John Sevier as a commonwealth-builder

Front matter

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Chapter I. Pagk

The thirteen colonies, as characterized by Rev. Hugh Jones in 1750 — Early settlers of North Carolina — Bancroft's report of them — The character of a majority of the people — A better class settled in Wake, Orange, and Mecklenburg Counties — The first trans-AUeghany settlers a different people — Their character and history — Their great achievements largely due to the remarkable character of John Sevier — His early history, and singular ascendency over men.

Chapter II

No sympathy between North Carolina and the western settlers — Condition of the States at the close of the Revolution- Extent of western territory belonging to North Carolina — Powers of Congress under the first Confederation — North Carolina cedes her western territory to Congress — Consternation of the western people — Threatened by enemies without and within — Meeting of settlers and call for a convention, which resolves to form a State government — North Carolina repeals the cession act, and concedes the demands of the settlers — The concessions not generally satisfactory — Sevier opposes secession, xii CONTENTS.

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but is borne along with the current — John Tipton an ardent secessionist — His character — The mistake of Sevier — Reasons for his action — State of franklin formed, Sevier elected Governor, and John Tipton and Joseph Martin left out in the cold.

CHAPTER III. TnE Aboetive Commonwealth 35

Extent and population of the seceded territory — The task before Sevier — He brings order out of disorder — Establishes a currency — Invites the Cherokees to a treaty — Disaffection of the Cherokees — Unwise effort of Governor Martin to pacify them — Sevier's treaty with them at Dumplin Creek, which secures a large accession of territory — Belligerent manifesto of Governor Martin — Sevier's reply to Governor Caswell — Caswell's letter to Sevier — Prosperity of Franklin — Backwater settlements seek annexation to Franklin — Action of Joseph Martin — He secures the treaty of Hopewell — Its injurious character — " Talk " of the Cherokee king to Governor Caswell — Martin's treachery and betrayal of Sevier.

CHAPTER IY.

Meeting of the Constitutional Convention — Houston's Utopian Constitution — Tipton's sudden conversion to North Carolina — Sevier proposes the adoption of the North Carolina Constitution — Partial elections authorized by North Carolina — Tipton elected to the North Carolina Senate — Hostilities with the Cherokees — Sevier promptly invades their country — Escapes an ambuscade — General Cocke's conference with the Cherokee chieftains — Punishment of Indian murderers — The Cherokees subdued.

CHAPTER V. Fruitless Overtures 85

Sevier makes overtures to North Carolina — Appoints General Cocke and Judge Campbell commissioners — His letter to Gov-

CONTENTS. yffl

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ernor Caswell — Letter of Judge Campbell to the same — Address of General Cocke to the North Carolina Legislature — Its adverse action — General removal of over-mountain officials.

CHAPTER VI. The Chosen Alteenative 99

Danger of war with the Creeks — Co-operation proposed by Georgia, which State appoints Sevier brigadier-general — Letter of Major Elholm — Franklin authorizes a call for volunteers — Statement of the position of Spain — Feeling of Western settlers —Letter from General Clarke to Sevier — From Judge Campbell to Governor Caswell — The whole West ready to secede from the Union — The alternatives before Sevier — He chooses peaceable resistance — His letter to Governor Caswell — Caswell to Sevier — Tipton's turbulent conduct — Peace agreement between Sevier and Evan Shelby.

CHAPTER VII. Quaker Guns 126

Prosperity in Franklin — Fresh disturbances incited by Tipton — Two parties forming — Shelby requests troops from North Carolina — Bledsoe advises the Governor to address the people — Letter from Caswell to Shelby — Sevier urged to make forcible resistance — Again attempts a peaceable settlement — Governor Caswell's conciliatory manifesto to the people, which brings about a peaceable dissolution of the Franklin government — Sevier, however, the real head of the people — Three thousand volunteers answer his summons to aid Georgia — An empty treasury — Sevier arms troops to aid Robertson at his own cost, and contracts debts in so doing — Sevier elected to the Cincinnati — Letter to him from Benjamin Franklin — Another attempt to conciliate North Carolina — Sevier outlawed — Sevier's negroes seized by Tipton — A Quaker battle.

x i v CONTENTS.

