COLONEL HAWKINS. 71

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
Melntosh,* 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.



72 COLONEL HAWKINS.

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 Mclntosh 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. His person and looks were in a high de-
gree grand and imposing. Tustenuggee 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 nation
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.



COLONEL HAWKINS. 73

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
tho 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.



PART II.



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.
CHAPTER VI. THE PINE BARREN SPECULATION

IN 1794, 1795.
CHAPTER VII. THE YAZOO FRAUD.



CHAIPTER I.



MIDDLE GEORGIA.

We have seen in treating of the Oconee war how the In-
dians gave the name of Virginians to the hosts of unwelcome
strangers that began to pour into their immemorial hunting
grounds soon after the Revolutionary war, and continued to
come in unceasing swarms until at length they filled up the
whole country to the east of the Oconee river. Nor was the
appellation wrongly given. For it is a fact that this coun-
try was mainly settled up in the first instance hy direct col-
onization from Virginia and, in some parts, from North
Carolina, and not hy theold population of Georgia spreading
out over it. We find evidence in our statute book of the
early attraction of the Virginians thither. As far back as
1783, a petition came from Virginia and was granted by our
Legislature, asking that two hundred thousand acres of
land might be reserved in this region of the State for such
emigrants from Virginia as should wish to settle down in
one solid, homogeneous neighborhood ; which reservation is
noticed and ratified in the Act of 1784, organizing the coun-
ties of Washington and Franklin. This fact, though now
long buried, possesses some historical interest still, as bear-
ing on the important point that the great mass of the first
settlers, who replaced the Indians in this part of Georgia,
came from Virginia, particularly those who established
themselves on the best lands. And they came not scatter-
ing]}' and wide apart, but in quick succeeding throngs,
bringing along with thorn their wives, children and servants,



4 MIDDLE GEOKQIA.

and their household goods and gods, allured by the cheapness
and fertility of the lands, the pleasantness and salubrity of
the climate, the felicity of the seasons, the happy lying and
cotnraodiousness of the country, well wooded, well watered,
with easy wagoning access to the flourishing commercial mart
of Augusta and with, from thence, a fine navigation by the
Savannah river down to the excellent seaport of Savannah,
close upon the ocean ; to all which was superadded the
known aptitude of the country for the peculiar agriculture
to which the Virginians were accustomed. For Whitney,
young, poor, but restless with inborn-ingenuity, hospitably
domesticated in the house of Gen. Greene's widow, near Sa-
vannah, had not yet invented that most wonderful and
beneficent machine, the cotton gin, and the cultivation of
cotton as a commercial commodity was unknown among us,
and tobacco was still the master staple in upper Georgia as
well as in Virginia. There are probably some very ancient
people yet living who remember those tobacco-growing times
and the queer custom of rolling tobacco hogsheads to Au-
gusta and the great rigor of the tobacco inspection ill that
market.

Of the immense preponderance of the immigration from
Virginia over that from all other quarters, some idea may be
formed from the fact that in my native section when I was a
boy, there were scarcely any but very young people who
could claim Georgia or any other part of the world than
Virginia as their birth place. Scattered here and there a
few only were to be found who were born elsewhere out of
Georgia than in Virginia. Washington county, however,
in the limits which it still possessed up to the time of the
present generation, must be set down as being an exception
to this remark. For within those limits that fine old county
was mainly colonized from North Carolina as I have had the
best means of knowing, and my heart will forever attest
what an amiable andgeuerous people they and their descend-
ants were fifty years ago, for a little earlier than then I made
my debut in life among them and lived among them long



MIDDLE GEORGIA. 5

enough to know and love them well and to be loved by them
in return so at least it has always been a satisfaction to me
to feel. Maryland, too, sent a little aid, just enough to
enable it to be said that she bore a part in conquering these
distant wilds. Within my puerile range of knowing, it was
but a single family she sent, poor when they came but des-
tined to great opulence drawn by toil from the liberal earth.
Olten were they called Chesapikers and often in boyish igno-
rance, I wondered why. With such exceptions as these, all
the rest, the great mass of the people, the elderly, the mid-
dle aged, the fully grown and not a few of the very young,
were Virginians born.

