Compare/Contrast Essay Thomas Jefferson/William Apess

            
            
             What do you think when you see someone who isn't like you? Are you quick to judge and think that you are better than them just because they are different? Well the early Americans thought that they were better than the American Indians, from religion, to race, to their whole lifestyle. In this paper are two views from the opposing sides, both arguing from their good thoughts to their bad. First is Thomas Jefferson's view as the early American coming into the Indians native land. Then there is William Apess, although of mixed blood, viewing the arrival of the puritans from the Native American's point of view.
             Thomas Jefferson, our icon of freedom and personal liberty, set the national policy toward Native Americans that would last for over one hundred years. He began the trail of tears that would destroy cultures and result in the reservation system. .
             Thomas Jefferson admired and lauded the American Indian. As a man of the Romantic Era he saw them as unspoiled, the "noble savage". Also as a man of the Enlightenment, with its analytical detachment, he knew that the Indian way of life could no longer exist in an expanding United States.
             Jefferson's attitude toward the Indian population of the United States always seemed as profoundly paradoxical as his attitude toward slavery. On several occasions he went out of his way to describe the Indian people of North America as a noble race who were the innocent victims of history. One senses in so many of Jefferson's observations on Indians an authentic admiration mingled with a truly poignant sense of tragedy about their fate as a people. On the other hand, it was during Jefferson's presidency that the basic decisions were made that required the deportation of massive segments of the Indian population to land west of the Mississippi."the seeds of extinction" for Native American culture were sown under Jefferson. (Ellis, 71).
             Jefferson had known and been interested in Native Americans all of his life.