- Historic Sites Inventing The Presidency As America goes into
its fifty-fifth presidential election, we should remember that
there might have been only one—if we hadn’t had the only
candidate on earth who could do the job October 2004 | Volume
55, Issue 5 Such pleas did not fall on deaf ears. Working
closely with Knox, Washington devised a policy designed to
create several sovereign Indian “homelands.” He concurred when
Knox insisted that “the independent tribes of indians ought to
be considered as foreign nations, not as the subjects of any
particular State.” Treaties with these tribes ought to be
regarded as binding contracts with the federal government, whose
jurisdiction could not be compromised: “Indians being the prior
occupants possess the right of the Soil. . . . To dispossess
them . . . would be a gross violation of the fundamental Laws of
Nature and of that distributive Justice which is the glory of a
nation.” A more coercive policy of outright confiscation,
Washington believed, would constitute a