USA > Georgia > Miscellanies of Georgia, historical, biographical, descriptive, etc > Part 3
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*See 1st Vol. American State Papers on Indian Affairs-passim.
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' ALEXANDER M'GILLIVRAY.
the deep incision made into his territory by our fathers at the close of the Revolutionary war, he hastened to throw himself into the arms of Spain as a security and resentment alike against Georgia and the United States. After contin- uing firm for a number of years to this enforced Spanish preference, learning from his own keen observation, as well as from all the antecedents of Spain in America, what abun- dant cause there was to be distrustful of her, he oscillated back towards the United States, attracted by the great con- fidence inspired by the character of Washington, by the concentration of all power over Indian affairs in the Federal Government, and by the better terms and stipulations now held out from our side to his own and all other Indian tribes. Yet it is obvious that in taking this great turn which culmi- nated so quickly in the treaty of New York, he was far from contemplating any breach with Spain. For he deemed it his policy to keep a strong, though latent hold on her as a safeguard against the United States, whom, nevertheless, he was bent on attaching as a friend, and holding, moreover, as a guarantor of the territory of the Indians against all the world, Spain included.
In the meantime, as already mentioned, he was scheming to construct a grand confederacy of the four great Southern tribes which might serve as a bulwark to the whole of them against the grasping designs of both the United States and Spain. It is not extravagant to say that the most consum- mate political genius could hardly have devised anything better or more suited to the circumstances than this, his plan, in its entirety. Had he lived to bring it to perfection and launch it into operation, there is no telling how much it might have changed the whole character and current of our subsequent Indian relations and history, and prevented many disastrous Indian (and perhaps also Spanish) events that afterwards took place. It might even have been that the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws and Chickasaws, instead of dwindling away, as they now seem likely to do, unhappy exotics in their compulsory Trans-Mississippi homes, would
*
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ALEXANDER M'GILLIVRAY.
have become, under his auspices, one grand, consolidated, Indian commonwealth, rooted and flourishing permanently on their beloved ancestral soil, and destined finally perhaps to full, fraternal incorporation into our mighty American system of States. Such at least was the consummation which, it is known and recorded, this great Muscogee patriot and statesman had conceived and suggested in regard to his own particular tribe.
Behold here the magnanimous hopes that flattered Mc- Gillivray and occupied his thoughts and fired his ambition ! But he was arrested by death in the midst of these high and beneficent machinations, and at a time, too, when he was apparently under a cloud. If his life had been prolonged, time would probably, however, have vindicated his strategy and his control over events, and it is likely that a brighter sun and a broader and more brilliant horizon would have beamed out upon him than he had ever known. With en- dowments such as distinguished him, with such a prestige as he had with the Indians of his own and all the neigh- boring tribes, and his strong, easy influence over them, for- tune could hardly have continued lastingly untractable to- wards him. His authority with his people had a vitality which reached beyond his life. Whilst the tone of the Creek nation went down considerably from the time of his death, yet for years afterwards the subtle influence that had long emanated from him and ruled in Creek affairs, survived him and continued to be felt. Particularly was it an ele- ment along with the name of Washington and other causes that gradually led his countrymen to become reconciled to the long distasteful treaty of New York, for which he was responsible as its almost sole negotiator and author on the Indian side,-his brother Chiefs having been not much more than machines in his hands in that great piece of In- dian diplomacy.
If ever there shall arise a weird pen fitted to deal with such a subject, it will find in this man's character and career a theme full of inspiration and demanding all its
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ALEXANDER M'GILLIVRAY.
