From: “The First Hundred Years” (1935. Sarah Blackwell Gober Temple)
CHAPTER I: EVENTS LEADING TO THE ORGANIZATION OF COBB COUNTY
§ TREATY RELATIONS WITH THE CHEROKEE INDIANS
1
On the morning of May 29, 1820, a tall weatherbeaten man stood at the Shallow Ford on the Chattahoochee River, in Georgia. He surveyed the pleasant scene before him. The river sparkled in the spring sunlight. The wooded slopes were covered with fresh green foliage, the distant reaches veiled in a blue haze.
He was not actually thinking of the scene itself, but of the struggle for the possession of the land upon which he stood. It was his consideration of the animosities attendant upon the ultimate outcome of this struggle between the Indians and the white people which gave him pause.
Whatever that outcome, he was here now to uphold the law. He bent his head to write. He was often not good at spelling, but he always made himself understood.
“Intruders on the Cherokee lands, beware,” he began with his customary directness. “I am required to remove all white men found trespassing on the Cherokee lands not having a written permit from the agent, Colo. R. J. Meigs, this duty I am about to perform. The Regulars and Indian Light horse will be employed in performing this service, and any opposition will be promptly punished. All white men with there live stock found trespassing on the Indian land will be arrested and handed over to the civil authorities of the United States to be dealt with as the law directs, there families removed to U. S. land, there crops, houses and fences destroyed …”
He signed his name. Andrew Jackson. Then he posted his notice, mounted his horse, and turned toward Alabama.
“On the excursion through the Cherokee Nation,” he wrote to Mr. Calhoun, the Secretary of War, on June 15, “I found a great many intruders and those on the north of the Chatahoochey not only numerous but insolent and threatening resistance.”
Those fertile acres along the Chattahoochee River, which forms the southern boundary of the present Cobb County, were coveted by the white man and held by the Cherokees. Again and again intruders settled upon them, only to be driven off by Indian agents appointed by the United States Government, or by the Indians themselves. Eighteen years were to elapse before the destiny of the Cherokees east of the Mississippi was determined. Twelve years went by before Cobb County came into being. General Jackson, as he stood near the edge of the county that spring morning in 1820, foresaw only a part of the complications which would attend the organization of the county, and the coming of the day when white men would finally become the legal owners of land which for years beyond the memory of man had been in the possession of the Indians.
Cobb and the other counties formed from the Cherokee Nation came into being with reverberations which shook the country and Georgia from end to end; arrayed friend against friend; threatened the state with disciplinary measures by the general government; caused Georgia to defy the nation; and unloosed upon the people of the state such criticism and odium as has not been experienced except at the time of the War Between the States and during the subsequent reconstruction period.
We must turn back some years if we are to understand properly this dramatic chapter in the history of the nation and its relation to the history of the county. We shall see how cessions of Cherokee land to the government lessened the Indian holdings and provided opportunity for settlement by white men in a time when most men were seeking new land. The slow, merciless march of time wrought inevitably the changes in the fortunes of white men and Indians which resulted in the organization of Cobb County. Historians have written vindictively of this group or that, this white man or that Indian, whose machinations caused the tide of affairs to boil more furiously at one point, to recede at another. This is futile. Bitterness and recrimination have no place in the long reach of history, and are to be considered, in arriving at truth, only as details of the great pageant.
2
The Cherokees were found in possession of northern Georgia when [ Hernando ] DeSoto and his men came up from Florida in the spring of 1540 on their quest for gold. The tradition has persisted that the Cherokees wrested their territory from unknown white men many years before, but the definite history of these Indians begins with the year 1540.
