Two hundred and twenty-two years ago today, in a field near what’s now Greenville, Ohio, a preacher named John Rhys delivered an Independence Day address to the United States Army.

The troops in his audience had recently won a decisive victory over the Western Confederacy, an alliance of Native peoples who’d been battling white encroachment in the Midwest for a decade. That victory had brought to an end the first Indian war of the federal era. More than a thousand white Americans had been killed, and perhaps twice that number of Native Americans.

Native leaders expected that defeat would mean a permanent expulsion from their lands. But Reverend Rhys took a different line. “The love of conquest and enlargement of territory should be sacrificed,” he told the troops. “Whites and Indians should move to each other’s towns, get to know each other better, perhaps even fall in love.” When they recognized their mutual humanity, he insisted, they would become “one people, and have but one interest at heart.”