power. The fabled centaur of antiquity, that marvelous conception of the human, united with the equine form and nature, was but a fiction, though one full of richest mean- ing. The scarcely less wonderful union of the civilized with the savage man in Alexander McGillivray was a hard, tan- gible reality, the most felicitous compound of the kind ever seen. Both by lincage and education he was heir to the two natures, which co-existed in him seemingly without con- flict and with great force and harmony of development. In youth he had what Washington and Franklin had, a common English education, sufficient to enable him as them in after life to impress on all men a strong sense of the great- ness which nature had bestowed, and which fortune and cir- cumstances exercised to the utmost and brought out fully to the world's view. The shrewdness, the robust sense and crude force of the Scotch Highland Chieftain were blended in him with calm Indian subtlety and intensity, and the in- nate dignity of the Muscogee warrior statesman. He had great ambition, great abilities, and what is most of all, and the true imperial sign of greatness, he had great power of influencing and controlling men on a large scale and in great affairs. What an outgrowth of civilization on what a stock of barbarism ! Like most very strong natures, he was strong at once by his virtues and talents, which were great and many, and by his vices, which were few but tell- ing, though not deformed by Indian ferocity, (for he was a stranger to the thirst for blood, and his breast was the seat of humanity) whilst all his qualities, good and bad, were apt to his situation and the necessities of the part he had to play. It has been said, more daringly than reverently or truly, that it took nature a gestation of a thousand years to produce a Napoleon Bonaparte. The great mother of us all ought not to be thus slurred in order to add to the renown of one of her sons. But this much is certainly true: Long intervals often occur without witnessing any of those extra- ordinary conjunctures, which are necessary to the production and manifestation of great and extraordinary men, and it is
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ALEXANDER M'GILLIVRAY.
not by any means probable that the world will soon again have the opportunity of beholding the like of General Mc- Gillivray. For to this end, there must happen the coupling of another man such as him with a fortune and circumstances as peculiar and extraordinary as his, and which, acting on him, made him what he was and blest him, moreover, with a felicity seldom the lot of the great among barbarians, that of being well handed down in civilized records, and conse- quently rightly known to civilized people-the only arbi- ters of fame and custodians of glory. Yet let it not be sup- posed that his good fortune in this regard, though marked, was perfect and entire. In the mention of it, therefore, there must be some reserve. History has not been enabled to present him fully. She has only preserved and spread before us the last half, or it may be less than the last half, of his public active career. When she first takes him up and makes him her theme, to-wit: at the opening of the Creek troubles with Georgia, soon after the Revolutionary war, he was already in the maturity of his greatness, and at the pinnacle of power. Of the length of time he had been there, of the steps and means, by which he had risen so high, and the talents and conduct by which he had sustained and il- lustrated himself in that elevation, there is not, there never was, any record, so far as I have been able to find out, and all tradition in relation thereto, has long since either perished or become apocryphal, except the general fact of his having at one time served under his father as a deputy in the Brit- ish Indian Agency during the Revolutionary war-with the titular rank of a British Colonel .*
His father was a Georgian, Lacklan McGillivray, who came in early youth from Scotland and was among those, who, in the Revolutionary war, sided strongly with Great Britain. He was a leading Indian trader, a man of property and consequence, and his name appears in the acts of confis- cation and banishment passed by Georgia. His mother was a principal Creek woman of striking personal charms,
.American State Papers, Indian Affairs, 2d Fol., 788.
ہے. ۔۔
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ALEXANDER M'GILLIVRAY.
heightened, it is said, by some French blood in her veins, and he himself was a Georgian born. The circumstances of his parentage and breeding would naturally have carried him into the ranks of the enemies of the State. But tradi- tion and written accounts alike inform us that it was his father's banishment and the confiscation of his father's estate that envenomed his heart and filled it with deep, vin- dictive hatred of Georgia and her people. Notwithstanding which, Georgia may well feel some pride that such a man was her son, whom destiny, not his own fault or crime, made her enemy. For he who devotes himself ably, patri- otically, unflinchingly and untiringly in the higher and more perilous spheres of service to the cause of his country's sal- vation, unimportant though that country may be in the world's mouth or mind, merits the homage of mankind and even of those against whom he has devoted himself in such a cause.
He died on the 17th of February, 1793, a peaceful death on civilized soil, whilst a visitor at Pensacola among those Spanish friends and allies with whom he had long been ac- customed to work and plot against us, whom at the same time he too shrewdly understood, and too profoundly fath- omed, not to see that there was reason why he should watch them closely and make a friend of the United States against them. And yet, as if fate had decreed that in everything and to the very last there should be something remarkable and out of the common course in regard to him, this man, whom nature and fortune bad concurred to make great, dy- ing there on Spanish soil, was spurned when dead by Span- ish religion and denied burial in their sacred ground* by those who had courted and magnified him while living, and was left to be obscurely interred by private and profane hands in the garden of his Scotch friend, Panton, the great Indian trader, where doubtless all trace of his grave has long since vanished, and the spot will be forever unknown, which inhumes the once famous and potential Alexander
*American State Papers, Indian Affairs, Fol. 1, 352.
