"If
we are to be permanently free from this danger," said one speaker in
the debate which followed the report, "we must drive the British from
Canada. I, for one, am willing to receive the Canadians themselves as
adopted brothers." Grundy, of Tennessee, who, like Clay, had been born
on the Atlantic slope and had followed the advance of population across
the Alleghenies, arose to declare that the whole Western country was
eager to avenge their fallen heroes, and awaited but the word of
Congress to march into Canada.
The frontiersmen, never free from the hostility of the savage, sought
to explain it by every cause except the true one--their constant
invasion of the lands reserved to him by the National Government in
treaties made with him. Here lies at least one explanation of the long
endurance of British commercial wrongs by the United States before war
was declared. The West, with its grievance of Indian tampering, had
not yet come into control of national affairs. The frontiersmen, by
their conquests of nature, had come to despise the strength of all
enemies. With no commerce to be endangered by a foreign war, safe in
the almost roadless interior from the peril of invasion, the Western
representatives were able to carry by storm in Congress their
temporising, commercial brethren of the coast.
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