Violent Saviors, page 12
Hawkins would supervise other agents among the Cherokees. The forty-two-year-old Hawkins moved to Creek country in 1796 to himself take charge of the Plan of Civilization there.13
Hawkins was fully devoted to the civilization effort. He had previously served as a commissioner to negotiate treaties with the Southern tribes. In 1786, Hawkins had written his friend Thomas Jefferson on how “there is nothing I have more at heart than the preservation of them.”14
In 1800, Hawkins filed a report with the War Department on the aid program after its first four years. As he summarized the report in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in early 1800, the spinning and weaving by the Creeks had clothed three hundred women and children. The livestock program had achieved the raising of one thousand beef cattle and three hundred hogs for the market. In a subsequent letter to Jefferson in 1800, Hawkins promised further details that would show him that “the plan has unquestionably succeeded.”15
On March 1, 1801, as Jefferson was about to be inaugurated president, Hawkins sent him the promised update. He reported that he had established two nurseries of peach trees. Hawkins calculated he had distributed five thousand peach trees from the nurseries since his arrival among the Creeks five years earlier. The Creeks began to accept the peach trees, Hawkins said.16
The War Department had sent Hawkins seventy plows, of which he got the Creeks to use fifty. Hawkins had introduced production of oil from hickory nuts and acorns in 1797. As he wrote in 1801, one trader was on his way to New Orleans to sell 240 gallons of the Creeks’ hickory oil.
Hawkins paid special attention to programs for women. He had delivered in 1801 eighty spinning wheels to the Creek women. Eight looms were in operation, Hawkins said in his report, although white women operated four of them. He noted three Indian women had clothed themselves already with the outputs of the spinning wheels and looms.
Hawkins noted that there were two blacksmiths in Creek country, although they also supplied white customers. He reminded the readers that the Treaty of Colerain in 1796, which Hawkins had negotiated, had promised the Creeks blacksmiths in return for them giving up some of their land.17
Jefferson gave a report on the overall Indian civilization effort to Congress at the end of 1801, attaching Hawkins’s report. “The continued efforts to introduce among them the implements and the practice of husbandry and of the household arts have not been without success,” Jefferson told Congress. The Indians were realizing the superiority of farming to hunting. “Already we are able to announce,” Jefferson enthused, that “instead of that constant diminution of numbers produced by their wars and their wants, some of them begin to experience an increase of population.” Jefferson had blamed the Indians’ population decrease on their backward ways rather than the depredations of white settlers, so the answer was the civilization plan.18
In 1803, Jefferson wrote Hawkins that he was under pressure from the Georgians to deliver yet more Creek land for white settlers. He also noted the Georgians were suspicious that Hawkins was too favorable to the Creeks. Jefferson implored Hawkins to increase his efforts. He had to get the Creeks to give up more land in return for civilizing aid. Hawkins had to persuade the Creeks that this exchange “will be for the good of both” sides.19
In desperation, Hawkins wrote back to Jefferson in 1803 that “success finally is no longer doubtful,” as quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Hawkins’ evidence for this success was rather underwhelming—after seven years in the field, his recommendations on livestock, agriculture, and household manufactures “begin to be the general theme of conversation” among the Creeks. He hoped that the Creeks “will become honest and peaceable neighbors,” and therefore “they can and will spare their superfluous land.” He hoped that one more land cession by the Creeks to Georgians would buy ten or twenty more years of peace “to perfect our plan of civilization.” Hawkins defensively referred Jefferson back to his earlier report that “will shew you the course I have pursued and am pursuing to attain” the goal of Indian civilization.20
This was not exactly a rigorous evaluation of the civilizing effort among the Creeks. In one of history’s first aid debates, the Frenchman Louis LeClerc de Milford emerged as a critic of Hawkins. Milford had lived in Creek country from the 1770s through 1790s. As he pointed out in a book he published in France in 1802, even some of Hawkins’s modest claims of progress were about things that the Creeks were already doing on their own. Despite the frequent emphasis of American leaders on Indians as hunters, many Indian tribes, including the Creeks, had been practicing agriculture for centuries.21
Milford had observed during his time among the Creeks before the plan that they already owned a lot of livestock. As for the famous five thousand peach trees that Hawkins bragged about in his 1801 report, Milford commented sardonically: “The author has no doubt forgotten, or never known, that the Creeks have such an enormous quantity of peach trees that one encounters them at every turn.” Milford’s caustic evaluation of the Hawkins report was that “nothing, or practically nothing, in this article is true.” As is often the fate of aid critics, Milford was ignored.22
Instead of evaluating what the plan had already achieved, Hawkins made claims about what was happening in the present or would happen in the future. Perhaps the modest achievements so far (“three Indian women had clothed themselves”) should be seen as the start of something bigger.
