Miscellanies of Georgia
James F. Meegan, Atlanta 1874

Colonel Hawkins

One morning in the month of June, 1816, during the summer vacation of Mt. Zion Academy, being on a visit to my venerated grandfather, I was sitting listless and musing alone with him in his front porch, gazing through the sycamores that surrounded the house across the broad, cleanly cultivated fields of cotton and corn that sloped away to the south; their long, gentle slant terminated by the "verdrous wall" of towering primeval trees that had been left to stand, gorgeously fringing all that side of the plantation for a mile or more up and down Fort Creek. The sun was nearing the meridian. It was the day, and a little after the hour, for the mail rider to pass on his weekly trip from Milledgeville to Greensboro, and my grandfather having already sent and gotten his newspaper from the tree box on the roadside, was'engaged in reading it, - the great old Georgia Journal, founded by the Grantland brothers, which he enjoyed the more because they were Virginians, from Richmond to boot, editorial elves of the renowned Thos. Ritchie. He had not read long before he suddenly stopped, and, letting down the paper from his eyes said, "Col. Hawkins is dead." The tone was not as if the words were meant for me or for anybody.

They sounded rather like the unconscious, involuntary utterance of the soul to the conscious heavens and earth. All nature seemed to lend her voice to his words and to speak out in unison: "Col. Hawkins is dead." Letting his newspaper drop to his lap and resting his elbow on the arm of his chair, he bowed his head upon his half open palm and sat in silence, neither reading any more then nor speaking another word. I had all my life been hearing of Col. Hawkins, and had become familiar with his name as important in some way in connection with the Indians, but in what way I had never well understood. But it was now evident to me that he who was then resting in his fresh grave in the midst of the Indian wilderness on. that little knoll by Flint river, was a greater and more valuable man than I had dreamed; that my grandfather certainly thought greatly and highly of him, - and to me what my grandfather thought was a measure and standard both of men and things. So God ordains to him who is early left to grow up an orphan boy. Seeing how much he was affected, - naturally a strong impression was made on me. From that moment the germ of a deep, undying interest in relation to Col. Hawkins was implanted in my mind, an interest more than justified by subsequent life long gleanings of information in regard to him, and which is still strong enough to make it impossible for me to pass finally away from the commingled affairs of Georgia and the Creek nation without commemorating him and doing him homage.

Large indeed were the claims of Col. Hawkins to be loved and honored all over Georgia, and especially along the Oconee river on both sides, and between the Oconee and the Ocmulgee. His services to our people had run through a long period and were of the most signal character. At the time of his death, it was for some twenty years that he had been occupying officially between Georgia and the Indians what may almost be called a heavenly, mediatorial relation, faithfully devoting himself as peace-maker, peace-preserver and peace-restorer, all that time between the two mutually distrustful and bitterly divided races. Of this most arduous, delicate and sometimes dangerous duty, he had acquitted himself with an assiduity and sagacity, with an integrity, ability and success that had obtained for him boundless confidence and respect from both sides and rendered him dear and illustrious alike to civilized men and savages from the Savannah river to the Ohio and the Mississippi.

For although he was the special resident Agent for the Creek tribe only, yet such was Washington's estimate of him that he made him General Superintendent also of all the tribes south of the Ohio; hence he became a well known and exceedingly important man to them all. It was a noble expansive humanity that- first planted him among, the Indians and kept him there all his life. He went and he remained among them an angel of kindness, an apostle of conciliation, friendship and good will. Unlike McGillivray, who belonged solely and intensely to the Indians in his feelings and actions, and with whom enmity to Georgia was a capital virtue, - unlike Elijah Clark, who was wholly Georgian, and was to Georgia, against the Indians, very much what McGillivray was to the Indians against Georgia, - their bitter, most dreaded, effective foe, - Benj. Hawkins' career was on and along a middle line, as it were, his part that of at once a parental guardian and protector of the Indians and a common friend and conscientious arbiter between them and their civilized neighbors. It is a fact most honorable to him, that in allowing himself to be appointed to this rather unique and very trying and difficult station, Col. Hawkins was actuated in no degree by the meaner motives by which men are too apt to be governed. Nothing of a money-loving, mercenary sort entered into his reasons. It was neither penury or embarrassment in his affairs, or thirst for wealth, or a chain of fortuitous circumstances, or the loss or want of prospects satisfactory to his ambition elsewhere, that operated upon him. It was his own large, man-embracing nature, and a generous passion to be useful, aye, beneficient to his kind, that impelled him. And he rises inestimably in our view, when we consider how much he gave up, what sacrifices he made to this feeling.

Sacrifices requisite in no branch of the public service so much as in that of Indian Agency, and which in Col. Hawkin's particulalr case, imparted to his conduct not a little the character of a romantic, sublimated benevolence and martyr like self-devotion,- nothing short of which could have moved him in his actual circumstances to quit civilized habitation and society, and to bury himself for life in remote savage woods, and among still more savage people, from whose midst he never again emerged.

For he was born to wealth and experienced from the beginning of his life all its advantages in one of the best sections of North Carolina, in what was then Bute, now Warren county, on the confines of the most enlightened and refined part of Virginia. Throughout his youth his good opportunities 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 completion 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 accomplished education, in addition to all the other felicities of his lot. Among other things, it merits to be particularly mentioned, that he became an excellent master of the French language. This acquirement it was that led to Washington'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, encountering hardships and participating in battles, showing himself, 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. Eustatia, in the West Indies, a small neutral Island, that seems 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 appearing on the Journal of that body the 4th of October, 1781.

He was continued in this eminent position, by successive reelections, until the 20th of December, 1786. On the accession of North Carolina to the new Federal Constitution, he was chosen one of her first Senators in the Congress of the United States, where at full term of six years fell to him in the allotment of seats.

It is proper to mention here, that before the new Government was organized, and whilst he was yet a member of the old Continental Congress, he was detailed, without interference, 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 Revolutionary war, the forging, of amicable relations with the various 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. Hawkins 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 Choctaws and the Chickasaws. With the three last named tribes the commissioners succeeded in negotiating satisfactory treaties 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 and managing their affairs generally. The attempt to negotiate 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 verging towards full triumph, fixed his eyes on the long known, 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 affairs among the Creeks.

Col. Hawkins' family, one of the most numerous, influential and ambitious in his State, was very averse to his embracing such views. Wheeler, in his history of North Carolina, to whom I am indebted for many interesting things in this sketch, is emphatic upon their opposition, 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 possessed 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. Hawkins, as we have seen, had been much among the Indians officially; he had penetrated the mighty forests which hid them, and seen and observed them amid their vast uncultivated woods; he had been brought in close contact and converse with them under circumstances which presented them in their most impressive points of view. He had thus gotten 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 powerful and touching, as hardly ever to die away wholly from minds upon which it has once laid its spell:- And particularly 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.

 

See also:
Creek Delegation to the Governor, 1811

 

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