Georgia: Wilkes County: A Smith Family Odyssey Chapter 6 ========================================================= =========== USGENWEB NOTICE: In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, data may be used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or for presentation by other persons or organizations. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material for purposes other than stated above must obtain the written consent of the file contributor. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store this file permanently for free access. This file was contributed by: Art Seder ARSeder@aol.com ========================================================= CHAPTER SIX THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT Shortly after his mother’s death, and perhaps even before complete distribution of his father’s estate in 1822, Nathan Foster Smith left Wilkes County forever. His destination was the newly-opened lands of north-central Georgia—lands that would become the counties of Jasper, Morgan and Newton. A subsequent chapter will detail what is known of Nathan Foster’s movements, his marriage and his family. However, Nathan’s westward emigration was part of a larger movement, and it is appropriate to consider first the background and reasons for that movement and some of its consequences. I At the end of the eighteenth century all of Georgia except a narrow band along the Savannah River was still the domain of the Creek and Cherokee tribes. White settlements in that band stretched from the Florida line to the headwaters of the Oconee River in northern Georgia but extended west less than fifty miles to the Ogeechee River. However, as the population grew many settlers ignored the treaty line and occupied the lands between the Ogeechee and Oconee Rivers, which resulted in continuing warfare between Indians and settlers. Log forts were constructed along that river to serve as centers for defense and retaliatory raids, and United States troops were stationed at points along the Oconee as well. While earlier treaties had been entered into by the Colony, and later the State, of Georgia, the federal Constitution of 1789 clearly reserved to the national government the power to enter into treaties. Shortly after taking office, therefore, President Washington took up the problem of the continuing war between the Creek Indians and Georgia settlers by inviting the Creeks to send a delegation of chiefs to New York to confer with him. At that meeting, held in 1790, the Creeks were induced to sign a new treaty surrendering all claim to lands east of the Oconee River; in return the so-called Tallassee country in southern Georgia was restored to them, and they were guaranteed possession of their remaining lands in Georgia. These concessions were bitterly opposed by white settlers to the point where General Elijah Clark, the Revolutionary War hero, launched an illegal settlement across the Oconee before being forced by state authorities to give up the project. The Treaty of 1790 greatly increased the lands opened to white settlers. As new settlements were established farther west of the Savannah River and more settlers kept arriving from Virginia and the Carolinas, new counties were formed in what had been Indian territory and others were created by dividing up the original counties. Thus, land in the northern part of Wilkes became Elbert County in 1790; land in the western part of Wilkes became Oglethorpe County in 1793; and lands in the eastern part became Lincoln County in 1796. Notwithstanding the increase in available land, the hunger for even more territory did not diminish. As a result, when the State of Georgia in 1802 ceded to the United States its claims to sovereignty over a vast territory extending from the Chattahoochie River all the way to the Mississippi, the national government committed itself to remove the Indians from Georgia entirely as soon as it could be done “peaceably and on reasonable terms”. Acting under this agreement, the federal government entered into treaties with the Indians in 1802 and 1804 moving the boundary westward from the Oconee to the Ocmulgee River. While the town of Milledgeville, on the Oconee River, had been the gateway to Indian territory under the 1790 treaty, the gateway after 1804 became the new town of Macon, on the Ocmulgee. Once again new counties were created in the ceded land, including Baldwin, Wayne and Wilkinson. And again, as new settlers poured into the area, counties were divided and subdivided. For example, Clarke was created from Jackson County in 1801; Morgan was created from Baldwin County in 1807; and Jasper was created from Baldwin in 1812. The beginning of the end of Indian occupation of their remaining lands in Georgia came during and immediately after the War of 1812. Throughout that war the Upper (or “Alabama”) Creeks, like most other Indians from the Canadian border to Florida, sided with the British against the Americans and mounted attacks against white settlements, principally in Alabama and Mississippi. On the other hand, another faction of the tribe, the Lower (or “Georgia”) Creeks, remained neutral. The Upper Creeks, who were the more warlike, were swayed by the rhetoric of the great chief Tecumseh, who proclaimed that the time had come to drive the white man back to the ocean. Moreover, the