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CHAPTER VIII. Seviee as an Outlaw 158

The French Broad people — Hostile plans of Joseph Martin — Offers office to Sevier's captains — Sevier at Greenville, and conference with his officers — Advises submission to North Carolina — With only two hundred and fifty men he marches against the Cherokees — Contradictory letters of Joseph Martin — Sevier crosses the French Broad ; his route an ovation — Preparations ■for defense — Sevier to the Governor of Georgia — The murder of Kirk's family — Sevier invades the Indian country — Murder of the Cherokee king and chieftains by young Kirk — It more thoroughly arouses the nation — A hand-to-hand fight of five months' duration — The Indians beaten at last, and sue for peace.

Chapter IX

OvEETHEOW AND TeIUMPH . . . T*** . . .197

Order for Sevier's arrest issued by Governor Johnston — Judge Campbell refuses to issue the warrant — It is done by Judge Spencer, of North Carolina — Sevier kidnapped, and conveyed to Morganton, North Carolina, to be tried for high treason — Great uprising of the western settlers — Sevier's wife plans his rescue — Tipton in danger of lynch law — Details of Sevier's rescue — Sudden death of Judge Spencer — Great rejoicing over Sevier's rescue — Sevier elected to the North Carolina Senate — Claims his seat of the Legislature — Fracas between Tipton and Colonel Roddy — Eloquent plea of Robertson — Sevier's disabilities removed, and he given command of the western milWfer— Elected as the first representative in Congress from the valley of the Mississippi.

CHAPTER X. Teeeitoeial Goveenment 219

Disordered state of French Broad settlements — Sevier frames for them a government — Dissatisfaction with North Carolina — She again cedes her western territory to Congress — A territorial

CONTENTS. xv

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government formed — Sevier appointed brigadier-general in the United States army by Washington — A prosperous era dawns upon the western settlers — Settlement of Knoxville — Fort erected — Treaty of Holston, and meeting of Sevier and Robertson — Sevier builds a cordon of block-houses — Removes with his family to the extreme frontier — Knoxville threatened by the Cherokees — Heroic preparations for defense — Sevier pursues the Indians and defeats them at Etowah.

CHAPTER XI. Pioneer Life in 1796 244

• Henceforth peace and Nolichucky Jack reign upon the border

— Remarkable achievements of the western settlers — Farm-life among them — No lack of society and social gatherings — Thrilling tales of female heroism — Happy ruse of Major Cozby in defense of his family — A backwoods physician — The "Knoxville Gazette" — Postal service — Frontier traveling — Cowan's store — Scenes at Sevier's inauguration as Governor of Tennessee.

Chapter XII

Population in Kentucky as compared with that of southwest territory — Meeting of Territorial Legislature — State of Tennessee formed — Sevier elected Governor — His first message — French Broad settlers — Sevier re-elected — His peace policy subjected to a severe strain — Condition of things as described by Francis Baily — Another treaty with the Cherokees which secures permanent peace — The savages ever afterward Sevier's friends — Great change in the customs and mode of life on the frontier in consequence of Sevier's full ascendency.

Chapter XIII

This book not a history of Tennessee — " Happy are the peo- ^^

pie whose annals are vacant " — Sevier six times unanimously xv i CONTENTS.

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elected Governor and three times Congressman — Fifty-two years in public life, and always a leader of men — His peculiar ru l e — His great popularity — An illustrative incident — Remarkable good order of western society — An upright lawyer — Sevier's care for the poor — A message of his — Trouble with Andrew Jackson — Challenged by Jackson to a duel — His poor opinion of Jackson — Sevier's poverty, his simple way of life, his death, amid universal mourning in Tennessee and throughout the West.