Hawkins was fond of gerunds like “going” or “becoming.” As Hawkins told Jefferson in 1800, “The benevolent plan of the government, is going successfully into operation, among the Creeks.” Jefferson followed suit in his 1801 message to Congress: The Indians “are becoming more and more sensible of the superiority” of farming over hunting.23
Laura Freschi and I in the modern aid debate noted in 2010 how aid defenders sometimes offer a “gerund defense.” Whatever your doubts about how much progress has already happened, the defense suggests, please let me assure you that progress is happening now. You cannot test this in the present; you will only be able to look back on some future date for whether progress had really been happening—at which point I can reassure you with a new gerund that progress is now happening. A gerund remains prominent today in naming the very object of development efforts—the developing countries.24
Thomas Jefferson repeated the gerund defense four years later in his 1805 message to Congress: “Our Indian neighbors are advancing.” Once again, Jefferson reiterated, the Indians “are becoming sensible” of how farming is better than hunting. (And he noted to Congress, as a more tangible accomplishment, that the Creeks did give up the piece of land he had demanded of Hawkins in 1803.25)
Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, would continue the gerund defense four years later in his 1809 State of the Union address. “The just and benevolent system continued toward” the Indians, Madison said, “is more and more advancing habits favorable to their civilization and happiness.”26
The defenses by Jefferson and Madison of their Indian plans seemed to work on some observers. The peripatetic development promoter Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours in 1817 would note how “the excellent Jefferson and his worthy successor Mr. Madison” had had plans to give “the Cherokees greater ease and make them happier.” He shifted into the future tense on whether these plans work: “There will be more Cherokees, and above all happy Cherokees.”27
Another variation on gerunds was Hawkins’s assertion in the 1800 letter to Jefferson that the Creeks “begin to be attentive to the raising of stock.” This is doubly hard to verify—that something is beginning in the present tense, and that what is beginning is an unmeasurable outcome—the attentiveness of the Creeks. Hawkins was quoting himself accurately—he had used the phrase that the Creeks “begin to be attentive to” some part of the civilization plan five times in his 1800 report on the plan to the War Department.28
Perhaps this was because Hawkins could only report more gerunds than results. His intensive town-by-town, household-by-household visits led him only to individual, underwhelming reports like that on his 1799 visit to the town of Hill-au-bee, where he talked to four “half breeds” and to Au-wil-au-gee, the wife of O-pi-o-che-tus-tun-nug-gee: “These Indians promised the agent, in 1799, to begin and fence their fields.” To sum up rather unfairly the claims of the beleaguered Mr. Hawkins, his defense was that the Creeks were beginning to think about following his advice to begin doing what they were already doing.29
The Creeks’ problem was not a shortage of white advice; it was a shortage of white respect for their land rights. Whites kept taking more and more of their lands. Hawkins under government pressure would force the Creeks to make four major land transfers to whites during his time with them (1796, 1802, 1805, and 1814). None of these land cessions stopped the further encroachment of settlers on the remaining Creek lands.30
Nobody was demanding that white Americans give up their own ways as a condition of keeping their land. The Cherokee chief Old Tassel had appealed to reciprocity back in 1777: “You say: Why do not the Indians till the ground and live as we do? May we not, with equal propriety, ask, Why the white people do not hunt and live as we do?”31
Hawkins promised the Creeks they could keep their lands if they adopted his plan. However, he did not keep the promise even when he claimed the plan was succeeding. It was not surprising, therefore, that Creek resistance to Hawkins emerged.
