USA > Georgia > Miscellanies of Georgia, historical, biographical, descriptive, etc > Part 4
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extraordinary passages in American history. To such height did things get that the elder Adams in his writings speaks of the multitude in Philadelphia, (which had now become the seat of the General Government) as ripe for de- throning Washington himself .*
Genet was artful as well as bold and unscrupulous. This he evinced clearly from the moment of his appointment. Sailing from France in a ship under his own orders, he di- rected his voyage to Charleston, a port very distant from the seat of Government, and after landing there on the 8th of April, 1793, and tarrying for awhile, busied in illicit, inflammatory intrigues, he consumed weeks, devoted to simi- lar objects, in his journey from thence overland to Philadel- phia, where he arrived on the 16th of May, and whither the news of his evil practices had long preceded him.t No where, however, on his whole route did he meet with greater encouragement than in South Carolina. The large, very influential French Hugenot element in the lower part of that State responded to him promptly with assurances that went beyond mere expressions of sympathy. Indeed, a strong feeling of French consanguinity added force there to the universally prevalent sentiment of gratitude to France as our generous Revolutionary ally. Hence the people's hearts warmed readily to his appeals. He was greatly em- boldened. A reckless French enthusiasm that had already gotten wide hold now spread and grew more intense in all directions. It soon crossed the Savannah river. And nowhere either in or out of Georgia did it seize upon a man more ardently prepared to be carried away by it than Gen. Clark. For all his feelings, his whole nature was strong, and with all his strength and soul he sympathized with France in her struggle for liberty, and paid back with every breath what he felt to be the impayable debt of love and gratitude his country owed her, for her aid in our great Revolutionary contest. Genet was not long in finding him
"Jno. Adams' Life and Writings, Vol. 8, 279.
t.American State Papers, For. Re. Vol. 1, p. 167, 168.
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out and learning all about him, and he eagerly pitched upon him as a man eminently suited in all respects, and especially by his great military prestige in the South, to become the leader in the military operations which it was his object to set on foot against the neighboring Spanish dominions, and which looked to nothing less than the seizure of the Flori- das and reconquest of Louisiana mainly by means of Amer- ican arms seduced to that illegal service. He thought that the pending war between France and Spain and the French epidemic now pervading the United States presented a fine opportunity for this purpose. Particularly was his heart set on the recovery of Louisiana, that vast region the loss of which, by the treaty of Paris of 1763, had never ceased to lie bitterly on the French stomach. Aside from the zeal for France by which he was fired, he burned with the personal ambition and thirsted intensely for the personal glory of exploiting this great achievement for his nation. And for the chance of it, he hesitated not to sacrifice all ambassa- dorial decorum, as well as to outrage our country's laws and neutrality, and endanger her peaceful relations and important pending negotiations with Spain.
This last consideration, however, was far from being any drawback with Gen. Clark. It rather impelled than deterred him. Nothing would have suited him better than war with Spain. For he hated her hardly less than he loved France, and he felt that she well deserved all his hatred as being already and for years past the venomous enemy of the United States, and especially of Georgia, groundlessly, as he thought, seeking to rob hier of a vast territory, at the same time meanly screening herself behind the Indians and insidiously instigating them against us. It was his deliberate convic- tion that in taking up arms against her, though under French colors, he was acquitting himself patriotically to his own country. He accordingly refused not the high com- mand which was tendered him .* Commissions, also, for
* Both Stevens in history of Georgia and White in his statistics tell us he was commissioned a Major-General in the French service with a pay of $10,00
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subordinate officers were placed in his hands in blank,- money and means were likewise furnished him, though in too limited an amount for the greatness of the enterprise. His authority was everywhere recognized by the adventurers whom Genet, his agents and emissaries succeeded in starting up and enlisting. From the banks of the Ohio to those of the Oconee and St. Mary's, his orders were obeyed in the making of preparations and getting up armaments, and men thronged from both South Carolina and Georgia to his points of rendezvous on the two latter streams, t fired at once by the splendor of the project and the renown of the leader. But mark ! there was no movement whatever, actual or cou- templated, against the Indians or their lands either within the chartered limits of Georgia or anywhere else. Nor did the Indians manifest any hostility towards the adventurers, trespassers, though they were on their hunting grounds. For it seems to have been made to be well understood by them that the whole aim was against the provinces of Spain, from whom the Indians, especially in parts remote from the Spanish border, were gradually becoming estranged since the treaty of New York, and were now still more disposed to be weaned when they were told there was a prospect of the restoration of the French as their neighbors, to whom they always had more liking than either to the Spaniards or Anglo-Americans. Indeed, the French made it their study to cultivate the favor of the Indians, who were even solicited to join in the enterprise. In every way it was sought to make fair weather with them with a view to the march of troops through their country on the proposed errand of Spanish invasion, while other forces recruited in the West
