Some 25 miles from Savannah these brave and devout pilgrims, after singing a psalm "set up a rock and in the spirit of the pious Samuel, named the place Ebenezer (stone of help) 'for hitherto hath the Lord helped us.'" Amid these crude but inspiring surroundings the young Treutlen received a splendid education, for that day, under the strict tutelage of his scholarly Lutheran pastors, Bolzius and Gronau. Thus it was that, when the red gloom of impending war was already visible on the distant horizon, and the Provincials had gathered at Savannah to take steps against the high-handed measures of England, John Adam Treutlen answered the roll-call from the Ebenezer country and was one of its leading and most aggressive spirits. Thus it was that, in the teeth of strong Tory influence and friends he espoused the patriot cause with all the ardor of a Knight Templar, thus becoming the chief object of Loyalist hatred and vengeance, his property being confiscated, and his home, with many of its treasures, burned to ashes.
Elected first Governor of Georgia under an independent Constitution by the Legislature, in 1777, there was not as yet the fearful carnage and bloody battles which were still to come, and which were to make the South and its manhood a synonym for courage and endurance the world over. It is true that the immortal conflict on Sullivan's Island had been fought and won, but Clinton and Parker, still hopeful under drooping plumes, had shifted the scene to the North.
The "blue bloods" of the Palmetto State—with the exception of Charleston's brave firebrand, Christopher Gadsden, were still praying for that peace, borne of wealth, intelligence and luxurious ease. Georgia, now perched upon the top-most round of empire—pre-eminence—was then weak in its swaddling clothes and viewed only as a promising child to be brought up in the aristocratic South Carolina Sunday School. With a cool and calculating diplomacy which smacked somewhat suggestively of the rising Talleyrand, we are told that the gentle ripples on the waters little betokened the torpedoes which were being laid beneath. Bludgeons, not the velvety hand of artful diplomacy, were calculated to narcotize the grim-visaged ruler of the satrapy across the Savannah, as all accounts agree that Treutlen was a somewhat "stormy petrel," a sort of pocket edition of Oliver Cromwell, the greatest civilized dictator that the world has ever produced—who could rout a parliament of sitting members, lock the door and put the key in his pocket.
And so it came to pass that, when the Governor heard of the so-called "Machiavellian scheme" to annex his little kingdom to the great Palmetto Commonwealth, by a coup d'etat, he pounded the floor viciously with his "condemnatory hoof" and shot a fiery proclamation over the official mahogany, denouncing the conspiracy in bitter vein and offering a heavy reward for the chief emissary—Drayton. When the Georgia patriot Government fell in 1779, Treutlen, along with hundreds of others, took British protection and fled to St. Matthews Parish, in the present County of Calhoun; and the road he travelled was a thornier path than that from Jerusalem to Jerico with
"Injuns on the upper way,
And death upon the lower."
It is not for me to split fine hairs over the principle involved in conditional agreements during the days of war, when every man is showing his teeth and reaching at the throat of his enemy. Suffice to say, that he chafed under the Tory bit and would have none of it. A born fighter and a man of rugged individuality, it was impossible for him to hug both sides of any fence. A dictator by instinct (and by Georgia statute,) well educated, and fresh from the Gubernatorial eiderdown he would naturally bring around his head swarms of bitter enemies, in times of war, and he was a marked man. He met his doom on a dreary night in 1780 under peculiarly atrocious conditions.
It is said that a small band of vindictive Tories went to his home during that fateful evening, and enticed him out, on a treacherous plea of surrender on certain plausible conditions. As he emerged from his door, he was seized, and not only brutally butchered, but, (all traditions agree,) literally hacked to pieces. The exact spot where the fragments of his dismembered body were buried will probably never be known. But there is every reason to believe that his bones rest in the vicinity of his home, from the fact that his tenure of life in this section was short; that he was without relatives beyond his family circle, and those relatives continued to live in the neighborhood. The mere fact that a Governor of Georgia could come here and be brutally and foully murdered by Tories, in the heat of war passions, and not a line recorded about it, in any South Carolina history or newspaper bearing upon that period, should open our eyes to the danger of swallowing the spurious pill offered to us by the Emily Geiger exterminators.
But for the Georgia records and a straight line of descendants, hereabouts, the Treutlen individuality and tradition would be tabooed as a "myth" and fabrication from beginning to end. Through the laudable efforts of the local D. A. R.—and particularly its regent, Mrs. F. C. Cain—a "marker" has been promised from the quartermaster general's office, Washington, D. C. It will stand in the vicinity of the "Metts Crossroads" and will remind the passerby of as true and loyal a Whig as lived during those perilous days.
Treutlen's general appearance, even in repose, as exhibited in an old photograph now in the possession of a descendant, is interesting. The orthodox military coat, unbottoned and spread abroad over his shoulders, brings into bold relief a "dicky" shirt front, emerging into a high and ferocious collar, which nestles snugly and smugly under his lower jaws. There is a profuse shock of hair, futilely bombarding an obstinate "cow-lick," the whole showing little or no subserviency to comb and brush. His large, piercing eyes, fringed by shaggy brows, with a drooping upper lid, produces a sad, if not sinister, aspect. The nose has a Roman slant, which meets a bold, intellectual forehead in an almost unbroken line. Marked cheek bones and a thin face ease down, more or less hastily, to a sharp and angular chin. A pair of thin lips, closely plastered to each other, bespeak firm determination; and his whole contour impresses one, forcibly, that he was not a safe man to take too many liberties with.