Anyway, no matter how much compassion Jefferson felt toward the Indians, however badly he wanted law and order and bureaucratic regularity on the frontier, on this question the people, not the government, ruled. Americans had but one Indian policy—get out of the way or get killed—and it was nonnegotiable. The only thing that separated Jefferson from the settlers was that he wanted to buy the Indians out rather than drive them out. But that too was more rhetoric than reality.