JOHN SEVIEE

Chapter I. The Actors 1^ This History

The thirteen United Colonies, which in 1783 achieved their independence of Great Britain, were composed of as heterogeneous elements as ever came together for the forming of a nation. Among them were men of every class and nationality, every rank and character, and every variety of political and religious opinion. Writing of them in 1750, the Rev. Hugh Jones, chaplain to the Honorable Assembly of Virginia, and minister of Jamestown, said : "If New England be called a receptacle of Dissenters, and an Amsterdam of religion, Pennsylvania the nursery of Quakers, Maryland the retirement of Roman Catholics, North Carolina the refuge of Runaways, and South Carolina the delight of Buccaneers and Pyrates, Virginia may justly be esteemed the happy retreat of true Britons, and true Churchmen, for the most part, neither soaring too high nor dropping too low ; consequently, it should

JOHN SEVIER.

merit the greater esteem and encouragement. " History fully confirms the worthy chaplain's characterization of the various colonies, and it records also the singular fact that early North Carolina, the "refuge of Bunaways," was the first-born daughter of Virginia, that "happy retreat of true Britons, and true Churchmen."

Though the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas introduced into the northern colony prior to 1670 several ship-loads of respectable English settlers from Barbadoes, and considerable numbers of Swiss, German, and French Protestants came in soon afterward, and some small colonies of Scotch Jacobites directly following the Stuart rebellion of 1745, a large majority of the early settlers of North Carolina were "runaways" from Virginia — either criminals, escaping from justice in the older colony, or "worthless trash," expelled from it because disorderly, and altogether unprofitable in a civilized community. These last were the remnants or descendants of the" servile class who had in former years been imported to work the plantations, and indentured to the planters to pay their passage across the ocean. They were Englishmen, but, for the most part, Englishmen who could trace their lineage no further than the prisons and slums of London. Their indentures expired, they found themselves shut out from respectable society by the prejudice entailed by their antecedents ; and the consequence was that the meanerspirited among them became outcasts, herding together in the backwoods, and gleaning a wretched subsistence from hunting and fishing ; or, hanging npon the outskirts of the plantations, living there in filthy cabins, and preying upon the planters' henneries and smokehouses. The better and more enterprising portion — those who retained some lingering traces of manhood, and had some aspirations for a higher life — emigrated at once to North Carolina, where, being joined by such of the outcasts as were from time to time expelled by the planters, they formed the principal element in what soon came to be known in the vernacular of the period as the "Tar-heel Commonwealth." From a people of such antecedents a model community could not be expected.; and we shall see that the tree bore its legitimate fruit if we glance for a moment at the condition of North Carolina at the time of the Bevolution.

Bancroft asserts that at this period there was neither law nor lawyers in North Carolina. This, though substantially true, was not so literally ; for lawyers might be found there of the order of Andrew Jackson, who varied a two-years' reading of Blackstone by intense application to horse-racing and cock-fighting ; and courts could be discovered sitting in taverns and log-hovels, with judges knowing nothing of law or precedent, and coming to their decisions only after close consultation with a whisky-bottle. Judge Lynch was the popular magistrate, and his decrees were usually those of a crowd of hooting and drunken ragamuffins. Until 1703 there was not a clergyman in the entire colony, and the first school was opened ~and printing-press established just on the eve of the Eevolution. As a consequence, the people were densely ignorant, few among them could read or write, and disorder and lawlessness everywhere abounded. To a few towns along the sea- coast a mail came once a month from Virginia, but the post-rider never penetrated into the interior. There the people dwelt in thick darkness, having from year's end to year's end no more intelligence from the outside world than could be gleaned from the few travelers who had the hardihood to venture into their wooded solitudes. There was next to no town life. New Berne and Wilmington, the principal towns, had each a population of less than six hundred. A vast majority of the people occupied small, scattered farms — often unfenced clearings in the midst of wide forests, from which the trees had been removed by girdling, and which were cultivated by negro-labor in a most primitive and wasteful manner. For the farmer himself, however poor he might be, was either too proud or too lazy to work. His time he spent in lounging at taverns, drinking poor whisky, and indulging in "manly encounters" with his neighbors, in which noses were broken, and eyes gouged out by the long finger-nails which he allowed to grow, and pared to a point for that express purpose. In aspiration and instinct he was generally but a little above the brute ; and yet he did know enough to dodge his taxes. Law and religion were to him unmeaning terms, and the chief end of man was to live without work, and keep down the expenses of government. Owing to a coarse diet and brutish habits, these people were poorly developed physically, and they regarded with astonishment the uniformly tall and athletic over-mountain men who marched over their wretched roads to fight the battle they should themselves have fought at King's Mountain.