And not only had they come from Virginia themselves,
but as the Trojans carried Illium unto Italy, so did
they bring Virginia into Georgia with all her divinities
both of the field and fireside, and they filially preserved
and perpetuated her here, her ideas and opinions, her feel-
ings and principles ; her manners, her customs, her tone
and character as well as her agriculture, her system of
labor and her whole rural economy. Nor was it a small
district only or a few isolated spots that the Virginians thus
overspread and impressed with their own very superior type
of society and civilization, but nearly all the best of the
fair and extensive region lying between the Ogeechee and
the Oconee, and that large part besides of the country be-
tween, the Savannah and the Cgeechee which was originally
comprised in the glorious old pre-revolutionary county of
Wilkes, which having been acquired from the Indians under
the Colonial regime only a very short time before the out-
break of the Revolutionary war, was still very thinly peo-
pled at its close, and presented consequently very strong
attractions fur the best class of emigrants, who came in
troops to those parts of the State where the lands, freed
from the Indian occupancy, were yet wild and unappropri-
ated and, under the old Head Right system, open to the first
comers.

And now here and heretofore (in the course of my writing



6 MIDDLE GEORGIA.

about the Oconee war) I have developed the beginnings of
that famed part of the State, known as Middle Georgia, and
have found and traced its germ, showing whence that germ
came and when, where and how it was first planted here,
and have also shown what hard and perilous fortunes it had
for a long time to encounter from Indian hostilities and incur-
sions, whilst striving to maintain itself and get root and
thrive in its new soil. But triumphing by degrees over all
dangers and drawbacks, and blest at length with favorable
auspices and a long spell of prosperity, it struck wide and
deep into the generous land into which it had been trans-
planted, and flourished apace not only within its early cis-
Oconee limits, but rapidly spread and propagated far beyond
those limits as new opening was from time to time made by
fresh acquisitions of Indian territory : First, from the Oco-
nee to the Ocmulgee in 1802 and 1805 ; then from the
Ocmulgee to Flint river in 1821 ; and finally from Flint
river to the Chattahoochee and our present western bound-
ary in 1825, full forty-nine years ago, when at length the
celebrated Black Belt across the center of the State was com-
plete and Middle Georgia finished.

Already, too, some eleven years earlier, the sword of Gen.
Jackson had achieved a great territorial enlargement for
Georgia on her southern side. For, as we have already had
occasion to tell, by the capitulation at Fort Jackson in 1814,
the Indians were entirely swept off by the besom of con-
quest from the whole Tallassee country, beginning far down
on the St. Mary's in the East and stretching all along the
line of the then Spanish province of East Florida clean to
the Chattahoochee in the West, being that very Tallassee
country for the more easterly portion of which Gen. Clark
and Gen. Twiggs, as we have heretofore seen, had at Gal-
phintou in 1785, concluded a treaty with the Indians ; a
treaty, however, which was not allowed to stand, having
been, as heretofore shown, overslaughed by the treaty of
New York in 17'JO.

How important an extension of her jurisdictional limits



MIDDLE GEORGIA. 7

the State was thus laid under obligations to Gen. Jackson
and his treaty of Fort Jackson for, those who are curious
to know may learn by consulting Early's map of Georgia
published in 1818, where the whole of this new extension
on our South is represented by one great blank space, not
having been at that date yet surveyed by the State and
laid off into counties or demarcations of any kind.