per annum ; and there is no doubt of the fact. But when White further says that he was solicited by two great European powers to enter their service, it is giving him a little too much trans-Atlantic military renown. The story is a figment, which, like the statement that McGillivray was the Indian commander whom Gen. Clark defeated at Jack's Creek, must be numbered among the pretty fables, parasitical mistletoes, that are perpetually growing out upon the sturdy oak of history, slowly robbing it of its life and truth.
+Americ in State Papers, Foreign Relations, Vol. 1st, pages 455, 458, 459, 460.
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were to descend the Ohio and Mississippi in boats to meet and cooperate with the French squadron that was held out as expected to come to their aid by sea *
But all this elaborate scheming and ado ended in total failure, never ripening into such action as was contemplated, -- never reaching the stage at which General Clark was to stand forth, truncheon in hand, conspicuous and avowed as the leader of the enterprise. Washington's administration was too strong, vigilant and active for Genet and the French party. Our obligations of neutrality toward Spain were fully maintained, and all attempts against her within our bounds were effectually suppressed. The most decided steps. were taken against Genet personally. His recall was de- manded, and every proper means used to impair in the mean- while his ability for mischief. But soon his actual recall and the coming of his successor, the citizen Fauchet, in the Spring of 1794, broke down his influence and dashed all the plans and prospects of those who had become connected with him. The consequences were disastrous to Gen. Clark. He was left standing blank, resourceless, aimless, in the wilder- ness, with a few troops here and there on the Indian side of the line, whom the power of his name had brought together, but whose destined field of employment was now abruptly taken away. There they were on his hands, awaiting his orders and expecting the fulfillment of his promises, and the desperate fortunes and wreckless character of most of them strongly appealed to him to engage them in some other career in lien of that just closed against them, even though it should be one still more irregular and exception- able.
It was under these untoward circumstances consequent on the sudden wreck and abandonment, in the South at least, of the Genet scheme, that Gen. Clark and his men in May, 1794, began to tarn their thoughts upon the Indian territory
* Pickett's History of Alabama, Vol. 2, p. 152, 153; Foreign Relations, Fol. 1, 455, 458, 459.
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where already they saw themselves quartered in arms. Nor did they think long before they took the overstrong resolu- tion of seizing upon the country and setting up for them- selves there; with an independent Government of their own creation,-the rich Indian lands being the tempting prize on which they relied to attract the needful men and means to their standard. In taking this step they were sensible of no patriotic scruples or impediments ; for, to a man, they regarded the country as already lost to Georgia by the per- petual national guarantee that had in the New York treaty been made of it to her Indian enemies, and by the State's . seemingly settled acquiescense in that guarantee. Thus acquitted to their own minds, they proceeded gravely and with all due form in their new movement of government- making, unabashed by the contrast between the grandeur of the thing they were attempting, and the pettiness of their numbers and resources. A written constitution was adopted; Gen. Clark was chosen civil and military chief, and the members of a body politic under the name of "The Com- mittee of Safety" were chosen to exercise along with him law- making and other sovereign functions. Whether any name, or what name was bestowed on the infant State, or whether it expired without baptism, no record or tradition remains to tell. Nor is there any copy of the Constitution now to be found. But in the 1st volume of the American State Papers, on Indian Affairs, there is preserved a letter of Gen. Clark's, to the Committee of Safety, dated at Fort Advance, the 5th day of September, 1794, which places beyond doubt, the adoption of the Constitution and the other facts of organization as above stated .*
Thus ended Gen. Clark's connection with Genet's project for the invasion of the Spanish provinces ; and thus it became changed into a suddenly conceived scheme of seizing on the Indian lands, on which he found himself quartered, and erecting there a new trans-Oconee State of his own and
*American State Papers, Indian Affairs, Vol. 1, pp. 500-501.