Creeks had specific strategic concerns that led them to renew warfare with the Americans. The Upper Creeks had become alarmed by the increase in numbers of settlers traveling the road built by the United States through Creek lands in Alabama and Mississippi to New Orleans known as The Federal Road. In consequence, they frequently harassed travelers along that road, leading to repeated armed conflicts. The Creeks were also alarmed at the American seizure of Mobile from their traditional ally, the Spanish. The American occupation of all of West Florida after the War of 1812 completely isolated the Creeks from their Spanish allies. These underlying grievances led to frequent armed encounters, and after one such encounter a contingent of young Creek Warriors called the “Red Sticks” were goaded into rash and reckless action. On August 30, 1813, they massacred five hundred white men, women and children who had been surrounded at Fort Mims in southern Alabama. This created an outcry and a demand for revenge that led to the dispatch of three armies of retribution, one from Georgia on the east, the second from the Mississippi Territory on the west and a third from Tennessee on the north. The Tennessee force, led by Andrew Jackson and assisted by Georgia troops, crushed the Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend on March 27, 1814, after which the victor dictated the terms of peace. Under the treaty that followed, known as the Treaty of Fort Jackson, the Creeks gave up 23 million acres of land comprising three-fifths of the present State of Alabama and one-fifth of the State of Georgia. The Georgia land consisted of the Tallassee region in southern Georgia occupied by the Lower Creeks, who had not participated in the uprising, and had been returned to them by the Treaty of 1790. The Lower Creeks were therefore the innocent victims of the outrage felt by white settlers against all Indians. The irresistible pressure on the Indians to quit all of their lands east of the Mississippi continued throughout the South, nowhere more pronounced than in Georgia. State laws added to the problems the Indians faced in attempting to maintain their homelands. For example, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi all passed laws extending state jurisdiction to members of the native tribes, abrogating the authority of tribal chiefs and imposing penalties on anyone opposing cessions of land to whites. A Georgia statute also required whites living on Cherokee lands to take an oath of allegiance to the state. Bowing to this pressure once more, the Creeks and Cherokees in 1821 relinquished title to the territory between the Ocmulgee and the Flint Rivers in Georgia, leaving the Creeks only a narrow strip along the Alabama border and limiting the Cherokees to the northwest corner of Georgia north of the Chattahoochie River. Not satisfied, the people of Georgia in 1823 elected as governor George M. Troup, who was something of a fanatic about the necessity to expel the Indians from Georgia entirely. He took the position that the Federal government had committed itself to that end twenty years earlier when Georgia had ceded its claims to lands extending westward to the Mississippi. But President Monroe rejected that argument, responding that “the Indian title was not affected in the slightest circumstance by the compact with Georgia, and that there is not obligation on the United States to remove the Indians by force.” Feelings ran high on both sides—one of the early manifestations of the “States rights” controversy. The movement to force all Indians from their lands east of the Mississippi continued to grow in the years that followed. In 1825 President Monroe, treating with one faction of the Creek Nation, obtained a cession of all remaining Creek lands in Georgia for a price of $5 million plus the award of an equal amount of land west of the Mississippi River. While the treaty was repudiated by other factions of the Creek Nation amid charges that the treaty had been bought with bribe money, it was renegotiated the following year on much the same terms. In 1830 the United States Congress passed the Indian Removal Act providing for the removal of all Indians remaining east of the Mississippi River and their relocation west of the Mississippi. However, in Georgia the Cherokee tribe, the most advanced of the southern Indians—people who had adopted a settled agricultural way of life, developed a written language and otherwise adapted to civilization—were deeply rooted in northwest Georgia and were determined to stay. While several decisions of the Supreme Court upheld their rights, those in power in Georgia, supported by President Jackson and the Congress, relentlessly pressured the despondent, divided Cherokees. Finally, in 1835, a minority faction of the tribe signed the Treaty of New Echota agreeing to emigrate to the West in return for $5 million from the federal government. The leaders of this faction were later murdered by their own people, but further resistance was hopeless. In 1838 the United States Army rounded up the last twelve thousand Cherokees for the march to the Mississippi. On this march, known as the “trail of tears”, several thousand Cherokees died, marking the ignominious end of the century-old white-red struggle in Georgia. II Some of the new settlers who occupied what