Daily Inspiration Quote by Benjamin Hawkins

A sentence that sounds like bureaucratic housekeeping is actually a small act of empire. Hawkins, a U.S. diplomat and Indian agent on the southern frontier, writes in the clipped, commanding idiom of early federal governance: polite on the surface ("you will oblige me") while issuing a clear order ("this prohibition") aimed at people he refers to only as "Indians", a category rather than a set of nations. The line performs authority twice: first by presuming Hawkins has the right to prohibit, and second by outsourcing enforcement to whoever receives the message. Power becomes portable, something you can repeat like a password.

The subtext is less about the rule itself than about who is permitted to circulate it. "If you should see any Indians" treats contact as incidental, almost accidental, implying Native people are figures encountered along someone else's route. They are not addressed directly; they are managed through intermediaries. That indirectness matters. It naturalizes a paternalistic chain of command in which Native communities are positioned as recipients of restrictions, not partners in negotiation.

Historically, Hawkins operated in a period when the United States was formalizing sovereignty in the Southeast through treaties, trade regulation, and "civilization" programs that promised order while tightening control over land and movement. The sentence is a micro-example of that broader project: the soft glove of courtesy over the hard knuckles of prohibition. It works rhetorically because it makes domination sound like simple administrative tidiness, the kind that can be repeated without argument.