USA > Georgia > Miscellanies of Georgia, historical, biographical, descriptive, etc > Part 6
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For he was born to wealth and experienced from the be- ginning of his life all its advantages in one of the best sec- tions of North Carolina, in what was then Bute, now War- ren county, on the confines of the most enlightened and re- fined part of Virginia. Throughout his youth his good op- portunities were well improved. After proper preparation in schools near home, his father sent him, along with his younger brother Joseph, to Princeton College, for the com- pletion of their education. The Revolutionary war interrupted the Institution and his studies, when he was in the Senior Class and almost at the end of his course. So he may be pronounced to have entered on life a young man of accom- plished education, in addition to all the other felicities of his lot. Among other things, it merits to be particularly men- tioned, that he became an excellent master of the French language. This acquirement it was that led to Washing- ton's taking him into his military family to be his medium of correspondence and conversation with the French officers and others with whom he had to have intercourse in that tongue. But his duties on the staff were not merely of this light and literary kind. He braved the campaigns, encoun- tering hardships and participating in battles, showing him- self, though very young, on all occasions worthy of his epaulets and of his honorable relation to his illustrious commander-in-chief.
Judging from his career, he must have been precociously distinguished for talents, address and aptitude for affairs. As early as 1780, when he was but twenty-six years old, North Carolina made him her general agent for obtaining both at home and abroad, all kinds of supplies for her troops. In discharge of which office he made a voyage to St. Eusta- tia, in the West Indies, a small neutral Island, that seems
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to have served the same ends for our ancestors during the Revolutionary war as did Nassau for the Confederate States during the late war of Secession. He was entirely successful in his part of the business, but the merchant ship in which he embarked his purchases, chiefly munitions of war, was captured by the enemy and the supplies lost to the State. Returning home we see him soon representing North Carolina in the Continental Congress, his name first appear- ing on the Journal of that body the 4th of October, 1781. He was continued in this eminent position, by successive re- elections, until the 20th of December, 1786. On the acces- sion of North Carolina to the new Federal Constitution, he was chosen one of her first Senators in the Congress of the United States, where a full term of six years fell to him in the allotment of seats*
It is proper to inention here, that before the new Govern- ment was organized, and whilst he was yet a member of the old Continental Congress, he was detailed, without interfer- ence, however, with his Congressional duties, into another public service of the highest importance, though of a very different nature. It was this : On the close of the Revolu- tionary war, the forming of amicable relations with the va- rious Indian tribes in every direction around the United States, became a matter of the greatest and most pressing interest. Congress, taking to itself a concurrent jurisdiction with the States in all Indian matters, appointed Col. Haw- kins as one of its Commissioners plenipotentiary, to be sent for the purpose of opening friendly negotiation with the four great Southern tribes, the Creeks, the Cherokees, the Choc- taws and the Chickasaws. With the three last named tribes the commissioners succeeded in negotiating satisfactory trea- ties whereby they entered into peace and friendship with the United States, and placed themselves under their protection to the exclusion of every other nation or sovereign, and gave to Congress the sole power of regulating trade with them
*Spark's Life and Writings of Washington, Vol. 12, p. 421, 431.
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The attempt to ne-
and managing their affairs generally .* gotiate a treaty with the Creeks proved abortive from many causes, at the bottom of which lay their entanglement with Spain by the treaty of Pensacola, and their difficulties with Georgia, which had the effect of keeping them aloof in a hostile mood, until that master stroke of Washington in 1790, which eventuated in the treaty of New York, by which the Creeks placed themselves in like relations to us with the other three tribes.
Col. Hawkins' senatorial term ended on the 4th of March, 1795. Before its expiration Washington, who had witnessed with regret, that the treaty of New York had only partially produced the fruits of peace expected from it, but who now saw his anxious policy of thorough Indian pacification verg- ing towards full triumph, fixed his eyes on the long kuown, well tried North Carolina Senator, as the fittest man to take charge of the well-advanced work of conciliation, and then, also, after it should be wound up auspiciously, to crown and secure it by becoming the permanent agent for Indian af- fairs among the Creeks.
