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THE SEED THAT WAS SOWN
IN THE
COLONY OF GEORGIA
THE HARVEST AND THE AFTERMATH
1740-1870
BY
CHARLES SPALDING WYLLY
New York and Washington
THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY
1910
Copyright, 1910, by
THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY
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This work is respectfully
inscribed to my friend, C. Downing, of Brunswick, Georgia, whose clear
brain, kind heart and free hand is an example and inspiration
"An honest heart is one that strongly feels
The pulse of passion and the throb of pain,
But asks assistance from a healthy brain
To stem all morbid current sentiment, should it steal
Into the veins with darkening stain;
A heart light beating, which may reveal
The torch of sin but struggles free again,
Repentant, looking to the Lamb who heals.
Not such my heart, a football for the crowd,
Now high in air, now trampled on the ground,
Till bruised, benumbed, and ossified, it lies,
And mercy, Lord, should mutter ere it dies.
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PREFACE
When a writer has assumed the burden
of reviewing the result of any great national decision it is impossible to
ignore the surroundings and environments of the participants therein. The
beliefs held by the adverse parties as essential articles of their faith become
not only the causes but personages in the conflict: To one party immediate
increase of prosperity and probable wealth seemed a creed entitled to universal
assent. To a smaller number a patient awaiting for a natural growth and strength
appeared a wiser choice. The first asserted "That in this climate a white man
could not labor," the other claimed "That in a year a white man's labor was more
than that of a slave." I have but moved the shadow backward on the dial: where
now does it point? In endeavoring to give concisely and truthfully the political
steps that finally led to the Break, I have been mindful that to the
children of to-day the war of the sixties seems but "old history" and that any
investigation into the causes of that war would appear like a groping for a
former life, through and by the footprints found in fossil remains. This, with
the fact that in those days a
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great national drama was being
enacted before my very eyes, must be my apology for writing as I have.
Charles Spalding Wylly.
Brunswick, Georgia,
December
20, 1908.
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CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. The Seeding 11
II. The Harvest
34
III. The Aftermath 82
IV. The Pilots 93
V. St Simon's and Jekyl Islands
132
Appendix I 145
Appendix II 158
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The Seed that Was Sown in the Colony of Georgia
I. THE SEEDING
To-day I have been
permitted to read the "Recollections of Mrs. George C. Dent, written for
her grandson." So impressed have I been that I find myself tempted to emulate
this model of a departed culture in an attempt to place on record what I have
known, and what I have had told me, of those who once lived in the counties of
Glynn and McIntosh.
An Eastern writer says: "A man will not after death be remembered
unless he has left a son, built a house, or written a book."
A son has not been granted to me; a house I have not built; a real
book I cannot write. Once, with effort, I published a pamphlet entitled "Annals
of Glynn." In its pages many of the families with whom I am connected, socially
and by blood, are briefly noted. In the limits to which I will be bound only the
fragments of those busy lives can be recast, and the mental characteristics that
I shall seek to disclose will be but the shadowy skeletons of
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minds that were once ruling
factors in the communities where they lived. I have thought, and still think,
that one telling anecdote will often better illustrate and give more life to a
word-picture than pages of description.
As I think, so I will write; and I trust these addenda to the first
work may meet at least that pardoning and half-pitying smile I have often seen
creep to young lips as they gave meek hearing to the prosy words of the old.
My memories are mostly confined to the residents of the tide-water
sections, and more especially to those of the islands of Sapelo, Saint Simon and
Jekyl. These sea- and marsh-encircled barriers to the ocean were early settled
by a class of immigrants who in a large measure became the seed beds from which
much of the manhood and culture of the coming State were drawn. Immediately
adjoining were the planters of the reclaimed swamp lands. A difference in the
form of agriculture had, by the inexorable law of environment, affected those
following the diverse industries. On the islands both a winter and a summer home
were possible, and there was no absenteeism. The ever-present, ever-dictating,
always over-ruling influence of slavery there assumed its least harmful form. In
the best instances it became patriarchal in its government; and in its worst it
was tempered by the pride of ownership and softened by the direct personal
attention and interest of the owner.
--- PAGE 13---
On the richer
lands a summer residence was impossible. From May to December the fortune and
well-being of the subject race was committed to a hired substitute--often chosen
from a class totally unworthy of trust. And again, the returns from these lands
being large, the possession of money in considerable sums increased absenteeism
and fostered a desire for luxurious surroundings. The result, in many cases, was
unfortunate.
