The cost, however, was that this would formally divide the country into unequal parts, a settler part and an Indian part. It was a starker and potentially more permanent partition than the existing state/territory division, and former president John Quincy Adams fretted about what it might do to the nation’s character. The idea, he warned, was “not republican at all.” It was something an empire would do, an act of “despotism.” Adams’s Southern colleagues in Congress raised another concern. If Congress were to “add to our Union men of blood and color alien to the people of the United States,”
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