But there were a few grains of wheat in this big bushel of chaff — a few brave spirits, "studious of their rights, bold to avow, and brave to maintain them," whose patriotic acts have cast a gleam of sunlight over the dismal history of Eevolutionary North Carolina. These men were mostly of the foreign element which had settled in Orange, Wake, and Mecklenburg Counties. In resistance to the tyranny of Tryon, they in May, 1771, fought the battle of the Alamance, and in May, 1775, they issued what is known as the "Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence." These two acts have given North Carolina the name of being the first of the colonies to make organized resistance to British oppression ; while in truth the credit belongs to but a small fraction of the population. A large proportion of the people were what I have described ; and many of them were Tories in the Revolution ; and Tories not from any intelligent idea of the issues at stake, but because all of the better class among them were patriots, and their instincts led them to oppose the law and order element. Impartial history has to record the fact that at this period the masses of North Carolina were the pariahs of American society, and the State itself little better than a Botany Bay for the American continent.

The men who planted civilization beyond the Alleghanies were a different order of people. Though settled on the soil, and within the jurisdiction of North Carolina, they were not North Carolinians. They were mostly Virginians, belonging either to the gentry or to the sturdy Scotch-Irish and English yeomanry who worked their own plantations. Of this latter class was the body of immigrants whom James Eobertson led over the mountains in 1770 to form the first civilized settlement west of the Alleghanies. They were Virginians who had only shortly before settled in Wake County, and they supposed, when they built their cabins beyond the mountains, that they were again upon the soil of the Old Dominion ; and this was the impression of all the settlers till a number of years afterward. For nearly ten years the immigration continued to be of this class, and almost altogether from Virginia, for no road had yet been opened into Eastern North Carolina, and the hunters' trace across the mountains was well-nigh impassable ; whereas, from Virginia there was, following the southwestern trend of the valleys, a broad, beaten trail which had been the Indian war-path for many centuries. When a passable road was finally opened over the Alleghanies in 1778, a tide began to set in from North Carolina, but it was of the better class — for it goes without saying that a man must be possessed of very manly qualities who will deliberately set up his abode where he has to take his life in his hand and face death daily. Still, the larger number of new-comers continued to be from Virginia, and the dominant sentiment was always Virginian, alike on the Holston and Watauga and on the distant Cumberland. With but one exception the trans- Alleghany leaders were all native Virginians — Sevier, Donelson, and the two Bledsoes being from the ranks of the gentry, Kobertson and Cocke from that yeoman class which has given some of its most honored names to English history. The one exception was Isaac Shelby, who was of Welsh descent, but born and educated in Maryland.

The over-mountain settlers were not fugitives from justice, nor needy adventurers seeking in the untrodden West a scanty subsistence which had been denied them in the Eastern settlements. And they were not merely Virginians — they were the culled wheat of the Old Dominion, with all those grand qualities which made the name of "Virginian" a badge of honor throughout the colonies. Many of them were cultivated men of large property, and, though the larger number were poor in this world's goods, they all possessed those more stable riches which consist" of stout arms and brave hearts, unblemished integrity and sterling worth. They were so generally educated that in 1776 only two in about two hundred were found unable to write their names in good, legible English. No body of men ever had clearer ideas

A of civil polity or more highly valued the blessings of good government. Order-loving and God-fearing, they lived together for twelve years without so much as one capital crime among them. Shut out by wide forests and high mountain-barriers from civilized law, they made their own laws, and framed for themselves a government which was, with the sole exception of the "Fundamental Agreement," entered into by the "free planters " of New Haven on June 4, 1639 — the first absolutely " free and independent " constitution that existed in this country.

The ruling motive of many of these men — as it is generally of those who seek new fields of enterprise — was, no doubt, the bettering of their worldly condition ; nevertheless, I think it true that much the larger number sought in their Western homes not so much worldly wealth as political freedom. They would be beyond the reach of the "red-coated minions of tyranny"; they dreaded less the war-whoop of the savage than the stinging insult of the British oppressor. But their leaders were far-seeing men, and they had higher aims than a mere escape from political tyranny. They sought to found in those Western forests a great empire of freemen, and they knew they were clearing the way for a civilization which should overspread the continent. Said Eobertson, while yet the navigation of the Mississippi was controlled by Spain, and all the vast region beyond that river was fast-locked by her mediaeval bigotry, " We are the Advance Guard of Civilization, and our way is across the continent " ; and to Governor Caswell, Seyier wrote, when the settlers were but a handful, " However inconsiderable the people of this country may appear at this day, reason must inform us that the time is not far distant when they will become as consequential in numbers, if not more so, than most of the Eastern States."