Col. Hawkins' family, one of the most numerous, influen- tial and ambitious in his State, was very averse to his em- bracing such views. Wheeler, in his history of North Caro- lina, to whom I am indebted for many interesting things in this sketch, is emphatic upon their opposition,t for which several good reasons are given, such as his wealth, his high education and culture, his great advantages of family and social and political position, the strong hold he already pos- sessed in North Carolina, his flattering future there, &c., &c. The historian, however, does not even attempt any reasons why all these considerations failed to prevent him from yielding to Washington's wishes. And yet, these reasons, at even this distant day, may be easily divined. Col. Haw- kins, as we have seen, had been much among the Indians
* See these Treaties in the Appendix to Watkin's Digest and Marbury & Craw- ford's Digest of the Laws of Georgia.
+Sce Title " Warren County."
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officially ; he had penetrated the mighty forests which hid them, and seen and observed them amid their vast unculti- vated woods ; he had been brought in close contact and con- verse with them under circumstances which presented them in their most impressive points of view. He had thus got- ten to feel deeply interested in them and to be strongly af- fected by that Indian fascination which thousands, both be- fore and after him, have experienced, without being able to understand and interpret it. Whatever it may be, or how- ever it may be explained, it is certainly something so pow- erful and touching, as hardly ever to die away wholly from minds upon which it has once laid its spell :- And particu- larly in the case of such noble savage races as the Creeks and Cherokees, it always generated a feeling of the most lively sort in all who happened to become well acquainted with them in a kindly way in their own beautiful country. Behold here the true, though subtle cause of those feelings and that bias of mind which mainly actuated Col. Hawkins in accepting the Creek Agency, and not only in accepting it, but in making its life-long duties a labor of love to him and a source of high moral and intellectual occupation and en- joyment. It was this generous, intense fitness of the soul to the task on which he entered which, added to his other happy qualifications, made him such a wonderful exemplar of what an United States Agent and proconsul should be, for the greatest, proudest, most warlike and jealous of all our Indian tribes.
His coup de 'essai in this new service was the treaty of Col- raine, negotiated in 1796, and which, also, as we have seen, was a coup de maitre. It was a much needed supplement to the treaty of New York, curing entirely all the wounds which, notwithstanding that treaty, had continued, more or less, to bleed and fester. At this point then began, and thus propitiously opened, Col. Hawkins' long, benign and exceedingly responsible official career, in connection with that formidable, but at length conciliated Indian people, with whose history his name was about to become identified in a manner so honorable to himself and to human nature.
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He had a jurisdiction which, in the extent of territory it embraced, was scarcely less than imperial. Starting from the St. Mary's, far down towards the sea, the line ran di- rectly across to the Altamaha, dividing the Tallassee coun- try from the seaboard counties of Georgia. On striking the Altamaha, it turned up and along the western bank of that river and the Oconee, to the High Shoals of the Apallachy, where it intersected the Cherokee line ; then turning west- wardly, it followed that line through Georgia and Alabama till the Choctaw line was reachedin Mississippi ; then south- erly, down that line to the 31st parallel; then along that parallel to the Chattahoochee; thence to that river's junction with the Flint, thence to the head of the St. Marys, and thence along that stream to the point of beginning. An im- mense region than which, as a whole, there is none finer under the sun, stretching more than four hundred miles from East to West and two hundred from North to Sonth. This wide and greatly favored region became thence forward the scene of his labors, and to it and nature's unsophisticated children who roamed over it, and to all his duties to them and to the neighboring civilized people, he at once applied himself with that high moral sense and generous solicitude which noble minds always feel for great interests committed to their charge. From the outset he studied the people and their country, and accomplished himself in all knowledge appertaining to the one and the other. And here the ad- vantages, growing out of his fine early education and out of the intellectual tastes, quickness and inquisitivenesss which were its fruits, stood out to view and served him in double stead, prompting and enabling him to become at once more thoroughly and variously qualified for the multiform duties of his station, and availing him also as a source of private enjoyment and mental support and comfort in his self- decreed official exile. Nor was it with the mind only that he labored, but with the pen also, and so perseveringly as to leave behind him a great amount of manuscripts concerning he Creeks and the Creek country. Of these manuscripts,
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to which the public of that day attached great importance, and not without cause, judging from such small published ·parts as have fallen under my eye,-a large portion perished in the burning of his house soon after his death. Another large portion escaped the flames and were afterwards confi- ded to the Georgia Historical Society. But the great interest they once excited has long since become extinct, having gradually sunk along with the melancholy fortunes of the rude and remarkable people to whom and to whose coun- try those writings relate. Yet may it not be, that ran- sacked and studied hereafter in distant future times, they will furnish to some child of genius, yet to be born, much of material and inspiration for an immortal Indian epic of which the world will never tire.