had been Indian lands were emigrants from Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland, Pennsylvania and even farther north. However, many more were Georgians— sons and daughters of families that had settled in the original counties of eastern Georgia in pre or post-Revolutionary times. This movement to central and western Georgia reflected not only the need for the children of large families to find new lands of their own but a significant change in the economy of the older sections of the state. This change was the consequence of two factors. First, in many older areas the land was no longer as productive as it had once been because the repeated cultivation of the soil without using fertilizers or rotating crops tended to exhaust the land. Second, cotton production became a large-scale industry in which the small farmer, working alone or with one or two slaves, could not compete economically. The continuing reduction in the price of cotton and increase in the price of slaves, made it necessary for planters to operate ever larger acreage, with the result that large plantations tended to absorb small farms. This forced out a large segment of the white population of the older counties and significantly increased the number of slaves, both in absolute terms and in the average number of slaves per slave owner. This phenomenon is illustrated by the following table showing the increase in cotton production and slaves and the reduction in number of farms in Wilkes County over the sixty years prior to the Civil War: Cotton Year Bales Slaves Farms 1790 1,000 1801 20,000 5,039 1821 90,000 8,921 1,057 1859 561,000 7,587 469 As a result of a new system of land distribution adopted in 1803, the land in central Georgia opened up by the succession of Indian treaties was readily available to the small farmers who were being dispossessed by large planters in the original counties to the east. As noted in an earlier chapter, the original grants of land were made according to the “headright” system, under which two hundred acres was granted to each head of family plus fifty acres for each child and each slave. There were many objections to this system. Because the emigrants had almost unlimited power of selection, they naturally chose only the best lands, leaving large areas unoccupied. In addition, the location of the grants was often impossible to determine, as they encompassed large areas of unbroken forest and had not been surveyed. Furthermore, headright grants were subject to fraud and overreaching, and huge areas of land wound up in the hands of speculators. In 1803 the Georgia legislature replaced the headright system with a series of land lotteries. The act provided that all lands thereafter acquired from the Indians must be surveyed and divided into small lots of uniform size. Each lot was given a number, and slips of paper with lot numbers plus a number of blank slips were placed in a box to be drawn. Residents of Georgia received drawing rights based on whether they were married, had children or were dependent orphans. This enabled the successful drawer to either claim his lot or sell it to another individual and made it more difficult for speculators to acquire large tracts of land. In consequence, whereas all lands east of the Oconee River had been distributed by headright grants, all lands west of that river were allocated by lotteries. The first settlers of the middle counties of Georgia were therefore small farmers from the eastern counties, most of whom had few if any slaves. Their wealth was largely in horses, cattle and hogs. Because most had grown up during the Revolution and the Indian wars that followed, a period in which little if any education was possible, they were largely illiterate. Some emigrated to claim land won in the land lotteries; others came to settle on land bought for a few cents per acre from lottery winners; and many simply came as squatters, asserting rights based mainly on possession. Like their fathers before them, they settled on small plots in the forest and again began the process of clearing a few acres, building log cabins and raising corn and hogs—and children. It was not long, however, before more successful planters began to follow the small farmers into middle Georgia. Land was cheap, and planters found it more profitable to move on to virgin lands than to spend the time and money necessary to preserve or restore the fertility of their original acres. They therefore settled on large areas of the best cotton lands in central Georgia, bringing their slaves with them, and often repeating the process of buying out the small farmers who had originally settled the land. While the middle counties of Georgia did not enjoy the explosive growth experienced by the original eastern counties before and after the Revolutionary War, the area vacated by the Indians after each treaty did not long remain in its original state. As a Georgia historian writing in 1829 remarked, “Almost all the towns on the west side of the Ocmulgee River seem to have sprung into existence as if by the plastic hand of magic. Four or five years ago the whole territory was a solitary wilderness; no voice was heard except that of the Indian hunter; but now industry has converted it into beautiful plantations and ornamented it with many lovely villages.” The class distinctions