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ALEXANDER M'GILLIVRAY.
McGillivray. What a contrast to the treatment of the aged and distinguished Choctaw Chief Pushmataha, who, dying at Washington in 1824, not only found an honored grave in the Congressional burying ground with monumental stone and inscription, but whose dying wish, "when I am gone, let the big guns be fired over me," was touchingly fulfilled by the booming of minute guns from Capitol Hill, the roar of cannon over his grave and all the accompanying pomps and glories of a grand and crowded public funeral .* But the indignant shade of McGillivray was not left long dis- consolate under this poor Spanish slight. Precious amends came soon to soothe and requite. The news of his death, traveling by way of the Havana and Baltimore, reached Washington in the latter city en route to Mount Vernon to enjoy there a few days' repose from the toils of the Presi- dency. That great nature which ever discerned and honored sterling worth and true nobility of mind and character wherever they existed, in whomsoever of human found, had recognized these qualities in McGillivray and felt his kindred to himself. He felt consequently his death, and on arriving at Mount Vernon wrote to Gen. Knox informing him of the event and calling the deceased their friend. When we re- member what ample and identical opportunities Gen. Wash- ington and Gen. Knox had both had of knowing McGilli- vray well, and how chary Washington always was of praise, and how few and chosen were the men to whom he ever ap- plied the sympathetic phrase of friend, this simple spon- taneous testimonial from the greatest of Americans to the illustrious Muscogee Chief goes to the heart and arrests the mind by its high value and touching significance. t
History too often slights and neglects to record many mi- nor things about which posterity feels curious and would gladly be informed touching distinguished and important personages. The Heroditus of Alabama has, however, avoided this fault in the case of McGillivray, and has grati-
*Col. Me Konny's Indian Lires and Portraits : Title, Pushmataha.
INpark's Life and Writings of Washington, Vol. 10, p. 335.
.
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ALEXANDER M'GILLIVRAY.
fied us fully in regard to his person, appearance, manners and other outward circumstances. He describes him as "six feet high, spare made and remarkably erect in person and carriage. His eyes were large, dark and piercing. His forehead was so peculiarly shaped that the old Indian coun- trymen often spoke of it. It commenced expanding at the eyes and widened considerably at the top of his head. It was a bold, lofty forehead. His fingers were long and tapering, and he wielded a pen with the greatest rapidity. His face was handsome and indicative of quick thought and much sagacity. Unless interested in conversation he was disposed to be taciturn, but even then was polite and respect- ful. When a British Colonel he dressed in the British uni- form, and when in the Spanish service he wore the military dress of that country. When Washington bestowed on him the honorary rank and title of a Brigadier-General, he sometimes wore the uniform of the American army, but never in the presence of the Spaniards. His usual dress was a mixture of the Indian and American garb. He al- ways traveled with two servants, David Francis, a half- breed, and Paro, a negro. He was the owner at his death of sixty negroes, three hundred head of cattle and a large stock of horses. He had good houses at the Hickory Grounds and Little Tallassee, where he entertained free of charge distinguished Government Agents and persons trav- eling through his extensive dominions. Like all other men he had his faults. He was ambitious, crafty and rather un- scrupulous, yet he possessed a good heart and was polite and hospitable. For ability and sagacity he had few superiors."*
It is impossible not to be struck with McGillivray's cra- nial development as here given : It is the very ideal of the sculptor for a head pregnant and alive with combined intel- lectual and moral power. If any man wants to be well sat- isfied on this point, let him go and gaze on the bust of the young Augustus by the Kentucky artist, Harte, which I saw at the Louisville Exposition in the fall of 1872.
* Pickett's History of Alabama, Vol. 2, Ch. 21, p. 112, 143.
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GEN. ELIJAH CLARK.
1
:
CHAPTER IV.
--
GENERAL ELIJAH CLARK.
