directed by its Presidents, and executed by its armies and its courts.
The cruelties of Alva in the Netherlands, which make the pen of Motley
glow as with fire as he tells them, the _dragonnades_ which scorched
over the fairest regions of France after the Revocation of the Edict
of Nantes, have a certain excuse, as being instigated by a sincere,
though misguided religious zeal. For Philip II. and Louis XIV. had, at
least, a fanatical belief that they were doing God service by those
holocausts of his children; while no motive inspired these massacres,
tortures, and banishments, but the most sordid rapacity and avarice,
the lowest and basest passions of the human breast.

And so carefully has the truth of this story been covered up with
lies, that, probably, very few indeed of the people of the Free States
have any just idea of the origin, character, and purposes of the
Seminole Wars, or of the character of the race against which they were
waged. And yet there is no episode in American history more full of
romantic interest, of heroic struggles, and of moving griefs. We have
been taught to believe that these wars were provoked by incursions of
the savages of Florida on the frontier, and, if the truth could not be
concealed, that an incidental motive of our war of extermination
against them was to be found in the sanctuary which the fugitive
slaves of the neighboring States found in their fastnesses. The
general impression has been, that these were mainly runaways of recent
date, who had made their escape from contemporary masters. How many of
our readers know that for more than three quarters of a century before
the purchase of Florida there had been a nation of negroes established
there, enjoying the wild freedom they loved, mingling and gradually
becoming identified with the Indians, who had made it their city of
refuge from slavery also? For the slaveholders of Carolina had no
scruples against enslaving Indians any more than Africans, until it