Selecting the Subjects, 3
toward relocation and separation, pushing for all Native Americans within the colonies to either assimilate the new American culture or to move to the territories west of the Mississippi.
The War department was told that should any of the tribes resist resettlement or offer any sort of armed resistance, that they should be given 'the hatchet', "and...if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, " wrote Jefferson, "we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the Mississippi....in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them." (Stannard, 120) Always the diplomat and statesman, Jefferson's attitudes were perhaps backed more by needing to appease political pressures than out of personal conviction, but it is worth remembering that his rhetoric of equality among all men did not extend to either the African Americans he kept as slaves or the Native Americans his policies displaced. The context of changing expectations for social conscience needs to be applied to any judgment, but the inherent hypocrisy of the era still needs to be kept firmly in mind when considering the reluctance of the descendants of its victims to venerate such an icon.
Abraham Lincoln
The presence of Lincoln on Mount Rushmore was an acknowledgment to the man's ultimate sacrifice in preserving the Union and reuniting the country after the American Civil War. Gutzon Borglum so idolized Abraham Lincoln that he named his son James Lincoln Borglum, known to everyone as Lincoln Borglum. Lincoln's veneration in stone on Mount Rushmore was a divisive point for some of the southern states, who understandably viewed the
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