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his men's. It is clear that in pursuing this course he acted under strong duress. The French impulse and support un- der which he had thus far been proceeding, had all at once failed him ; French means, to which he had all along been beholden, had stopped and were no longer at his bidding. Consequently, French ends could no longer be consulted by him, and the new turn he gave to things, far from being a wanton, was a logical conduct on his part. It was the nat- ural glancing in a new and unintended direction of a ball that had been otherwise launched at first, but which by an intervening obstacle had been thwarted and turned from its original aim towards another object.
The development which has now been given of the course and ending of the Genet affair in the South and of the springing upof the socalled Oconee rebellion therefrom, shows how widely both those matters are misunderstood and mis- told in Stevens' History of Georgia. In that work the facts are strangely transposed and misarranged. The Oconee affair is related as having preceded and led to Gen. Clark's engaging in the French project, and this French project is set forth not as having given birth to the Oconee attempt, but as having been itself a misborn, profligate offspring therefrom .* Such dislocation and misplacement of facts is tantamount in the effect to gross misstatement and works not less wrong to Gen. Clark than to chronology. For al- though he cannot be pronounced free from blame for his connection with those affairs, yet the difference is vast in every point of view, moral, political, patriotic, between his having become involved in them in the manner I have de- tailed, and that charged by the historian, who represents the Oconee part of his conduct as an orignal, wanton aggression upon Indian rights and territory, carrying with it rebellion towards Georgia and the United States, and the French part of it as a lawless, fillibustering enterprise, into which he had desperately flung himself after his character, fortunes
'Stevens' History of Georgia, Vol. 2, . p440, 405, 406.
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and prospects had been already deeply damaged by the Oconee criminality.
A very little attention to dates and the actual order of events would have prevented this harsh, wrong treatment of Gen. Clark. Let us see: Genet arrived in this country in the Spring of 1793. He commenced his intrigues imme- diately, and it was not long before we find Gen. Clark con- nected with him, busied in fitting out and freighting boats on the Ohio with warlike stores, in receiving and dispensing French funds and commissions, and concentrating armed men under the name of the French Legion beyond the Alta- maha and Oconee on Indian soil; the same being also claimed as foreign soil, in order to give a pretext for saying that the preparations there made were no violation of the territory and neutrality of the United States .* Now towards these lawless doings the authorities and people of Georgia evinced no displeasure for many months,- none, indeed, so long as they wore only a French charac- ter and were marked by only a French destination against the Spanish provinces. But when, upon the miscarriage of the Genet project in 1794, that character and destination were exchanged for an aggressive seizure of Georgia's In- dian territory,-then for the first time popular feeling began to rise against Gen. Clark. Gov. Matthews began then to see there was something wrong in his proceedings, and be- thought himself of interfering and of denouncing and ar- resting what he was doing. The result was that before the end of autumn the whole Oconee scheme was crushed by the arm of Georgia, prompted and upheld by Washington, as the French Genet scheme had months before been defeated by the arm of Washington alone.
And then upon the back of all and as a clinching disproof if any were needed, comes the insuperable, silencing fact of the poverty of Gen. Clark and his Oconce adherents. It is notorious that they were poor, (as indeed were the people of Georgia generally at that day, though far less so than now)
*American State Papers, Foreign Relations, Vol. 1, p. 311.
