, at least, even if many of its manifestations were blamable, the spirit that lay behind them was right.

The crisis demanded that they should be both strong and good; but, above all things, it demanded that they should be strong.

It was needful that justice should stand before mercy; and they could no longer have held their homes, had they not put down their foes, of every kind, with an iron hand.

They did not have many theories; but they were too genuinely liberty-loving not to keenly feel that their freedom was jeopardized as much by domestic disorder as by foreign aggression.

Indian warfare was of such peculiar atrocity that the employment of Indians as allies forbade any further hope of reconciliation.

It is not necessary to accept the American estimate of the motives inspiring the act in order to sympathize fully with the horror and anger that it aroused among the frontiersmen.

They saw their homes destroyed, their wives outraged, their children captured, their friends butchered and tortured wholesale by Indians armed with British weapons, bribed by British gold, and obeying the orders of British agents and…

Looking back it is easy to see that the Indians were the natural foes of the American people, and therefore the natural allies of the British Government.

But, after all is said, the fact remains that we have to deal, not with what, under other circumstances, the Americans might have done, but with what the British actually did; and for this there can be many apologies, but no sufficient…

They were too well-read in the merciless wars of the Chosen People to feel the need of sparing the fallen; indeed they would have been most foolish had they done so; for they were battling with a heathen enemy more ruthless and terrible…

The war was thus another and important link in the chain of events by which the west was won; and had any link in the chain snapped during these early years, the peace of 1783 would probably have seen the trans-Alleghany country in the…

No body of British troops in the Revolution bore such a dark stain on its laurels as the massacre at Fort William Henry left on the banners of Montcalm; even the French, not to speak of the Spaniards and Mexicans, were to us far more cruel…

In fact the British, as conquerors and rulers in America, though very disagreeable, have not usually been either needlessly cruel nor (relatively speaking) unjust, and compare rather favorably with most other European nations.

When off in the wilderness they were obliged to take a man for what he did, not for what he thought.

The rough democracy of the border welcomed a sect which was itself essentially democratic.

To many of the backwoodsmen's prejudices, notably their sullen and narrow hostility towards all rank, whether or not based on merit and learning, the Baptists' creed appealed strongly.

Undoubtedly the latter have often suffered terrible injustice at our hands.