Georgia, by the ab}ve mentioned events, seeing herself
finally rid everywhere of the Creek Indians, began to turn
eager, impatient thoughts to her upper or Northern side
where the Cherokees inhabited, a people who had far out-
stripped all our other aboriginal tribes in the progress to-
wards civilization, and whose extreme, immovable attach-
ment to their ancestral land seemed to place an insuperable
obstacle in the way of our ever acquiring it by peaceful or
humane means. But here again the powerful aid of Gen.
Jackson was exerted in our favor, being rendered this time
in his character and functions as President of the United
States. Before his iron will and inflexible policy, backed
by his despotic influence over Congress and the country, all
opposition had to give way alike among the Indians and
that great mass of the Northern people by whom their cause
was espoused. It is now nearly forty years since, by the
consummation of his measures, the Cherokees were removed
to new homes beyond the Mississippi, and Georgia placed in
undisturbed possession of the fine country they left behind,
with all its mountains and vallies, its rich lands and mines,
its health-giving climate and waters, its charming diversi-
fied scenery and those great commanding advantages of geo-
graphical formation and position which make it the eternal
doorway and key between the Southern Atlantic and the
immense transmontane valley of the Mississippi.

SECTION II.

I have often thought, in these sad latter days, that it was

* something to be thankful for to have lived in this period of

interesting progress and development of Georgia, and to



8 MIDDLE GEORGIA.

have grown up witnessing, from childhood to manly age,
this inspiring expansion of my native land, of which one
effect surely was to impregn my young mind with a rich,
varied store of dearly cherished, ever-living memories con-
cerning the State and what I have seen and known of her,
the value whereof, as a resource of mental comfort and lux-
ury, I have begun to feel more sensibly as I grow older and
become more dependent for my enjoyments on the laid up
treasures and recollections of the past. The past is pecu-
liarly the domain of old age, in which it loves to roam at
large, mustering up the dead whom it has known, reviving
bygone scenes and sights, thoughts and feelings, living over
again its departed manhood, youth and even childhood.
Alas! to how few is such a second, retrospective life ever
accorded ! And how obvious, too, that whether any and
what sort of enjoyment is to be derived therefrom, must de-
pend, in the case of every individual, upon the nature and
character of that past through which he has traveled and by
which his mind has been, as it were, formed, peopled and
furnished. Happy is he who has a past on which he can
strongly draw and find amends for the sorrows and adversi-
ties of the present! To the young, ardent, hopeful; to the
active, sanguine seekers after pleasure, riches, honor; to the
favorites of fortune, who already rejoice in the possession or
assured attainment of their respective objects of desire, this
resource cannot be expected to appear in a very striking
light. But to the aged, whose active career is closed, whose
earthly hopes are ended, and who, moreover, lie prostrate
and helpless under the blows of fortune, it is a resource
second only to the consolations of religion and the concious-
ness of an upright life.

Among all the retrospects on which my mind has long
loved to dwell, retrospects, I mean, having relation to those
successive expansions and that progressive improvement of
my native State, which have, to a great extent, taken place
under my own eyes, as it were, there have been none so
dear and interesting as those which carry me back to the



MIDDLE GEORGIA. 9

earlier and better days of Middle Georgia that Middle
Georgia that was my birth place and has been my life-long
abode, and that, for long, long years, was ever to me as a
large earthly paradise in which 1 always felt myself every-
where at home and in warm sympathy with every thing
around me. And it is still dear and precious to recall her
as she WHS in her primal period and high meridian, al-
though now her glory is gone and she scarce knows her
former sell amidst the staring ruin and mournful depression
which have become her late.

Striking indeed was the spectacle as her fair, ample spaces
presented themselves to view in the several installments
of their acquisition and settlement : At the first,
spreading out in all their unmarred primeval grandeur
and beauty, a vast and towering woodland scene, nature's
ancient, yet ever young, bjuoming work then, passing in
turn one after another, irorn the deep night of barbarism in
which they had lain for unknown ages into the sudden light
and life of high civilization. Elating to witness at the time,
grateful to reYnember ever since, the successive expandings,
the triumphal unfoldings of Georgia in this, her rich middle
belt, her very zone of charms, as exulting she advanced
by bound after bound from East to West, high-strung, hardy,
laborious, "disdaining little delicacies," trampling down ob-
stacles, disregarding hardships; subduing and transforming
rude nature, forests falling before her, the wilderness bud-
ding and blossoming as the rose at her touch, rich crops
springing up all around her, called forth by her industry
from the willing earth. It was the white man with the axe
and the plow, the hammer and the saw, and in all the array
and habiliments of civilization, superseding the Indian in
his hunting shirt and moccasins, with his tomahawk and
scalping knife and his bow and arrows. It was Ceres, with
her garland of golden sheaves, her basket and hoe and her
divine gait and air, putting an end to the reign of Pan and
the Satyrs. And no metamorphosis the world ever saw, or
fiction ever forged, was more beautiful, picturesque and lovely



10 MIDDLE GEORGIA.

than the change that was wrought, and wrought, too, with
a magical ease and suddenness and on a largness of scale
that made the wonderful blend with the beautiful in the
successive panoramas that were presented.