DeSoto and his men were the first white men known to penetrate into the interior of the Cherokee country. The object of the Spaniards was to set the standard of their country upon these unexplored lands, and to supplement their national exchequer with the wealth and treasure which they confidently expected to find here. Their march led them into North Carolina and into the Nacoochee Valley in the present White County, Georgia. From the Indian town there, Guaxule, the route travelled by the Spaniards brought them to the town of Chiaha, which Georgia historians have generally accepted as being upon the present site of Rome, in Floyd County. The Bureau of American Ethnology disputes this, however, and defines the route as leading down the Chattahoochee River from its head. waters in northern Georgia to the Lower Creek town of Chiaha, often called Chehaw, which was in the neighborhood of the present town of Columbus, Georgia.
The difference in interpretation rests upon the decision concerning the situation of a town between Guaxule and Chiaha, a place called Canasoga or Canasagua. This name Canasoga, pronounced Gansagi by the Cherokees, was given by them to several of their towns, and we cannot now identify the Canasoga of DeSoto’s time satisfactorily with any of the towns in Murray, Bartow, and other counties, or with the Connesagua River, as did historians formerly. It is probable that the Spaniards’ two-days’ march from Guaxule took them to a town on the upper Chattahoochee and that they came down this river. The Bureau of Ethnology advances the theory in this connection that the name of Kennesaw Mountain, near Marietta, Cobb’s county seat, may be a corruption of Gansagi. If so, the Canasoga mentioned by the Spaniards might have been on the Chattahoochee not far from Kennesaw Mountain. Lending some color to this suggestion is the fact that the uninhabited country between Canasoga and Chiaha was neutral ground between the Cherokees and Creeks, and that, as we shall see later, Kennesaw Mountain was a point on the boundary line established by the government between the two tribes many years later.
In any event, whether DeSoto marched to Rome and then into Alabama, or, as seems more probable, down the Chattahoochee and along the edges of the future Cobb County to the neighborhood of Columbus and out of the state, we have now a starting point for the history of the Cherokees. The relations of the Cherokees with the white man in this part of their Nation began with DeSoto’s march. They continued for two hundred ninety-eight years with extraordinary vicissitudes.
The original territory of the Cherokee Nation included the present states of Kentucky and Tennessee, a part of the western portions of West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina, about half of South Carolina, and the upper parts of Alabama and Georgia. The line ran west from Orangeburg, South Carolina, south of Athens and Lawrenceville, Georgia, through Marietta and Gadsden, Alabama, to the future line of Alabama and Mississippi.
The treaty relations of the Cherokee Nation with the white man began in 1721. During the colonial period of our national history, there were ten treaties concluded by which land was ceded by the Cherokees. Only two of these cessions were of land in Georgia: one, in 1773, when land north of the Broad River was ceded, and another, in 1783, when land between the Oconee and Tugaloo Rivers was ceded. The cessions now began to encroach upon the land held by the Cherokees in northern Georgia, for a part of the present county of Habersham was included in this cession, with land comprising future counties to the south of Habersham.
By the close of the Revolution, the boundary of the Nation was considerably lessened. Only a small part of North Carolina was left, a yet smaller part of Kentucky, the major portion of Tennessee, a very small strip in South Carolina, and, in Georgia, the eastern boundary ran south to a point between Lawrenceville and Athens, with the latter outside the Nation, and continued to the west through Marietta and across Alabama as already shown. Thus it can be seen that with the line of the Nation running through Gwinnett County, almost next door to Cobb, white men were soon to be close enough to look with longing eyes over the river at the Chattahoochee bottom lands.
The fact that the southern line of the Nation ran no further south than the site of Marietta must not be taken too seriously, however. The Cherokees always regarded the land down to the Chattahoochee as belonging to them, when there was any question of ownership involved, although this claim was disputed at times by the Creeks to the south. Boundary lines between Indian tribes were not usually definitely marked. Between two such powerful tribes as the Cherokees and the Creeks, there was usually a strip of territory, sometimes many miles in extent, which was regarded as neutral and used as a hunting ground by both. Such was the case with the land which was later to be the southern part of Cobb County. The strength of the Indian title to any tract of land was in proportion to the distance of that land from their villages. Since there were no important Indian towns in Cobb County, it is evident that the lower part of the county was not valued highly by the Cherokees until some years later, when Georgia and the Nation were engaged in a bitter dispute concerning territory.
