—Florence I. W. Burnham in American Monthly Magazine.
[TRAGEDY OF THE REVOLUTION OVERLOOKED BY HISTORIANS.]
By T. H. Dreher, M. D.
Before the William Thompson Chapter, D. A. R., invaded this neck of the moral vineyard and put its delicate, historical fingers upon the tendrils of local happenings, there was no blare of trumpets over a foul and bloody deed which occurred near the "Metts Cross-Roads," in this county, during the Revolutionary war. But the gruesome case was never without intense interest to those concerned in the episodes of a past age. The strange and mysterious always throws an additional halo over our heroes. This feeling is intensified, in this case, by virtue of the fact that the same blood which ran in the veins of the victim of the "cross-roads plot," now pulsates in the arteries of many lineal, living descendants who are part and parcel of Calhoun County's sturdy citizenship.
The malignant, cruel and cowardly feature of this dastardly crime, garbed in a plausible and hypocritical cloak, make it unique, even in the gory annals of criminal warfare and harks our memories back to the murder of Duncan, King of Scotland. Here, as there, we have no doubt, but that souls grew faint over the details of the foul conspiracy and "their seated hearts knocked at their ribs" until spurred to the "sticking place" by the evil eloquence of some overpowering and unnatural genius, like unto Lady Macbeth. John Adams Treutlen (for that was the name of our hero) is in his grave.
"After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well,
Treason has done his worst; nor steel nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further."
That is true. The cold pen of a true chronicler, however, must again allude to the utter negligence and gross indifference of an earlier age to a proper appreciation of significant events. That a noted Governor of Georgia should be brutally done to death by revengeful Tories because of the intense Whig fires which consumed his very soul; that children, and children's children, should grow up around the scene of his untimely taking-off, and still his home and his grave should be, today, unidentified spots on the map of Calhoun County force us to exclaim with Mark Antony: "But yesterday the word of Caesar might have stood against the world. Now lies he there and none so poor to do him reverence."
The salient facts in the life of Treutlen are interesting. Born in Berectsgaden, 1726, as a German Salzburger, he was brought to this country in a boat load of Salzburgers that landed at Savannah in 1734. If early impressions count for anything, there is no wonder that the spirit of liberty and independence sank deep into the very inmost recesses of his soul. His father, along with thousands of other German Protestants, was exiled by a fanatical decree of Archbishop Leopold, which drove out from his domain all who would not accept the Catholic faith. It was this Salzburger strain and religion which was unterrified and unwashed, amid the raging tempests of an angry sea, while others aboard, including John Wesley, trembled for life, and confessed to a livelier awakening to the rejuvenating and sustaining power of God upon frail humanity.