It was a spectacle which will not occur again ; it is one
of those things that has been seen for the last time; it will
never more be repeated. Nature exhausted and insolvent,
as it were, in this regard, has no more Middle Georgias, no
more beautiful, healthful, fertile, well wooded, well watered
Southern uplands to offer wild and inviolate as future con-
quests to Southern industry and civilization ; nor even if she
had, could the other requisite conditions ever be hoped for
again. A mighty, though unavowed revolution, settling
down firmly into permanent bad government, has rendered
them impossible. The maxims and polity of our fathers
have been discarded and in they- stead a senseless, vindic-
tive, prostitute Federal despotism now reigns. Rioting and
rotting in low-minded splendor and profligacy, paralytic and
shrunken on its Southern side, plethoric and bloated on its
Northern, festering with corruption all over, 'it waves its
baleful sceptre over us inflicting on these "delightful pro-
vinces of the Sun" a worse than Oriental fate. Already has
it succeeded in making us from the richest and most prosper-
ous people in the world, the poorest and most helpless.
Already are its accursed effects widely seen and felt upon the
very soil and face of nature, which we behold rapidly relapsing
into uncultivated wastes and dwarf woods of second growth,
requiring a second clearing and reclamation from hard-work-
ing human hands. And how different a work it will be
whenever it shall corne, from that which in bygone days an-
imated the hearts and hands of the sturdy pioneers of this
land in their original reclaiming of it from the wilderness.
How little hopeful, how little elevating and stimulating will
it be in comparison ! How slow and thankless, how drag-
ging and unrewarding 1 And then besides, whence shall
come the hands to do it? We have them not amongst us.
Our whole system of agricultural labor is disorganized and



MIDDLE GEORGIA. 11

our laborers are not only demoralized hut they hug their de-
moralization to their bosoms as the chiefest boon of their
new found freedom. Nor is it strange to those who know
human nature, especially negro nature, that it should be so.
Is there, then, any relief which may be expected from abroad?
Is there any outer quarter to which we may reasonably look
for tho help and reinforcement we need? None whatever.
And most especially never shall we again see such another
migration, such another transplanted civilization, as that
which of yore poured from the bosom of the mother of heroes
and statesmen at a most critical period into the lap of young
Georgia and grew with her growth and spread with her ex-
panding boundaries.

This train of thought brings the mind with force to what
is now and must long be to us the greatest and most mo-
mentous of questions. The question, namely, of the renais-
sance ot Georgia. And first of all, is sheto have a. renaissance?
Is the Phoenix ever to rise from its ashes? Shall Georgia
ever emerge from her ruins? or is it to be her destiny and
that of her sisters of the South, to swell the long dismal cata-
logue of conquered States of ancient and modern times, that
have never risen from the blow that felled them, but contin-
ued to go down, down, till at length they reached a depth
where, hopeless of recovery, they have ever since lain and
seemingly will forever lie, wretched, submissive, debased,
under the horse's hoof, the despot's heel and the brigand's
knife? If such shall not be our lot, it will not be because
fortune is our friend or all history is not against us, but it
will be because we shall work out our salvation from it by
mighty and persevering effort and self-denial. For it will
take both in full measure to rescue and save us. Yes, if
such is not to be our and our children's lot, it will be because
deeply sensible ot the dreadful, impending future, we shall
gird ourselves up like men to war against it at every point
and by every means and with all our strength of body, soul
and mind, resolved to know no rest, no ease, till fate shall be



12 MIDDLE GEORGIA.