The treaty by which the boundaries were fixed at the close of the Revolutionary War was the famous Treaty of Hopewell, concluded on November 28, 1785. It marked the beginning of treaty relations on the part of the Cherokees with the newly formed Government of the United States.
The necessity for this treaty lay in the fact that both Cherokees and whites were continually ranging back and forth over disputed boundary lines, committing depredations which augmented ill feeling and in many cases led to acts of hostility. The general government, therefore, deemed it advisable to exercise its treaty-making powers, define boundaries, and so warn settlers and intruders against further encroachments upon Indian lands. By the treaty provisions, the Cherokees and the white men agreed to return to each other prisoners taken during the Revolution, the Cherokees having allied themselves with the British during the war. The Cherokees now acknowledged themselves to be under the exclusive protection of the United States. The treaty provided that the Indians might punish as they pleased all who settled or would attempt to settle upon Indian lands, unless they removed within a specified time. With the treaty concluded and the boundaries defined, it was now hoped that future difficulties might be avoided and that, should they arise, the treaty terms would serve as an acceptable basis for settlement of trouble.
The succeeding treaties show a pathetic faith in the power of words. Perhaps the country even at that early date had already a childlike trust in the efficacy of laws, even though public opinion will not have them enforced. “The United States give peace to the Cherokees,” began the Hopewell Treaty of 1785. “Perpetual peace declared between the United States and the Cherokee Nation,” began the treaty concluded July 2, 1791. The ninth article of the latter provided, “Inhabitants of the United States forbidden to hunt on Cherokee lands or to pass over same without a passport from the governor of the state or territory or some other person authorized by the President of the United States to grant same.” Cherokees committing crimes against citizens of the United States were to be delivered up and punished by United States law, while white men trespassing or committing crimes against the Cherokees were also to be punished by the same laws. Settlers on Indian lands, however, would forfeit the protection of the United States and could be punished as the Cherokees saw fit.
It was the substance of things hoped for. The treaty itself had grown out of the dissatisfaction with the treaty of 1785. The whites intruded upon Indian lands; the Indians retaliated by stealing stock and such property as they could lay hands upon. In the interim between the two treaties, Congress had issued a proclamation on September 1, 1788, forbidding all unwarrantable intrusion upon Indian lands and exhorting all those who had settled upon the hunting grounds of the Cherokees to take their families and property away immediately.
President Washington brought to the attention of Congress the growing number of intruders upon Indian lands in August, 1790.3 General Knox, the Secretary of War, had during the previous year communicated to the President his views that Congress “should seriously consider the disgraceful violation of the treaty of Hopewell,” manifesting as this violation did a contempt for the authority of the United States. “The Indian tribes can have no faith in such imbecile promises and the lawless whites will ridicule a government which shall on paper only make Indian treaties and regulate Indian boundaries.”
The State of Georgia played her part here in the name of progress by accentuating the Indian troubles. By the acts of February 7, 1785, and December 21, 1789, she had disposed of 3,500,000 acres of vacant land lying south of the Tennessee River to the Tennessee Company. News of the settlement which the company hoped to place upon a part of this land having come to the attention of the Secretary of War, the latter vehemently protested to the President. Washington by proclamation forbade the settlement in view of the fact that by the treaties already passed the company’s settlers would be placed outside the protection of the United States. The Indians were thus left free to destroy the settlement already started, and this they hastened to do. The resulting strain upon the relations of the two races was of more far reaching importance than was the property loss.
There was some fighting in the upper part of the Nation between the white settlers and the Cherokees in the next few wears, and sporadic though the actual battles were, their portent was serious. It was known that the young warriors of the Nation were planning a general war upon the whites, but the attacks which they made upon settlements resulted in punishment by Kentucky and Tennessee troops and the destruction of some of the Cherokee towns,
“There were two methods of settling Indian troubles, by treaty and by battle. No one wanted the latter while the former could be employed effectively. In the last six months of 1794, both means were used, and the result, if not permanent, was at least a much needed breathing spell for each side.
