… the light of the sun became to my eyes, as indistinct and dark as the gloom of death; the beauties of nature to me were “blotted out for ever,” and in my 23d year, when I looked forward to days of ease and comfort, from the resources of my activity and industry—my path is shut up, and the world become a blank of indistinctness and uncertainty …

 

So ends the 180-page narrative A History of a Voyage to the Coast of Africa, And Travels into the Interior of that Country; Containing Particular Descriptions of the Climate and Inhabitants and Interesting Particulars Concerning the Slave Trade by Joseph Hawkins. The book was published “by his Friends” soon after his return from Africa, the first of many attempts to secure a financial footing for the blind young man.

Joseph Hawkins was born in Kingsbury, Washington County, New York in 1772, the first of eight children born to Joseph and Rachel Hawkins. According to his History, at the age of 18 Joseph became convinced that a prosperous future as a merchant awaited him in Alburg, Vermont—some 350 miles away from home near the Canadian border; his hopes of success were “disappointed” just 14 months later and he cast about for new opportunities. Having heard that young men of “moderate education and industrious habits” could be assured “constant employment in the southern states,” Hawkins departed for Boston on horseback and from thence to Charleston, South Carolina, by sea.

Again sorely disappointed by the opportunities he found in Charleston, Hawkins signed on as a supercargo aboard the ship Charleston, bound for the coast of Africa. According to his narrative, once there, he led an expedition inland, acquiring captives from a war between two rival nations and leading them into enslavement in the United States. At times, he seems not unsympathetic to the plight of the enslaved, describing the “deep sighs of the poor Galla prisoners … eyes flowing with tears” as “deeply affecting to me.” He is also teased by his fellow officers who “had all provided themselves with three or four wives each, and rebuked me for not bringing mine along, alleging that they would … bring a good price when we arrived in America.” Whatever his true feelings about the slave trade and the enslaved people on board, Hawkins and his ship departed for America with 500 enslaved people. On the return passage, a contagious disease causing symptoms of dysentery, but also swelling and inflammation of the eyes and eyelids struck most of those aboard the vessel, leaving Hawkins blind.

Playing the lottery

Lotteries for both public and private benefit have been common throughout American history, but it’s a bit unclear why the state legislators of Vermont authorized a lottery for the benefit of someone intimately involved in the slave trade. By his own account, Hawkins resided in Vermont for less than 2 years before departing on his voyage to the coast of Africa. Nonetheless during the October 1798 session of Vermont’s legislature, lawmakers authorized a benefit lottery for Hawkins—16,000 tickets priced at $3 each, with a top prize of $5000. In the 31 December 1798 issue of the Rutland Herald, the editor commented quite favorably on Hawkins and the lottery:

Among the applicants for public favor, we consider Mr. Joseph Hawkins as one, who is highly worthy of the public encouragement … [the] abilities, exertions, and misfortunes of so active and enterprising a man, pointed him out to the legislature of this state as an object worthy of their attention … We do not know of any lottery, in which the adventurer may depose his property with more entire safety, or with a better prospect of benefit to himself.

The first issue of the lottery apparently went well enough that a second class was authorized in 1800, to be administered by Hawkins himself. The Vermont legislature authorized both issues of the lottery benefiting Hawkins, and lottery tickets could be sold outside of the state. By 1801, however, Hawkins seems to have run into some trouble and the Managers of the Philanthropic Lottery advertised in the newspapers that “not having been able to extricate it [the lottery] from the difficulty and embarrassment into which it had been involved by the defection of Joseph Hawkins … cannot … proceed to complete the drawing, at the time formerly proposed.” The Managers are unclear about what the “defection” was, but in the 15 June 1802 issue of the Massachusetts Mercury, Hawkins writes “to explain away the unfavorable remarks and dishonorable reports which have been prevailing these two years past to the disadvantage of my character.” Apparently after having been given the management of the lottery, Hawkins was “called upon to discharge a heavy debt which I had contracted … long before my unhappy misfortune. I had only three days left me to determine whether I would pay the debt or suffer myself to be prosecuted.” He then gave up the lottery receipts to a Col. Storrs and hightailed it back to New York State where the debt could not be collected and found himself charged with embezzlement from the lottery for his trouble.

Hawkins’s post-lottery life

At the smae time Hawkins was administering the Philanthropic Lottery in Boston, he began publishing a short-lived literary magazine called The Columbian Phenix which was published between January and July of 1800. He married Hannah Washburn Sweetland that year and had three sons, born in Connecticut. Hawkins seems to have also spent time in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, working on inventions related to steam power. He never made it to Europe to see the oculists who it was thought might have restored his sight, a trip that was supposed to have been paid for out of the lottery proceeds. However, in September 1804, newspaper advertisements for a New York City physician named Mr. Launey (or Launy) appear in various newspapers, along with a fawning testimonial from Hawkins claiming that Launey’s “apparatus” had given him relief that no other physician in America had been able to. Since later accounts always mention Hawkins’s blindness, however, Mr. Launey’s cure was but a temporary one.