Hawkins, Benjamin (15 Aug. 1754-6 June 1816), U.S. senator and Indian agent, was born in Bute, later Warren County, North Carolina, the son of Philomen Hawkins, a planter and land speculator, and Delia Martin. Family wealth enabled the young Hawkins to attend the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), class of 1777, but the approaching British army cut short his senior year. Fluent in French, he briefly served on General George Washington's staff as a civilian interpreter, but by the end of 1778 he was back in North Carolina as a trade commissioner and member of the legislature. In 1781 Hawkins won election to Congress, where he remained until 1784; he served again in 1786-1787.

Hawkins sat on Congress's Committee on Indian Affairs, which sought to win peace in the West by negotiating treaties with the Indian tribes. In 1785, as Congress moved to put this policy into effect, it appointed Hawkins to chair a five-man commission to meet with the southern tribes. Talks with the Creeks collapsed, but negotiations conducted over the next six months at Hopewell with the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws achieved Congress's aims of making peace. Hawkins emerged with a reputation as a skilled practitioner of Indian diplomacy.

For the rest of the decade Hawkins, a Federalist, divided his time between congressional sessions in Philadelphia and North Carolina where, like many delegates to Congress, he expressed his frustration with the Articles of Confederation as a frame of government by supporting the Constitution. He did not attend North Carolina's first ratification convention, which rejected the Constitution, but he was active at the second convention in November 1789, which approved it. Shortly thereafter the North Carolina legislature elected Hawkins to one of its seats in the U.S. Senate. Hawkins's term in the Senate was undistinguished, and he chose not to stand for reelection. The administration drew on his experience with southern Indians, however, by enlisting his advice during the negotiations with the Creeks in 1790 that resulted in the Treaty of New York.

[See Biography of William McIntosh]

In 1795, as Hawkins's term expired, President Washington appointed him to head a commission to attempt to ease tensions between the Creeks and Georgia over disputed land claims. The talks, held at Colerain on the St. Marys River, opened in late spring 1796 and fulfilled Washington's hope that the Creeks would cooperate in surveying the newly established boundary between the United States and Spanish Florida. More important, Hawkins and his colleagues rejected Georgia's claim to lands purchased in the 1780s without congressional authorization. The Georgia legislature had already sold the lands in question as part of what became known as the Yazoo Frauds, and the position taken by Hawkins at Colerain that Georgia's claim was invalid marked an important step in the growing federal-state controversy in the South over the land claims and political rights of Indian tribes.

Later in 1796 Washington offered and Hawkins accepted an appointment in the federal Indian affairs bureaucracy. Though theoretically responsible for the entire South, as his title principal temporary agent for Indian affairs south of the Ohio River indicates, Hawkins was always mainly involved with the Creeks. He literally lived among them, moving from town to town and staying in people's homes. Soon after he arrived, he asked a friend to send him a "housekeeper." Lavinia Downs became mother to Hawkins's seven children and, in 1812, his wife. In 1803, following an administrative reorganization in which Hawkins's appointment was changed to principal agent for the Creeks, he and his family settled down at a permanent agency on the Flint River in central Georgia. The agency compound of five miles square included the agency offices, residences, shops, and a plantation staffed by Hawkins's slaves (who numbered seventy-two at the time of his death), which the agent used as an experimental, instructional, and productive facility. Under Hawkins's direction, the agency plantation became the model for Creek emulation.