The treaty of 1794 was soothing in that the government agreed to mark boundary lines, and to furnish the Cherokees, in lieu of all former sums, with $45,000 worth of goods annually in compensation for all territory ceded by the 1785 and 1791 treaties. It was true that the Indians felt that there was one drawback to this treaty. Fifty dollars was to be deducted from the Cherokee annuity for every horse stolen from the whites and not returned within three months. But there were ways of getting around that.
3
The first of the treaties of the Federal period by which land was ceded in Georgia, and the fifteenth in the general list of cessions, was concluded at Tellico, Tennessee, on October 24, 1804. The tract ceded was that known as Wafford’s Settlement, a strip about four miles wide and twenty-three miles long which lay along the boundary of the Nation in the present counties of Hall and Gwinnett. This cession brought the boundary closer to Cobb County.
Colonel Wafford, with various others, had made a settlement in the vicinity described. The government believed that this was done in good faith and through doubt of the Indian lines rather than with intent to intrude, and accordingly wished to arbitrate the matter with the Cherokees. They protested. The government itself believed that the land belonged to the Creeks, but that Nation disclaimed it in favor of the Cherokees. For this cession of land, the United States agreed to pay the Cherokees $5,000 in goods or cash and an annuity of $1.000. 13
There was more involved in the negotiations concerning this treaty than the cession of land, however. Both the general government and the State of Georgia hoped to secure consent to the right of way for a road which would run through the Nation from Tellico Factory, Tennessee, to Athens, Georgia, the necessary houses of entertainment to be established along the way for travellers who made a journey of more than one day’s duration.
This right of way the Indians refused to grant. No concession to the government, not even that of ceding land, was more jealously guarded by the Cherokees than that of granting road privileges. They became increasingly wary of making such grants in the succeeding years, for they realized that each Federal road was a wedge thrust into their Nation and would hasten the coming of the while then into their country. Their halfbreed chiefs, grown wise through years of dickering with the government and naturally jealous of any encroachment upon their land, watched the tide of emigration flowing into Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia from the north and east, and they proposed to give no possible aid to those advancing hordes who sought new lands.
Thirteen years were to pass before any more lands were ceded in Georgia. The terms and gains of other cessions, however, are indicative of the attitude both of the general government and of the Cherokees. The government paid $3,000 in merchandise, $11,000 in cash in ninety days, and an annuity of $3,000 for a cession of land in Kentucky and Tennessee and the use of two roads, in effecting a treaty in 1805. According to the terms of another in 1806 by which land was ceded in Tennessee and Alabama, $2,000 was paid upon ratification, $8,000 was paid in four annual installments, a grist mill and a machine for cleaning cotton were furnished and erected by the government, and one of the Cherokee chiefs was to be paid $100 annually for life.
A treaty made in 1807 further amplified the provisions made the previous year. The United States agreed to pay to the Cherokees $2,000 and to permit them to hunt upon the tract ceded until the increase of settlements rendered it impracticable. It was secretly agreed also that $1,000 and two rifles should be given to the chiefs with whom the treaty was negotiated. It will be seen that the chiefs were advancing in that political acumen which they were to display so notably later in their lobbying at Washington.
Other treaties were made, more land ceded, more money paid. Then, on July 8, 1817, there was concluded a treaty, the twenty-third in the general list of cessions, which was for this section of Georgia and for the future Cobb County almost as important as the last treaty of 1835. Events growing out of it were to bring exciting times in the history of the state and to render increasingly complex and unsatisfactory the relations between the two races. By the provisions of this treaty, land was ceded in Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama
It was not only that the cession of land was important; the other provisions of the treaty were even more so. A tract was set aside by the government on the Arkansas and White Rivers for those wishing to emigrate to the West, equal in area to that ceded by the treaty.