Gradually, and certainly, what had been serfhood became slavery, and
the slave sank to but a "chattel," having lost even the personal
acquaintanceship and feudal love which once had gilded his chain. The
consequence of an expensive and dissipated habit of life pressed upon the owner,
prompting harsh measures toward the exaction of greater tasks; while too often,
by the terms of a mortgage, a public sale was forced, and, with that, there came
the partial breaking up of family ties--which gave to the great novelist1
of the fifties the "climaxes and situations" with which she hypnotized the world
into a stern determination that an end must be made of this reversal and denial
of American declarations.
I have written the above passages, knowing well under what a light
of ante-bellum semi-darkness they will be viewed by kinsman or acquaintance who
may chance upon them. Be it so. Marie-Bashkirtsseff-like, I shall bare my
thoughts and beliefs, even
1.
Mrs. Stowe
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to their nudities. Too long
jealously cloaked in the hereditary garments of personal interest and masked
from any light of discussion have they laid dormant, for there was no feature in
the "peculiar" institution that did not work far more to the injury of the white
than to the black race.
It was the cause and the very "raison d'être" of failure and
want of enterprise in the young. It encouraged idleness by the debasement of
honest manual work to the standard of slave labor. It clouded the vision, so
that only in the stronger minds were the eyes uplifted to the nobler realms of
thought and action. It even, in some cases, perverted justice by the spectre2
of a coming débâcle, in which all might be lost.
And yet it was a legacy made sacred by the traditions of years and
strong by its social power, since it claimed, with truth, that only through
investment in that form could money certainly and surely bring to its owners a
social equality with the higher and the most aristocratic circles of our
Southern land. And in a neighboring State (a fair sample of all) even the doors
of the "St. Cecelia"--jealously closed where entrance was asked for mere wealth,
however great--in time would swing wide at the touch of those who knocked
accompanied by a train of inherited slaves, with the accompanying
prestige of a plantation home.
It is a pleasure to close these pessimistic views
2. See
Appendix II on use of word “spectre.”
--- PAGE 15---
and turn to the recollections
of my youth, which are greatly suffused with visits to Sapelo, the home of my
grandfather, Thomas Spalding.
Neither himself nor his house had any counter-part in the county. He
had, early in life, married a Miss Sarah Leake, who must have been a
woman of great gifts and endowed by nature with every beauty of person, mind and
heart, since, as afterward of my cousin Mrs. M. C. S., neither I nor
anyone before me have yet heard any words but those lifted in unstinted
testimony to a perfection of heart and mind unknown and unmet with in others.
Mrs. Dent writes that
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney,
after a visit to Mr. Spalding, "stopped at my father's, and said:
'Mrs. Spalding, sir, would grace a king's court, or make a dairy sweet.'" I
am very sure, had he met my cousin and sister-in-law, his phrase would have been
repeated and reiterated.
Du Maurier tells of a legend that in every hundred years one
nightingale is given to the world, so that each recurring century may listen to
a perfection of melody! This may or may not be; but I am sure that these two
lovely women were created that we who knew them and their daughters might
take to heart and realize the full meaning of the words of the Annunciation:
"Blessed art thou among all women . . ."
(See St. Luke 1:42.)
Thomas Spalding was born in 1774. His father
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was from Ashantilly, Scotland,
and had embarked in the Indian trade. His storehouses made a chain from Sunbury,
Georgia, to Volusia, Florida, and northward by the Chattahoochee to the
Tennessee; his canoes floated southward and northward to Frederica, the central
storehouse. Adhering to the Crown at the bursting of the revolutionary storm, he
saw his possessions seized and confiscated. "Under an act of banishment and
exile" he retired to Florida, then a British province, and devoted himself to
the education of his only child. So well did he succeed, that in after years,
his son was recognized as one of the foremost scholars of his day, for he had
brought an unmatched memory to bear upon the history of the past; had himself
been a witness to the birth of the State, a nurse to her infancy, and a guide to
her manhood. A biographical sketch of him can be found on page 634 of White's
Historical Records. It is from the pen of James Hamilton Couper, Esquire,
and tells the life of Mr. Spalding in better words than it is given me to
use.
In 1796 he bought the larger part of Sapelo Island, selling his home
at "Retreat," on St. Simon. Here he built, at the "South End," a house modeled
after Roman examples. The walls were three feet thick; the four reception-rooms,
thirty-two by twenty-six feet; with chambers of corresponding size. Nor was the
frame unworthy of the building: north, south, and west it was embraced and
absolutely enveloped by gigantic oaks; eastward, it
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looked direct on the sea. The
waving moss cast constant shadowy glooms, interlaced, like life, with gleams of
light and brightness--with mind attuned to Nature's somber picture, it might be.