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altogether too poor to have made it possible for him and his followers and supporters ever to have set on foot by any means of their own such an enterprise as this was ; an enter- prise involving from the outset an Indian war and a heavy outlay. Whence it is apparent from the very impossibility. of the thing, that it would not have been started at all but for the French means and preparations that were on hand for another very different purpose, and which, upon the failure of that purpose, were readily convertible to this new object.
Having set forth thus fully the manner of Gen. Clark's becoming involved in these, the only reprehensible affairs of his life, we feel warranted in pronouncing it such as must greatly soften censure, and conciliate kindly feelings towards him. And more especially in relation to that part of his conduct in which he was implicated with Genet and his schemes, may it be claimed that the bare statement of the facts is all that his case needs. To add any elaborate apology and vindication would be idle and supererogatory. For in that whole matter he but acted in sympathy and accordance with a powerful and certainly not discreditable national feel- ing of his day ; a feeling fiercely inflamed against despotism and in favor of liberty and France. And into whatever of mistake or fault he and his abetting countrymen may have fallen, it was error rather of degree than of principle. The undue lengths to which they allowed themselves to be transported were but the pardonable result of the over- ardent French enthusiasm then prevalent, and have long since been condoned by the freedom-loving part of mankind as belonging to that class of things in which, although Governments are obliged to frown and fulininate, yet history and opinion delight to be gracious and hasten to acquit, propitiated by the nobleness and magnanimity of which they savor and which shed a tinge of honor on human nature even in its lapses and misdeeds.
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SECTION III.
But as no such proud palliation, closely akin to praise itself, can be pleaded for his Oconee doings, it behooves us to give them some further attention, from whence it will be seen that his memory so far from suffering by a strict scru- tiny here will, on the contrary, come out therefrom cleared of much of obloquy and misconception,-cleared sufficiently at least to save from historic blight the rich wreath of honor, fame and public gratitude with which a life of heroic, self- sacrificing services to his country had entwined his brow.
I will not here insist again on the casual and almost coer- cive, involuntary manner in which he was led into that Oconee fault. Enough has been said on that topic-enough to show that the way and manner were such as greatly to lighten whatever blame there was. But somewhat else re- mains that makes in his favor; other facts and considerations there are which, although perhaps only apologetic in their nature, nevertheless weigh strongly for him. Let us look at them as they have come down to us and in the light of the times in which they occurred, rather than in the altered hue which the changing circumstances and opinions of four- score years may have imparted to them.
Then, as we have already shown in the preceding articles, violent animosity had long prevailed between the Creek In- dians and Georgia. They became during the Revolutionary war our bitter enemies and the allies of the British. Van- quished in that great conflict, they entered at its close into a treaty of peace, friendship and territorial cession with us at Augusta in 1783, whereby we became the absolute owners of the Oconee country, which, however, we were not allowed to enjoy in peace. For they kept no faith, and during the very next year, not only raised the warwhoop again, but rushed into a Spanish alliance in order to strengthen them- selves in their hostilities. Further, also, we have seen that in the course of another year they composed this war by entering into another treaty, that of Galphinton, by
عد .
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which another large cession of land being made, the Tallas- see country became ours. Both at Augusta and Galphinton General Clark was one of the commissioners on the part of the State, and as such was a negotiator and signer of both these highly important treaties. In seeking and obtaining the Tallassee cession, he and our other leading men who cooperated with him, were less actuated by the prevailing land-greed of that period than by a sagacious statemanship , that looked to the means of a permanent preservation of peace with the Indians, which they knew could only be effected by cutting them off by a wide interval of territory, from Spanish neighborhood and instigation. Long after- wards, at the treaty of Fort Jackson in 1814, Gen. Jackson avowed himself governed by precisely the same policy in forcing the conquered Creeks to surrender a wide strip em- bracing this very Tallassee region, and stretching from Wayne and Camden counties to the Chattahoochee, all along the line of what was then still the Spanish province of East Florida. But that very policy of isolation from Spanish in- fluence which Gen. Clark and all Georgia had so much at heart in 1785, and which made the Tallassee cession so im- portant in their eyes, rendered it at the same time extremely obnoxious to the Spaniards, who consequently exerted their influence to make it odious to the Indians and to stimulate them to fiercer warfare than ever against us, indeed, to make it impossible there ever should be peace without the retro- cession of that country. And so, notwithstanding the Gal- phinton treaty, and yet another hollow peace signed at Shoulderbone in November, 1786, the war ceased not, but was continued and kept up by the Indians with a virulence that prevented even any attempt at pacification from being at any time afterwards made between them and the Georgians.