Under the faithful proconsular sway of Col. Hawkins, the Creek Indians enjoyed, for sixteen years, unbroken peace among themselves and with their neighbors, and also what- soever other blessings were possible to the savage state, which it was his study gradually to ameliorate. To this end he spared no pains. Much was done to initiate, instruct and encourage them in the lower and most indispensable parts of civilization. Pasturage was brought into use, agriculture also, to some extent, both together supplanting considerably among them their previous entire reliance for food on hunt- ing, fishing and wild fruits. To the better and more secure modes of obtaining a livelihood which civilization offers, he sought to win them by example as well as by precept. He brought his slaves from North Carolina, and under the right conceded to his office, he opened and cultivated a large plan- tation at the Agency on Flint river, making immense crops of corn and other provisions. He also reared great herds of cattle and swine, and having thus always abundance of meat and bread, he was enabled to practice habitually towards the Indians, a profuse, though coarse, hospitality and be- nevolence, which gained their hearts and bound them to him by ties as loyal and touching as those of old feudal allegi- ance and devotion. There was something in the vast scale
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and simple, primitive management of these, his farming and stock-raising interests, that carries the mind back to the grand, princely, pastoral patriarchy of the Old Testament- to Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and Job. For food his herds roamed the boundless forests and grew fat upon the caney bottoms and grass-bearing uplands, and the mast that fell from the trees, costing him nothing, save their marking, branding, salting and minding, services well per- formed by his faithful negroes and their Indian assistants. The sanctity with which the Indians, throughout the nation, regarded his cattle, was a beautiful trait in their relations to him. Whatever bore his mark or brand, was everywhere absolutely safe. He often had as many as five hundred calves at a time, to separate which from their dams, Flint river was used as a dividing fence, across which, that it might be used in this manner, he built a bridge, with a gate at each end. There of evenings at that bridge's western end, hundreds of lowing cows, returned from their day's wild pasturing, moaned wistfully to as many answering calves bleating from its eastern extremity. For he repudiated the lazy policy which to this day marks herdsmen as a class, who with great droves of cattle and calves, are strangers to the luxuries of butter and milk. His milk was measured by barrels and churned by machinery, and great were the out- comes,-yet not more than enough for his vast hospitality to the Indians and white folks, and his regal munificence to his negroes. Had the great pastoral bards of antiquity not sung and died before his day, elated, they would have seized upon these scenes and celebrated them in their finest strains as more wonderous, grandly rural and baronial, than aught in all the charming bucolics they have left us.
