Your country is salubrious and fertile, and possess the highest capacity for future progress and development by the application of slave labor.

Besides this, the contiguity of our territory with yours induces relations of so intimate a character as to preclude the idea of discordant or separate action.

It is well established that the Indian country west of Arkansas is looked to by the incoming administration of Mr. Lincoln as fruitful fields, ripe for the harvest of abolitionism, free-soilers,and Northern mountebanks.

We hope to find in your friends willing to co-operate with the South in defense of her institutions, her honor, and her firesides, and with whom the slave-holding States are willing to share a common future, and afford protection commensurate with your exposed condition and your subsisting monetary interests with the General Government.

As a direct means of expressing to you these sentiments I have dispatched to you my aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel J. J. Gaines, to confer with you confidentially upon the subjects and to report to me any expressions of kindness and confidence that you may see proper to communicate to the Governor of Arkansas, who is your friend and the friend of you people.

Respectfully, your obedient servant,

H. M. RECTOR,

Governor of Arkansas.

[Inclosure No. 7.]

TAHLEQUAH, CHEROKEE NATION, February 22, 1861.

His Excellency HENRY M. RECTOR,

Governor of Arkansas:

SIR: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of Your Excellency's communication of the 29th ultimo, per your aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel J. J. Gaines.

The Cherokees cannot but feel a deep regret and solicitude for the unhappy differences which at present disturb the peace and quietude of the several Sates, especially when it is understood that some of the slave States have already separated themselves and withdrawn from the Federal Government and that it is probable others will also pursue the same course.

But may we not yet hope and trust in the dispensation of Divine power to overrule the discordant elements for good, and that, by the counsel of the wisdom, virtue, and patriotism of the land, measures may happily be adopted for the restoration of peace and harmony among the brotherhood of States within the Federal Union.

The relations which the Cherokee people sustain toward their white brethren have been established by subsisting treaties with the United States Government,and by them they have placed themselves under the "protection of the United States and of no other sovereign whatever." They are bound to hold no treaty with any foreign power, or with any individual State, nor with citizens of any State. On the other hand, the faith of the United States is solemnly pledged to the Cherokee Nation for the protection of the right title in the lands, conveyed to them by patent, within their territorial boundaries, as also for protection of all other of their national and individual rights and interests of person and property. Thus the Cherokee people are inviolably