In this state things were when the new Government of the United States was first launched in 1789, and Washing -. ton was called to the helm. His attention was very soon claimed by this war. On the 6th of the ensuing July,
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in a report made to him by his Secretary of War, Gen. Knox, it is emphatically noticed as "a serious war in which Georgia was engaged with the Creek Indians, that might become so combined and extended as to require the interfer- ence of the United States."* 'Up to this period all affairs whether of peace or war, and all treaties and negotiations with the Creek nation had been, under the old Confederation, left almost wholly to be managed by Georgia as a sort of peculium of her's-and the rather because all of that tribe to be found within the United States were located on the chartered soil of Georgia. But all this peculium of the State was now at an end. It terminated by the new national Government assuming to itself an exclusive and unlimited control over all Indian affairs and Indian territory, whether within a State's chartered limits or not. This it did under its war-making, its treaty-making and its commerce regula- ting powers, and by a stretch in construing the same, to which the people of Georgia never became heartily recon- ciled, but again and again protested against it by both word and deed as long as any Indian occupancy existed within her limits. The men that witnessed and took part in the bitter, fearful quarreling that grew up eventually out of this question of power over Indian matters, and at length got to be chronic between the State and the general Govern- ment, are now nearly all gone. But as long as any of them shall live, it will not be forgotten how intensely General Clark's sentiments on the subject continued to be cherished in Georgia for more than thirty years after his death, nor will there be any lack of a feeling of indulgence towards him in regard to the errors of conduct into which those principles largely helped to hurry him.
This full transference of the whole Indian jurisdiction into Federal hands was practically exemplified in the length to which the oft-mentioned treaty of New York went, buy- ing, as it did from the Creek Indians, a promise of peace
*American State Papers, Indian Affairs, Vol. 1, p. 15.
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at the price of the retrocession of Tallassee and of a perpet- ual guarantee to them by the United States of all their ter- ritory, regardless of the paramount rights and sovereignty of Georgia.
And yet high as was the price thus paid to the Indians for their promise of peace, that promise was not kept. The better and more informed among the chiefs and warriors were, it is true, disposed to keep it, but they were unable to restrain another and a very large portion of their people who, instigated by the Spaniards, and dissatisfied with the treaty of New York, because it did not contain all the con- cessions they wanted, persisted in their hostile incursions and depredations on our exposed frontier.
Such, then, was the posture, in which the war of the Creeks against Georgia stood and presented itself to the view of Gen. Clark in 1794, when the sudden foundering of the Genet scheme left him on their soil in the very embar- rassing and difficult situation which we have above described; and such the circumstances under which he felt that he would be guilty of no wrong towards these savages in treat- ing them as enemies and turning his arms against them as such, since they were still every now and then reeking their hostilities on Georgia in spite of so many treaties of peace, that of New York among the rest. Nor did he feel, either, that he was at all criminal towards the United States in so doing, inasmuch as he was simply disregarding and seek- ing to force to a proper test things, which he fully believed to be unconstitutional in that treaty and in the Congres- sional legislation by which it was supported, namely, the retrocession and perpetual guarantee provisions which it con- tained. And still less did it seem to him that Georgia had any right to be angry at what he was doing, for the reason that by submitting to those injurious treaty provisions, she had in principle and in fact surrendered her territorial rights and sovereignty, and thereby not only abased herself, but despoiled her citizens of their great landed birthright, and consequently was no longer entitled to denounce such
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