But at length adverse circumstances and influences arose so powerful that it was impossible for Col. Hawkins with all his address and weight of authority among the Indians to main- tain peace in the nation. The war of 1812, between this country and England, had been portentously brewing for a long time before it actually broke out. Seeing its approach,
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Great Britain, through her numerous agents and emissaries among the Indians, by liberal largesses and supplies of arms to them, and by whatever other means were at her command in her neighboring Canadian provinces, had been for several years tampering with the North Western tribes, and foment- ing among them a hostile feeling towards the United States. As soon as the requisite success had been attained on this border, she directed her attention to the Southern and West- ern tribes, and began her machinations among them also. The great argument by which she sought to delude and in- cite them was, that by uniting their own arms with the British, the tide of American aggression, which was rapidly dispossessing them of their lands and driving them further and further to the West, might be stayed and even made to recoil on the aggressors. Her real object, however, was to get well within her grasp and to brandish over us the thun- derbolts of a terrific Indian war, held in hand and ready to be hurled upon our whole thousand miles of exposed fron- tier from the lakes to Florida, in the hope on her part that we thereby might be deterred from declaring war against her at a time when she was already so sorely pressed by Bonaparte and the French. Such was the view with which she conceived and prompted the famous incendiary mission of the celebrated Shawnee Chief, Tecumseh, and his brother, the Prophet, to the Southern tribes in 1811 .* They had little or no success, however, with the Cherokees, Choctaws and Chickasaws. But better omens awaited them among the Creeks,-a thing partly owing to the greater residuum of suppressed enmity towards us that still rankled in that tribe, as also to their naturally more warlike and ferocious character ; partly, likewise, because Tecumseh and the Prophet were of Creek blood and extraction, their father and mother having with their little children migrated in 1767 from the heart of the Creek countryf to the Northwest,
" American State Papers, Indian Affairs, Vol. 1, p. 500 ; Pickett's History of Alabama, Vol. 2, p. 242.
Pickett's History, Vol. 2, p. 241.
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where Tecumseh himself was soon after born, who, however, when he grew up made a visit of two years to his ancestral land and people. The consequence was that when he ar- rived among them on his mission of mischief in 1811, he became quickly master of their sympathies as he already was of their language.
He reached Tuckabatchee, the Creek capital and the seat of the Big Warrior, whilst Col. Hawkins was there holding a grand council of the nation. Keeping dark as to the object of his coming until Col. Hawkins had departed, he then disclosed his errand with that fierce Indian eloquence for which he was famous, and with all the most impressive collateral solemnities of savage superstition and patriotism. By these means and the powerful aid of that most extraordinary Indian religionist and fanatic, his brother, the Prophet, who accompanied him with an impos- ing retinue, it is not wonderful that he succeeded in kindling a flame among the Creeks which was to be nursed and kept smouldering until after the happening of war between the United States and Great Britain, when at some proper mo- ment and given signal, that flame was to burst forth into one vast conflagration along our whole frontier.
It is a proof both of the powerful ascendant Col. Hawkins had acquired over the wild people among whom he dwelt, and with whom he had to deal, and of his great ability and fitness for the position he had so long filled among them, that although the anticipated war between England and the United States broke out and involved the Indians the very next year ; yet a large portion of the Creek territory, (all that part bordering on Georgia and extending west from the Ocmulgee to the Chattahoochee,) never became its actual seat, and consequently that our long line of frontier settle- ments never suffered a whit more than the interior parts of the State from the war's perils and alarms. This happy exemption was due almost wholly to the fact that Col. Hawkins' official seat and residence having been first on the Ocmulgee at the beautiful site opposite to Macon which still bears his name, and afterwards on the Flint river at the
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place still called the Old Agency, his personal influence, intercourse and acquaintance with the Indians on the Geor- gia side of their country was much greater and impressed its effects more strongly than farther to the West. Hence the Indians on the eastern side remained pacific, and not only so, but they became our actual friends and allies. For the purpose of protecting and keeping them secure and steady in this adherence, the friendly warriors were, on the advice of Col. Hawkins, organized into a regiment of which he became the titular Colonel, although he never took the field, deeming it better to devolve the actual command upon the noble and some years afterwards ill-fated Chief, William McIntosh,* who, like the great McGillivray, was only of the half blood in the civilization of lineage, but more than the whole blood in the better and loftier traits that do honor to man's nature.