Under these two leaders, John Sevier and James Robertson, these people had developed a boundless courage, a constant fortitude, a self-devoted patriotism, worthy of the most heroic ages. When only a handful of thirty men able to wield an axe or handle a rifle, they ventured beyond the Alleghanies, and in the mountain-girt valley of the Watauga built their cabins and tilled their fields, encompassed by twenty thousand armed savages, and shut off by a trackless wilderness from all civilized succor. There for five years they held their ground, till they grew to number about two hundred riflemen, and then, under John Sevier, they began a career for which it is hard to find a parallel in history. Outnumbered more than twenty to one, they held for six years the gateways of the Alleghanies against the savage horde which Great Britain had enlisted for the destruction of the colonies. Time and again they met the savage onset, and time and again they beat it back, and carried havoc and death into the very heart of the Indian country. And so well did they guard the mountain-passes that in all these years not one savage band broke through to carry the torch and the tomahawk to the homes of Eastern Carolina.

Their own cabins went up in flames, their own firesides were drenched in blood, and their mothers and wives and children fell before the merciless scalping-knife of the Cherokee, yet they never shrank and never wavered, but stood, from first to last, the immovable rearguard of the Revolution. And not content with this, when the day was at the darkest, when saaboard Carolina was trodden under foot by the red dragoon, and the young republic seemed in the very throes of dissolution, they left their own homes well-nigh unprotected, and, mustering their best and bravest, rushed over the mountains to the rescue of their distant countrymen. Making an unexampled march of two hundred miles, they hurled themselves, only nine hundred and fifty strong, against the almost impregnable defenses of King's Mountain, and, in one hour, annihilated the left wing of the army of Cornwallis ! The result, in logical sequence, was Yorktown and American independence.

Doubtless, the great achievements of the over-mountain men were largely due to the remarkable qualities of John Sevier, who was both their civil and military leader. He knew how to achieve great results with slender means, and before Napoleon was born had discovered that principle of dynamics by which a small body, driven with immense force, will deal a heavier blow than a much larger one having only the ordinary momentum. He was a man of great natural endowments, and of a training that peculiarly fitted him to be what he became, the rearguard of the Revolution, and the guardian and defender

THE ACTORS IN THIS HISTORY. H

of the newly planted civilization beyond the Alleghanies. No other man of equal talents and equal achievements has been so little noticed in American history, and hence it is not amiss to devote a few pages to a consideration of his life and its influence in founding and developing the great empire which has grown up west of the Alleghanies.

He was not of the ordinary type of backwoodsman. He was a gentleman born and bred ; and in his veins flowed some of the best blood of the French and English nations. He had the force and fire of the Navarre Huguenots combined with the solid Anglo-Saxon elements which have had here, perhaps, their highest expression in our venerated Washington. This peculiar blending of qualities was seen even in his face, which, while in contour and lineament strikingly like that of Washington, had the mobility of feature and delicacy of expression which belong to the French physiognomy.

He was born in 1745, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where his father had established himself a few years before as a considerable planter. The place was then on the confines of civilization, and had few educational facilities ; but John was taught the rudiments of learning by his mother, and, an Indian war soon breaking out, which forced the family to Fredericksburg, he had there the advantage of a good school for several years. The family returned to their frontier home when John was twelve years old, and then he was sent to an advanced school at Staunton, where he remained, an apt and ready but not very industrious student, until he was sixteen years of age. From these few years of tuition he acquired as much of an education as was common to young gentlemen of the period — enough to enable him in after-years to be a ready and effective speaker and writer, and to associate on equal terms with the leading men of the country. But he was always better acquainted with men than with books. Study was irksome to his active nature, but the knowledge of men came to him by intuition.