And on our own, the civilized side, there was also a prom- inent representative character, whom we should not over- look ; a leading, sterling, nobly meritorious, yet unhappily before the end of his career, a somewhat erring soldier and patriot, whom it would be wrong and incomplete to quit the Oconee war without noticing and honoring, and whom at the same time it is impossible to recollect without some feel- ing of melancholy.
If I were asked what man in those uneasy, perilous times was most formidable to the savage foe, most serviceable to the exposed frontier, most unsparing of himself, ever fore- most in doing or attempting whatever he saw was best for the security and advancement of the State ; who, whilst he lived, always made himself strongly felt wherever he took part, and who, now when we look back, continues still to be seen in the mind's eye stalking sternly, with his armor on, across the troublous space he once so bravely filled in our dim, historic past ; his stalwart, war-hardened form, yet dominant on the theatre where he was so long wont at dif- ferent periods to suffer, fight and strive for Georgia, not against the Indians only, but against the British Tories also ; my prompt answer would be that General Clark, the elder, Elijah Clark, the father, was that man. I designate him thus because, distinguished as he was himself, no Georgian, who lived half a century ago, could possibly re- call him without remembering instantly that it was his good fortune to be further felicitously distinguished, by having a son, also a General, who during a long striking career
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GEN. ELIJAH CLARK.
courted and acquired great eminence, both personal and offi- cial, and honorably illustrated, if he did not augment the name he inherited, leaving it more intensely imprinted at least, if not higher enrolled on Fame's proud catalogue. Thus much one, who was never his political friend, drops in passing, as a spontaneous tribute to the memory of that strong charactered, most remarkable man, General Clark, the son, about whom his fellow citizens were too long and fiercely divided in his life-time to have become fully recon- ciled since his death, now about forty years ago. That re- conciliation, will not, if ever, be perfect till its cause shall be pleaded at the bar of an entirely new generation.
General Elijah Clark was indebted in no small degree, to the fact of his residence in Wilkes county, on the then up- per border of the State, for his great conspicuousness in our past Revolutionary Indian troubles. Had he lived on the seaboard or anywhere else far down the country, it is almost certain that his part in those scenes would not have been so important, stirring and incessant ; neither would he prob- ably have become involved, as a consequence partly at least of his connection with them, in those more than question- able doing3, which in his latter years drew down condemna- tion for him from the highest and best quarters, and which have furnished a handle to a recent historian for reflecting altogether too injuriously on his name and fame .* Resid- ing, however, as he did, in the immediate neighborhood of the Indian hostilities and depredations, he could not but be aroused by them to continual vigilance and activity. More- over, the very highi military reputation which he had won and brought out of the Revolutionary war, made him the man, to whom all the upper new settlements looked as the most competent of leaders and the most fearless of fighters. Hence the universal voice of men, women and children con- spired with his own patriotic and pugnacious qualities and impulses to bring him to the front in every emergency of much danger and anxiety. On such occasions at his bugle
.Steven's History of Georgia, Vol. 2, p. 404, 405, 406.
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LIVIUUN
GEN. ELIJAH CLARK.
call, there never failed to come trooping to him from the freshly cleared fields and still uncleared forests, bands of armed men, at the head of whom he would repel incursions, and pursue and punish the flying foe even in the distant re- cesses of his wild woods.
The most signal battle in this whole war, that of Jack's Creek, in what was then Indian territory, but is now Walton county, was fought by him in the year 1787, in this way .* It is striking to read his report of this battle to Gov. Mat- thews. No mention is made in it of his having a son in the battle, though with a just paternal pride, commingled with a proper delicacy, he emphasizes together the gallantry and conduct of Col. Freeman and Major Clark, and baptizes the thereto nameless little stream, on which the battle was fought, by simply saying that it was called Jack's Creek-a Dame then but just bestowed by admiring comrades in arms in compliment to the exploits and bravery of the General's youthful son on the occasion. Long, very long after that son had ceased to be young and the frosts of winter were on his warlike and lofty brow, thousands and thousands of old Georgians used to love still to repeat the name of Jack Clark without prefix of either Governor or General, and to remember him too as the hero of the well fought and impor- tant, though now it would be deemed, tiny battle of Jack's Creek. For in those days of hourly dread and peril, to be forward and valiant in defending the settlements from the
* White's Statistics 5S1 ; Historical Collections 672. - White in his Statistics of Georgia dignifies this battle no little by saying that the Indians were com - manded by McGillivray; a great mistake, which White himself tacitly acknowl- edges by wholly omitting any such statement in the account he gives of the battle in his subsequent and more labored work, "The Historical Collections of Geor- gia." Moreover, if a fact that would have added so much to the eclat of the battle and victory, had really existed, Gen. Clark would hardly have left it out of his official report of the battle to Gov. Matthews. And yet Gen. Clark says nothing about it. McGillivray's forte and function to which he always con- fined himself was that of being the great statesman and supreme magistrate at the helm of his nation, not a leader of the petty bands by which Indian war- fare was waged.