The United States agreed to “give to all the poor warriors who remove a rifle, ammunition, blankets, and brass kettle or beaver trap each, as full compensation for improvements left by them; to all those whose improvements add real value to the land, the full value thereof, as ascertained by appraisal, shall be paid. The United States to furnish flat-bottomed boats and provisions on the Tenessee for transportation to those removing.” There was one other provision which was to raise a storm later: each head of a Cherokee family residing on lands ceded by this treaty or hereafter to be ceded who might wish to become a citizen of the United States was to receive a reservation of 640 acres for life with reversion in fee simple to his children, land reserved under this provision to be deducted from the quantity ceded.
Here, certainly, both the government and one portion of the Cherokee Nation placed their cards upon the table. It was no secret that the government believed that emigration would be a wise solution of the Indian troubles. Officials scarcely dared to contemplate how really felicitous such a solution would be. No one knew how all of this was going to end. They might speak of the Cherokees as their poor savage brothers of the wilderness, but in reality the chiefs were more than a match for government commissioners.
This was disconcerting. There were times when the commissioners could barely save their faces after the conclusion of a treaty, and they found it even more difficult when in a year’s time they had as suavely as possible to grant more concessions and pay out more money because the Indians had in the meantime decided that they had not had enough. There was no disposition on the part of the government to be niggardly. And yet who could keep pace with this greed-_-greed for money and for land which welled up again and again? Certainly it was not alone on the part of the Indians. Greed for the Cherokee land was becoming a dominating factor in the lives of a large part of the population of Georgia. Gentlemen, with political fences to mend at home, harried the government continually about it. How wise a solution emigration would be!
Twenty-eight chiefs and headmen signed the 1817 treaty with its provisions for emigration. In the midst of the negotiations sixty-seven other chiefs protested the very idea of emigrating. While the possibility of removing to the West had been considered for many years by some of the Cherokees, the sixty-seven headmen who protested against ratification of the treaty declared that they represented the then prevalent Cherokee opinion on the subject. To emigrate would mean that they must return to the primitive and savage conditions of life which they had outgrown years before. They vehemently protested against such a course.’ The astute General Andrew Jackson, this time one of the commissioners, brought matters to a successful conclusion for the government despite the protest, and the treaty stood.
The cession of land in Georgia was such that the line ran from High Shoals on the Appalachee River, across the upper part of the present Walton County north of Monroe, westward through the southern part of Gwinnett, and across the present DeKalb and Fulton Counties, to the Chattahoochee River. The line then turned north along the river, the land between the Wafford’s Settlement strip and the river being now ceded to the government, with the Tallulah River between the present counties of Rabun and Habersham as the northern boundary and Tallulah Falls as the northeastern point on the boundary line. Thus it will be seen that with the Chattahoochee River as the western boundary of the cession, the Cherokees had ceded land up to the entire eastern boundary of what was to be Cobb County. Boundary lines of the lands ceded were to be run and marked by United States commissioners accompanied by commissioners appointed by the Cherokees.
This provision is of interest to those concerned with the history of Cobb County, for back and forth across this section of the state for several years thereafter various gentlemen were running boundary lines, some of them with government authority, some of them with state authority. Thousands of words were printed in the newspapers concerning the exact location of the line between the Creeks and the Cherokees. On horseback and afoot, badgered government agents in the Cherokee Nation pursued the gentlemen running the lines, endeavoring to stop them from doing this and that, and pouring out their own troubles and those of the Cherokees. The pushing tide of white men turned yet more hopeful eyes upon the Indian land and determined to possess it.
The eventual occupancy of the Cherokee lands by the white men, and the organization of Cobb County, was presaged in that first treaty with the Cherokees signed in 1721 when they began to cede land. The treaty of 1817 saw the county beginning to struggle in its birth pangs. They lasted for fifteen years, and the entire nation took a hand in the process.