that had begun to appear in the eastern counties after the Revolutionary War—the landed planter with many slaves who raised large quantities of cotton, on the one hand, and the small farmer who raised corn and hogs and owned few if any Negroes, on the other—were revived within a few years in the newly settled middle counties of Georgia. Dr. Smith states: “These two classes of people had little to do with each other. They were on the same juries, and sometimes judges of the same court, but there was no social intermingling. It was the same condition of things that obtained on the coast thirty years before.” Smith, The Story of Georgia and the Georgia People, p. 249. III During the period Georgians were pushing westward a similar migratory movement was taking place throughout the South. Farmers and planters were leaving Virginia and the Carolinas in record numbers, emigrating not only into central and western Georgia but into Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. The mass migrations that took place reflected some of the same factors that led to the migration from eastern counties of Georgia. Families sought out new lands in part because of the need for sons to find farms on which to live and raise their own families. But it also reflected the fact that in Virginia and the Carolinas, even more than in Georgia, much of the soil had become exhausted by years of tobacco and cotton production. From a strictly economic point of view it was cheaper to start anew in the rich, virgin lands of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi than to practice the kinds of scientific farming that would have maintained crop yields in the older regions of the country. The great migratory movement that began about 1815 was greatly abetted by the acquisition of New Orleans from France as part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The acquisition of this new territory, in turn, brought about a need for roads from the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi Valley, both for military and commercial reasons. This led to the development of what became known as the Federal Road. The beginnings of such a road already existed. The Great Wagon Road, by which thousands of German settlers had traveled from Pennsylvania to western North Carolina, continued south through the Carolinas to Camden and Columbia, South Carolina, on the Santee River. From that point early settlers had pushed on down a trail that led to Augusta, Georgia, on the Savannah River and from that point to Milledgeville, Georgia, on the Oconee River. From Milledgeville an ancient Indian trading path led to Mobile. And in 1806 Congress appropriated $6,400 to open a post road from the Indian frontier near Athens, in Clarke County, Georgia, to New Orleans. In the end, therefore, the Federal Road consisted of two paths through Georgia. One, called the Upper Road, crossed the Savannah River near what is now Anderson, South Carolina, passed by Athens, Georgia, and entered Alabama near Columbus, Georgia. The other, known as the Fall Line Road, crossed the Savannah River into Georgia at Augusta and proceeded by Milledgeville and Macon to a junction with the other path at Columbus. The Federal Road, was anything but a smooth, surfaced highway when the first large wave of emigration commenced about 1815. It is remarkable that, by the early 1820's the road was sufficient for stagecoach travel, and wagon teams could be used for hauling of goods and settlers’ belongings. We do not know the precise route Nathan Foster Smith followed from his boyhood home in Wilkes County to his future home in middle Georgia. However, it is not unlikely that in at least part of his travels he followed the Federal Road, mingling with emigrants from Virginia and the Carolinas seeking new homes in western Georgia or pushing on to Alabama and Mississippi. Georgia contended that the contested land had been ceded by the Creeks and Cherokees, but the treaties were often entered into with minority elements of the tribes. Moreover, there was substantial question whether the states had the power to enter into treaties under the Articles of Confederation. In each case lands from other adjacent counties were included in the new counties. However, to avoid confusion reference will be made only to the principal land divisions in discussing the formation of new counties. The origins and conditions along the Federal Road will be discussed in a succeeding section of this chapter. The chief who had led the negotiations, a half-breed named William McIntosh, was the leader of the Lower or Georgia Creeks, who were a minority of the Creek Nation. After signing the treaty, McIntosh was shot and his house set afire by the Upper or Alabama Creeks, who constituted the majority faction. The lists of those entitled to draw in the lotteries, which were held in 1803, 1806, two in 1819, 1821,1827 and 1832, provide valuable genealogical clues to the residents of Georgia during this period. It may be recalled that Elbert Smith bought 202 acres from his sister, Mary (Polly) Chaffin for $10, or 5 cents per acre. Sherwood, Gazetteer of Georgia, p. 109. This migratory movement is discussed in The Granthams, Seven Generations of American Frontiersmen in a chapter entitled “The Great Migration of the Early Nineteenth Century”, pp. 109-137. 85 85 A Smith Family Odyssey