The opposition was in the background all along. In Hawkins’s 1800 report on the Plan of Civilization, he expressed exasperation about how the opposition to the plan prevailed “more or less in every town in the nation.” He complained, “The plainest proposition for ameliorating their condition is immediately opposed.”32
Hawkins attributed Creek resistance to his plans to an irrational attachment to the old ways. In 1797, he tried to explain to Secretary of War James McHenry how the Creeks had a surprising lack of appreciation for “the pains taken to better their condition.” (The pains included his delivery to them of two reams of paper, twine for ten fishing nets and two seines, and some garden seeds—in return for their land cession in 1796.) Resistance to such efforts could be due only to “their obstinate perseverance in their old habits.” The Creek men had been “bred in habits proudly indolent and insolent.” The Creeks had to “be humbled to the level of rational life.”
Hawkins could get some chiefs on his side by enriching them with gifts. He reported to the secretary of war in 1797 that he had taken the government money for the Creek civilization plan and divided it among those friendly town chiefs “who faithfully exerted themselves for the honour and interest of their country.” The civilization plan could conceivably have had some attractive things to offer some Creeks. Of course, the friendly chiefs also knew military resistance would lead to even faster loss of their lands, while cooperation could give at least temporary relief.33
Other chiefs made a different choice. Hawkins noted in his 1800 report the opposition of the chief of the Creek town of Tallassee, Hoboithle Micco (also known to Americans as Tame King). Tame King had an inexplicable “spirit of contradiction.” Hoboithle Micco and a band of warriors in September 1799 chased off a team of white surveyors attempting to mark the boundary between US territory and Spanish Florida.34
Hawkins responded furiously. He got Creek warriors on his side to bind and whip Hoboithle Micco and three of his followers. The warriors described their punishment of one of Tame King’s followers: “We beat him with sticks until he was on the ground as a dead man, we cut off one of his ears with a part of his cheek and put a sharp stick up his fundament.”35
Hawkins in his 1800 report bragged about this “exemplary punishment.” Hawkins then persuaded his Creek allies to form a national government to make decisions for all Creeks. The Creeks had previously been a heterogeneous collection of towns, each one of which had its independent chief. Their tribal meetings were a consensual forum for discussion, not to enforce conformity between different towns. No town chief had claimed any power to enforce his will on other towns of Creeks. Only a consultative confederacy existed. Now a US-backed Creek national government would enforce the Plan of Civilization on all Creeks. Not for the last time, an aid donor found a native autocrat to be convenient.36
Hoboithle Micco continued his defiance. In 1803, he said he still had no desire for a “blacksmith in the nation or weavers to bring them into slavery, no plough or any plantation tools.” Jefferson, getting his reports from Hawkins, in 1805 attributed the resistance to the “bigotry” of “anti-philosophers,” who incomprehensibly favored their own ways “over the duty” of following rational improvement schemes. Jefferson just could not understand why the Indians were not impressed with his experts.37
A further threat to civilizing plans happened north of the Ohio River in 1807. Two brothers with a mother reported to be Creek, the “Shawnee Prophet” Tenskwatawa, and the warrior Tecumseh, were preaching pan-Indian resistance against whites. This worried President Jefferson, and he asked his secretary of war to contact wavering tribes “to recall to their minds” the “paternal policy” he had pursued and that he “still meant to be pursued.” Jefferson said plaintively “that we never wished to do them an injury, but on the contrary to give them all the assistance in our power towards improving their condition.”38
Jefferson warned rebels who were against the civilization plan: “If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Missisipi [sic].” Jefferson threatened again that “we shall destroy all of them.”39
The new president in 1809, James Madison, inherited the tense situation. Hoboithle Micco hoped to influence Madison to hold back white settlers. In a letter to Madison on September 29, 1809, Tame King said the Creeks were getting ever more impoverished. They could not even clothe themselves; they “must and do go naked.” The problem was that “the Muscogee [Creek] land is become very small,” Hoboithle Micco wrote to Madison. Yet still the settlers encroached onto their lands further by driving in their livestock, building houses, cutting red cedars, even hunting. He asked Madison to “give orders to your officers to prevent this in future.”40
Madison replied on November 6, 1809, that there were some bad men on both sides. He said Hawkins would prevent encroachments “in future as much as he can.” After this tepid promise, President Madison told Hoboithle Micco that the real answer to Creek poverty was more of the same old Plan of Civilization:
Fence in your Lands, plow as much land as you can, raise corn & Hogs & Cattle. Learn your young Women to card & spin, & let those who are older learn to weave. You will then have food and cloathing and live comfortably.