The result of all these things was that the few hostile In- dians who were scattered through this friendly eastern sec- tion of their country, disappeared and merged themselves with the more congenial belligerent elements in the middle and western parts of the nation,-on the waters of the Coosa, Tallapoosa and Alabama. There concentrated and fierce they stood at bay and fought and fell in many a battle under the heavy, rapid blows of that predestined conqueror of their race, Gen. Jackson, the second of that great heroic name in Southern history, where he stands and will ever stand towering and resplendent in the midst with him of Georgia and him of Virginia close touching and illustrious on either side.
Gen. Jackson having brought this great Southern Indian war to a close early in 1814, was not allowed to pause in his career. The Government wanted his genius, his energy and his indomitable will on another and a much grander and more important theatre near the mouth of the Missis- sippi. He went, and in the short, glorious campaign of New Orleans, gave the finishing stroke to the war with
* Wheeler's North Carolina, title, Warren County.
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Great Britain, as he had already just done to that with her deluded savage allies. But before going to gather these brighter laurels, he received at Fort Jackson, near the con- fluence of the Coosa and Tallapoosa, the absolute surrender and submission of the crushed and starving Creek nation. There with his victor's sword, and in conformity with com- mands from Washington city, he dictated the terms of a treaty of peace and marked out narrower bounds to the vanquished and all their tribe. How much was taken from them and how little was left to them constitutes one of the most striking and consequential events in our Indian and Anglo-American annals. From that time the prowess, the spirits and the prospects of the long redoubtable Creek nation were broken forever. The capitulation of Fort Jackson was its death-knell and tomb. Even the three great friendly Chiefs, the Big Warrior, the Little Prince, and McIntosh were cut to the heart by this deep incision of a sword whose every gleam they had been wont to watch with loyal gaze and honor with soldierly obedience, though mar- shalling them into the jaws of danger and death. Col. Hawkins was profoundly saddened at the hard, wretched fate of those whom he had long cherished as if they were his children. A cruel dart too entered his bosom from the lips of the Big Warrior,* whom the Colonel was well known to have regarded as one of nature's great men and the ablest of Indian statesmen. The stern, long confiding chief mourn- fully upbraided him for having persuaded himself and so
"The name of Big Warrior was given him on account of his great size. He was the only corpulent full blooded Indian I ever saw, yet he was not so cor- pulent as to be either unweildly or ungainly. In fact his corpulency added to the magnificence of his appearance. Ilis person and looks were in a high de- gree grand and imposing. Tustenuggec Thlucco, was his Indian name. He and Col. Hawkins first met at the treaty of Colraine in 1796, and were great friends down to the time of the treaty of Fort Jackson. He was probably the most enlightened and civilized man of the full Indian blood the Creek uation ever produced. He was wealthy and a lover of wealth. He cultivated a fine plantation with his seventy or eighty negroes, near Tuckabatchee, where he lived in a good house, furnished in a plain, civilized style.
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many of his chiefs and people to stand neutral in the war or take part in it against their country. For years after- wards the story used to be told how the big tears stood in the aged Agent's eyes as he listened in silence to a reproach which he felt was at once undeserved and unanswerable.
Judging from Wheeler's history, it would seem that North Carolina was disposed to claim Col. Hawkins as not only peculiarly but exclusively her own. But his career, his la- bors and his merits are too broad, diverse and manifold and illustrate too many scenes and subjects of national impor- tance with which he was connected, to admit of such appro- priation. His fame is as well the property of Georgia, of the Creek nation and of the United States at large as of North Carolina. They all rush to compete with his mother- land and to insist on having along with her a share in such a man, to whom they each owe so much of gratitude. In fact the more he is contemplated, the larger and more ca- tholic becomes his hold on the heart, and we end by feeling that all mankind, civilized and savage, have a right to rise up and exclaim :- He is ours also.
1
PART II.
1
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CHAPTER I .- MIDDLE GEORGIA.
CHAPTER II .- MIDDLE GEORGIA (continued) AND THE NEGRO.
CHAPTER III .- MIDDLE GEORGIA (continued) AND THE LAND LOTTERY SYSTEM.
CHAPTER IV .- THE PINE MOUNTAIN.
CHAPTER V .- KING'S GAP AND KING'S TRAILS.
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