Benjamin W. Hawkins

(Sept 27, cont.) Here is a view of the Hawkins cemetery, facing north-northwest. I didn’t find the grave of Caroline Hawkins Clark here, but was surprised and pleased to find the grave of her father, John J. Hawkins, who I’ve already written about. His grave marker is the one closest to the camera.

Caroline’s brother, Benjamin W., is also buried here. The marker for him and his wife is the one closest to my bicycle, by the gate. The 1887 biography that I’ve already quoted from tells about the Hawkins ancestry (pages 487-488):

The first settlement in America of the Hawkins family was during the first half of the eighteenth century, when four brothers, John, Samuel, Benjamin and James, emigrated from England and settled in the Shenandoah Valley in the Virginia Coloney. These brothers were slaveholders, and were direct descendants of Sir John Hawkins, who was the first Englishman to establish the slave trade between Africa and the American colonies.

Wikipedia has some corroboration for this claim about Sir John Hawkins. It appears that he got the “Sir” for his role in defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588. He had begun his slave-trading a couple of decades earlier.

But three centuries later, a great civil war having been fought not so long previously, the family was pleased to report a different type of role with respect to slavery. I’ve already quoted a passage saying that Benjamin W’s grandfather on his mother’s side had left Kentucky on account of disapproval of slavery. Benjamin W.’s family didn’t claim for him any role in the abolition movement or in operating the underground railroad, but noted that he didn’t cooperate with slave hunters:

In his earlier life [Benjamin W.] had many interesting experiences while in the fur trade, carrying the mail and in other pioneer features of life. While fugitive slaves were passing through the country he refused to betray them to their pursuers even when offered $1,000 as a bribe.

YTD mileage: 2045.0