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All of this would have been true, if the white settlers had simply stayed in the unoccupied areas. But they did not. In fact, the Royal Charter for the Virginia Colonies under King William III stated that everything within its boarders was the property of the crown, including the lands occupied by the Indians.

The American government did remove millions of Indians and relocated them to other areas. That is an historic fact. The American Government did perform acts, such as providing blankets contaminated with small pox, which by all rights can be considered the act of an invading force.

We did not stay on our side of the boarder. The American Government broke more treaties with Native Americans than did the Native Americans. The various tribes east of the Mississippi were predominately stationary. They lived in permanent villages. The American army forcibly removed them.

I believe the founding of Jamestown should be celebrated, but let's not ignore the fact that the Native peoples were not always treated with fairness.

It’s true there was encroachment by settlers on lands claimed by the Indians as their hunting grounds, but in NO way can this be morally compared to the massacre, torture and kidnapping of many thousands of people by the Indians. The vast majority of those killed by the Indians in the massacres were NOT encroaching on Indian lands.

Suppose you own a vast ranch upon which you graze wide-ranging herds of cattle. One day you discover there are families that have moved onto the edges of your land. Are you morally justified in killing, torturing and kidnapping these people? And not only these people, but thousands of other people who are not even on your land?

It is wrong to pick out isolated events later on in the long history of the relations with the Indians (such as the “blankets with smallpox” incidents) and claim these events balanced things out with the Indians. The die was cast long before BY the Indians themselves in the 1750s, 1760s and 1770s and everything else progressed from the foundation that was laid in those years. There was an opportunity in those years to achieve a modus vivendi with the colonists and avoid the large-scale bloodshed that occurred, but the most war-like of the Indians chose to ally themselves with the cynical and calculating French and then later the British monarchy. The prevailing aim of these Indians was to exterminate the settlers. Traditional Indian culture celebrated the killing of other humans above all other activities. Only in Indian culture was a man who sneaks up behind a farmer in his field and buries his tomahawk in the other man’s brain considered an “honored warrior.”

The Indians perpetrated savage cruelties upon a huge number of people, all along the frontier. These Indians in their barbarities stooped to the very lowest levels of human behavior, and did their very level best to earn the undying enmity of the frontier people. From these brutalized frontier communities would arise people such as Andrew Jackson, who would later find himself in a position of influence over the destiny of many of these Indian tribes.

". . .let's not ignore the fact that the Native peoples were not always treated with fairness."

For MFM. Okay, so we did not treat the indians fairly.

In the bigger picture of continental expansion, we were not alone. Other nations also had covetous designs on what is now the US. Brits, French, Mexicans, Spanish and Russians challenged our young nation's various expansion attempts. That the indians would be eventually conquered by others was never in question. Had we not expanded across indian lands, they would have been conquered by other advanced nations and the US would not have any Pacific Ocean ports. As a nation we did the right thing.