Leaving school before he was turned of seventeen, young Sevier struck out at once in life for himself by marrying a wife, and laying out a township about half a dozen miles distant from his father's plantation. This town, still bearing the name he gave it, is now the beautiful village of Newmarket, in the valley of the Shenandoah, about one hundred and fifty miles northwest from Eichmond. Here young Sevier erected a log warehouse and dwelling, much in the style of a fort, for security was the prime requisite in backwoods architecture ; and in the warehouse he opened a store for the vending of dry-goods and groceries, thereby making his town what its name indicated, the market-center of a wide agricultural region.

Among the young trader's customers were many of the red dwellers of the forest, who came to him for powder and lead and the long-barreled rifle. Their eyes were dazzled by the bright array of "stroud," beads, scarlet cloth, and looking-glasses, with which the warehouse was adorned, and they longed to possess the gorgeous wonders. To their untutored virtue, a few discharges of powder and shot seemed an easier mode of payment than a tiresome getting together of peltries, only to be procured by long and tedious hunting. So, one dark night, they descended upon Newmarket, and attempted to take forcible possession of young Sevier's business establishment. The young gentleman had only a half-dozen men with him, but he made such effectual resistance that the baffled savages soon scattered into the adjacent forest. In the morning, a a trail of blood through the trodden undergrowth told the route they had taken ; and, gathering a score of his friends together, young Sevier followed in pursuit of the marauders. After a toilsome march through a pathless forest, he came up with them at their wigwam village, and, not stopping to count their numbers, made so furious an assault upon them that they speedily fled in all directions. Their village was reduced to ashes, and a number of their braves were left unburied among the cinders.

Thus did this born soldier, when a youth of scarcely eighteen, inaugurate a new system of Indian warfare. Thenceforth, wherever his influence went, it was attack and not defense : not a skulking behind trees and logfortresses ; but an open forest, a wild halloo, and then the onward rush of the hurricane ! It was by such tactics that Sevier became the victor in thirty-five battles, and the most renowned of Indian fighters.

The Indians naturally objected to a bonfire being made of one of their villages at the whim of a white stripling, and they attempted to enforce upon him their law of retaliation. They descended again upon Newmarket in largely augmented numbers ; but this the young soldier had anticipated, and he was ready to receive them. At the head of about a hundred hardy borderers, he put them again to flight, and he followed up his success by again invading the Indian country, burning their villages, destroying their standing corn, and often defeating bodies of five times his own number.

His exploits attracted universal admiration, and in time reached the ears of Lord Dunmore, the last royal Governor of Virginia. The Governor at once sought out the young volunteer who had thus taken off his hands the business of chastising the unruly savages. He expected to find him an uncouth backwoods youth, of rustic ways, and the rude speech of the border ; but, instead of this, he met a young man of refined aspect, easy and prepossessing manners, and an air of natural dignity that bespoke the born gentleman. The courtly Englishman was fascinated with the backwoods 3-outh, and took him at once into favor, showering upon him many marks of distinction, and, among others, in 1772, a commission as captain in the Virginia line — the same corps in w T hich Washington then held the rank of colonel.

Thus, for about half a dozen years, Sevier fought the Indians with one hand, and with the other dealt out dry-goods and groceries from his warehouse at Newmarket — doing the last so successfully that, by the time he was twenty-six, he had accumulated what, for the time and place, was an ample fortune.

Then, one spring day in 1772, he was invited by oue of his fellow-officers — Captain Evan Shelby, subsequently General Shelby, of the Revolutionary army — to visit him at his cattle -farm of King's Meadows (now Bristol, Tennessee), on the southwestern border of Virginia. Sevier went, and there he heard of a body of adventurous pioneers, who, under the lead of James Robertson, had, less than two years before, built their cabins at Watauga, on the western slope of the Alleghanies. Curious to see this handful of settlers, who had thus ventured upon the hunting-grounds of twenty thousand warlike savages, Sevier rode on to the settlement with Evan Shelby and his son Isaac, who afterward became the first Governor of Kentucky. The visit brought him in contact with Robertson, and that fixed his earthly destiny. On the instant he decided to cast in his lot with that feeble community beyond the mountains.