Even after thirteen years of less-than-glorious success for the Plan of Civilization, Madison informed Tame King he was sure “that his red Children can live well if they will follow his advice.” Madison promised the Creek chief once again, “Colo. Hawkins will give you Cards and Spinning-wheels and Looms to weave in.”41
Hoboithle Micco was not too convinced. In 1811, Tecumseh visited the people his mother reportedly came from—the Creeks—attempting unsuccessfully to persuade them to join his pan-Indian revolt. However, he sowed further divisions between pro- and antiplan Creeks.42
Finally, in 1813, the long-brewing Creek rebellion broke out. It was both a civil war among the Creeks and a war against the whites. Hoboithle Micco became one of the leaders of the rebellion. He now looked on the Creek procivilization leaders “as people of the United States.” The rebels, known as the Red Sticks, targeted the most visible emblems of the Plan of Civilization. They destroyed corn, hogs, and cattle and tossed plows and looms into the river.43
But the rebel cause was hopeless. In a battle on November 29, 1813, white Georgian soldiers and pro-plan Creeks killed Hoboithle Micco (whom the Georgians called the “greatest conjuror of all the fanatics”). They also razed to the ground Tame King’s town of Tallassee.44
Andrew Jackson had overall command of the US forces to suppress the rebellion. Jackson finally defeated the Red Sticks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend on March 27, 1814. In August 1814, Jackson forced the Creeks to sign a treaty that surrendered two-thirds of their remaining lands. Jackson did not allow Hawkins to participate in the treaty negotiations. Hawkins was shocked at the collapse of his life’s work. He wrote to a friend, “I often regale myself with tears.” Hawkins died a broken man in 1816.45
Jefferson told a friend in December 1813 he felt betrayed by the Indians whom “we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize.” He said, “Their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination.” He was saddened particularly that some Creeks, “for whom we had done more than for any other tribe,” had joined the pan-Indian revolt. The Creeks now had to submit to “removing to such new settlements beyond the Mississippi as we shall assign them.”46
As Jefferson foresaw, the solution to the Indian problem now shifted to removal. After the 1813–1814 war, the failure of civilizing plans among the Creeks became the reason for removing the Creeks. The head of the Indian office in the War Department, Thomas L. McKenney, visited the Creeks in 1827. Despite years of civilizing effort, he said, the Creeks were now “habitually drunk.” Their “total abandonment to vice demands that the government save them from destruction by removal to the west.”47
Observers that were more perceptive noted how little incentive the Creeks had to invest in their farms when they expected to lose their lands soon. This was a critical flaw in the Plan of Civilization from the start.48
The Indian removal effort now reached its climactic phase in the South. But where were the liberals?
8
The Liberal Fight Against Indian Removal
In 1830, the US Congress debated an Indian Removal Act that would decide the fate of the Southern Indians. The climactic debate finally brought out some who gave the liberal case against removal, including a leader of missionary efforts, a pioneering female reformer, and a young Cherokee preacher. The shift of the debate to the Cherokees was important because Cherokee development was generally considered a success. Would the success of plan A, developing the people, really stop the advent of plan B, to get rid of the people and just develop the land?
