January 10

[In my January 10, 1809 address to the Chiefs of the Wyandots, Ottawas, Chippewas, Potawatomi, and Shawnee nations, I speak from Washington during my final months as President of the United States to deliver a dual message of ultimate friendship and warning regarding our future relations. While promising absolute justice, urging them to adopt Western agriculture, and presenting a peaceful future where our two peoples completely intermarry and become one blood, I threaten that any tribe launching an unprovoked war will face total extirpation or permanent banishment from their ancestral lands.]

Never will we do an unjust act towards you. On the contrary, we wish to befriend you in every possible way; but the tribe which shall begin an unprovoked war against us, we will extirpate from the earth, or drive to such a distance as that they shall never again be able to strike us. I tell you these things not to make you afraid. I know you are brave men and therefore cannot fear.

But you are also wise men and prudent men. I say it, therefore, that, in your wisdom and prudence, you may look forward. That you may go to the graves of your fathers and say, "fathers, shall we abandon you?" That you may look in the faces of your wives and children and ask, "shall we expose these our own flesh and blood to perish from want in a distant country and have our race and name extinguished from the face of the earth?" Think of these things, as wise men, and as men loving their fathers, their wives and children, and the name and memory of their nation.

I repeat, that we will never do an unjust act towards you. On the contrary, we wish you to live in peace, to increase in numbers, to learn to labor as we do, and furnish food for your increasing numbers, when the game shall have left you. We wish to see you possessed of property, and protecting it by regular laws. In time, you will be as we are; you will become one people with us. Your blood will mix with ours; and will spread, with ours, over this great island. Hold fast then the chain of friendship which binds us together, and join us in keeping it forever bright and unbroken.