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GEN. ELIJAH CLARK.
Indian tomahawk and scalping knife was a sure road to everybody's lasting. admiration and gratitude.
The sudden, irregular calls thus made by the old General to armed attack and pursuit of the Indians, and the prompt, rushing obedience the rural new settlers invariably yielded him, were merely occasional things, it is true, but they oc- curred often enough and were successful enough to make the General feel what power he had among the people and to familiarize and endear his exercises of that power to the people. But destiny, which had hitherto been forced into being his friend by his irresistable valor and energy, and by his ardent, uniform adherence to a right conduct in all things, began at length to be his enemy and to impel him into some improper and ill-starred, though not ill-meant courses. His first error was his lending himself to the scheme of the unmannerly, mischief-making French Minis- ter, Genet ; his next, that of setting on foot the Oconee Rebellion, as it was called; missteps, both of which, were owing rather to accidental circumstances existing at that particular time, than to any intentional wrong doing on his part. For the Indian war, which, although not entirely quashed as yet by the New York treaty, was by its influence greatly crippled and reduced in magnitude, no longer pre- sented a sufficient field for the restless, bellicose passions which it had nurtured. These passions not having died out proportionately with the war, were still alive and smoulder- ing in many adventurous bosoms, among others in Gen. Clark's, at the date of Genet's arrival in the United States, in the Spring of 1793, and engaging in his insurrectionary tamperings against the foreign policy of our Government. The French insanity, which had already seized strongly on the country, now rapidly spread and increased. Most gen- erally, however, it found vent only in a wordy fray intended to influence the Government and to drive it from its neutral policy into a belligereney on the French side. But Gen. Clark was by all his temperament, training and habits, a man of emphatic deeds and substantial daring, and when
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GEN. ELIJAH CLARK.
the French wild-fire reached him, it ignited a nature which wanted but opportunity to break out into action, and enlist- ed a man, who felt assured that his standard, once raised, would bring a numerous body of daring, war-loving spirits of the South and West around him. Hence sprang those two marring and reprehensible incidents of his life above noticed, namely, his complicity with Genet in his schemes, and then, as an offshoot therefrom, his Oconee irregularity. For it would be the sheerest misnomer to call it a rebellion. And as those incidents are both matters which have been greatly misunderstood and mishandled to the no little detriment of Gen. Clark's name, a name dear to Georgia and which she is bound ever to overwatch and protect with grateful guardianship, I purpose by a faithful and succinct account to set them both in a clear and true light.
SECTION II.
Genet was the first envoy to the United States from regi- cide, Revolutionary France. Worthy to represent such a crew as Robespierre and the Jacobins, he came drunk, with the wild, unschooled spirit of liberty, which in his own country was then newly broken loose from the despotism of ages and was insanely exultant there still over the ruins of an old and the chaos of a new order of things. From the moment of his landing on our shores, he showed himself the very impersonation of diplomatic fanaticism, wrong- headedness and indecency, and entered at once on what was evidently a predetermined course of criminal, unneighborly intermeddling and agitation. He seemed bent on signaliz- ing his embassy by every audacity and impropriety that could tend to throw our country into mad excitement and precipitate it as an accessory into the fiery whirlpool of French wars and quarrels. How successful he was in kind- ling the flames of popular fury and stirring up the people against their own Government for its firm, immovable stand against him and his machinations, forms one of the most
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