As Indian agent, Hawkins represented the federal government to the tribes assigned to him. His principal duties included administering federal Indian policy, reporting on local events, and influencing tribal actions. Federal Indian policy changed over time but the John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison administrations shared basic principles. One was that peaceful relations between Native Americans and European Americans were preferable to violent conflict. Part of Hawkins's job was therefore to keep the peace, largely by enforcing the many congressional trade and intercourse acts, which regulated trade, recognized tribal land claims, guaranteed boundaries against encroachment, and recognized tribal sovereignty and political autonomy. At the same time, however, the United States responded to the wishes of its citizens and the interests of many states by also seeking cessions of tribal land. In pursuit of this policy, Hawkins and other agents tried to convince tribal leaders to agree to sell land to the United States. The government used many arguments and techniques to produce Indian signatures on land treaties, but the heart of Washington's approach, continued by his Federalist and Republican successors into the early nineteenth century, was the so-called civilization policy. At its most basic level, to "civilize" Indians meant to transform them culturally and ideologically into European Americans. The assumption was that if they became God-fearing, market-oriented, independent small family farmers they would willingly sell most of their tribal lands for money to invest in their farms and to buy goods. Many, including Hawkins, were also committed to "civilizing" the Indians because they sincerely believed that the European-American way of life was far preferable to the Indian way.

Along with everyone else involved in the efforts to "civilize" Indians, Hawkins believed that native people had to make fundamental and interrelated cultural changes. One was to depend on farming for a livelihood; another was to rearrange their gender roles so that the men, not the women, owned and tilled the soil. In pursuit of these goals, Hawkins encouraged Creek men to grow cotton and trained the women to use spinning wheels and looms. He introduced plows and other implements as well as a wide variety of new crops. Furthermore, Hawkins restructured Creek government by dividing the nation into electoral districts and providing for the election of delegates to the national council, which was to meet regularly and hear his annual state-of-the-nation address. He encouraged the council to assert powers over the semiautonomous towns, to enact laws to enforce its authority, and to develop an American political consciousness.

In some ways Hawkins was a success as an Indian agent. He was a fair, honest, efficient, likeable man, and he won the trust and respect of many Creeks, some of whom accepted his economic and social messages, became planters, entered the regional markets, sent their children to schools, and generally became, as Hawkins would have described them, civilized. His political and governmental innovations, though never achieving the sweeping change he desired, nevertheless formed an important marker on the path toward centralized state making begun in the 1780s under the guidance of Alexander McGillivray and culminating in 1867 with the establishment of constitutional government. Ultimately, however, most Creeks rejected the more fundamental changes Hawkins demanded.

The last years of Hawkins's life and career were filled with turmoil, controversy, and failure. Largely in response to Hawkins's civilization program, the Creeks experienced a cultural crisis during his tenure that climaxed in a movement of religious revitalization and civil war. Beginning with a series of bitter confrontations and stimulated by Shawnee chief Tecumseh's visit in 1811, the Creek civil war became entangled with the War of 1812. Invaded and ravaged by American armies under the direction of Andrew Jackson, in 1814 the Creeks succumbed to a peace treaty that cost them a massive tract of rich land in present Alabama. Events had swept completely out of Hawkins's hands and he lost his influence over both the Creeks and U.S. policy toward them. After the war, suffering from recurrent ill health as well as professional frustration, he resigned. Hawkins died in office, at the Creek Agency on the Flint River, during the search for his successor.

Bibliography

Hawkins's manuscripts can be found in Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; the Georgia Historical Society, Savannah; the Georgia Department of Archives and History, Atlanta; and Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia, Pa. Many of Hawkins's writings have been published. His fascinating Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799 first appeared as vol. 1, pt. 1 of the Collections of the Georgia Historical Society (1848) and have been reprinted (1974). The Georgia Historical Society also printed Letters of Benjamin Hawkins as vol. 10 of its Collections (1918). A more comprehensive collection that includes letters, reports, and documents housed in over a dozen archives is C. G. Grant, ed., Letters, Journals and Writings of Benjamin Hawkins (2 vols., 1980). Merritt B. Pound, Benjamin Hawkins, Indian Agent (1951), remains the standard biography, but it should be supplemented with Florette Henri, The Southern Indians and Benjamin Hawkins (1986). The best account of Creek history in Hawkins's period is Joel Martin, Sacred Revolt (1991).

Michael D. Green

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