ambassadors have been seized, imprisoned, and butchered,... [and] war has never been declared against them". Outlining the process by which the US government seized Indigenous land, Neal said, The frontier people pick a quarrel with the Indians... No declaration of war follows; no ceremony; but, forth goes General [Andrew] Jackson—or general somebody else; wasting and firing the whole country. A truce follows: a ceding of the conquered country—for the protection of the whites. Neal used novels like Logan (1822) to challenge racial boundaries between White and Indigenous Americans. Reacting to the Indian Removal Act (1830) and popular literature that supported it, Neal published the short story "David Whicher" (1832) to explore peaceful multiethnic coexistence in the US. The tale also "contested how popular literature employed colonial violence to provide a model of and justification for its continuation in the name of national expansion". Temperance As a child, Neal decided to avoid intemperate drinking and maintained this personal conviction throughout his life. He did not associate himself with the temperance movement until after he returned to Portland, Maine from London. His first invitation to lecture an audience was for the annual address for the Portland Association for the Promotion of Temperance in 1829. Neal Dow, John Neal's cousin, was a leader of the prohibition movement, and in 1836 Neal engaged in public debates with his cousin to defend moderate wine drinking as an alternative to total abstinence. It was in this period between the late 1830s and late 1840s that Neal became disillusioned with the temperance movement, which had moved away from a focus on moral suasion to enacting prohibition laws; Dow and his followers "instead of regarding the injunction, 'Be temperate in all things,' were furiously intemperate on the subject of temperance; making total abstinence the condition of citizenship, and almost of civilization." Neal remained convinced of "the evils of intemperance... They could not well be exaggerated; the only question was about the remedy." Dueling In his first novel (1817), Neal portrayed dueling as a holdover from an aristocratic era that is immoral, pointless, antidemocratic, and anti-American, charging "that here, in America, a gentleman may cut another's throat, or blow out his brains with complete impunity." His "Essay on Duelling" that same year attacked the institution as a gendered performance, or "the unqualified evidence of manhood", believing that "in his closet every man wishes duelling abolished, and if every man