Steeped in retrospective thought, through columned aisles,
high-arched in living green, a visitor passed; cool shadows from bannered moss
moved ahead and beside you--shadows that, at times, seemed to flit away, as
though in the presence of a memory or a sorrow. The eastern doorway is
reached--then look!
The blue sea rolled before him, every wave with sparkling crest,
every ripple smiling to chase some mournful thought or fretful care away.
In this druid-like grove my grandfather idly dreamt he had founded,
in perpetuity, the seat of a family. But a year ago I stood by the ruined wall,
and, in the deep monotone of a stormy sea, I thought I could hear, in each
in-coming wave, a warning of a To Be, succeeded by a To Have,
whilst every out-going rush and sweep of the surge gave, in fateful response--And
Nothing More.
"A PARAPHRASE
The South End Sapelo Island The splendor falls on castle-walls
And moss-grown oaks now old in story;
The long light shakes across the sea,
And the great white waves leap in glory:
Blow, bugle, blow: set the wild echoes flying;
Blow, bugle: answer echoes,--dying, dying, dying.
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"Oh, hark! Oh,
hear! How thin and clear
And thinner--clearer--further going--
Oh, sweet and far, o'er sea and wave
The horns of woodland faintly blowing--
Blow! Let us hear the purple glens replying;
Blow, bugle: answer echoes,--dying, dying, dying.
"The Princess.
In addition to the
Spalding household two families resided on
the island. I have now the Marquis de Montalet's edition of
Rousseau's
works, Paris, 1792, in 39 volumes, calf bound. On the fly leaf appears the
following:
Marquis de Montalet, Sapelo, 1793;
James Spalding, 1813;
Charles Spalding, 1825;
C.S. Wylly, 1886.
The
Marquis de Montalet
had made his home at the north point,
and on the northeastern front Monsieur de Boeufeillet had established his
seat. The Marquis, a widower and emigre, devoted himself to horticulture,
and his flowers and gardens were the envy of all visitors. He also paid
attention to the development of the native talent of his colored cook, "Cupidon,"
hoping to make him worthy of a cordon bleu in the art
cuisine. Two
at least of Cupidon's pupils became famous.
Mr. John Couper's man
"Sans-foix" excelled even his master; and "French Davy," afterward
my mother's cook, had greatly profited by his teaching.
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Monsieur
Boeufeillet, with Madame and their daughter
Natalie, were the
would-be aristocrats of the island. Their servants wore livery, and the family
left cards after calling, or, more often, "spending the day."
Among the frequent visitors there was often found the household of
Captain Cottineau,3 consisting of Madame and her brother, the "Abbé
Carl." The Captain had commanded the sloop Alliance, consort to Le
bonne Homme Richard in the historical sea fight with the Serapis; and
had given Commodore Paul Jones loyal aid; had remained faithful to the
lilies of Bourbon; and now lived in the hope of a day of restoration, and recall
to "beautiful France." With true Gallic light-heartedness they bore their bad
and good fortune; fraternized with their neighbors at the "South End"; gave
formal dinners, one to the other; with Mr. Spalding, discussed the latest
works of Rousseau and of Voltaire; sacre'd all republican ideas and
institutions, as they drank the healths of the royal family of France, never
losing their sweetness of temper save
3. Mde.
Cotteneau in co-operation with her brother the
Abbé kept a very
exclusive school for the teaching, as see advertisement in Georgia Gazette, of
the " true Parisian accent and polite manner with the Classics."--Mr.
Randolph Bryan,
Joseph Bryan,
James Scrieven,
Charles
Spalding, George Houston McIntosh,
Miss Bryan, afterward
Mrs. Wm. MacKay,
Elizabeth Spalding,
Katharine Spalding and
James Spalding with
Margery Baillie, afterwards
Mrs. J. W. Kell,
were for years students and boarders. The school was on West Broad St.,
Savannah.
--- PAGE 20---
at the mention of some late
victory of "le scelerat de Napoleon."
Thus on the little island there had been thrown a nobleman, whose
very breath had been that of the Court of France; a man of the successful
bourgeois class of Paris, with his wife and daughter; and lastly a gentleman,
American born, of Scotch descent and education, whom travel had made somewhat
cosmopolitan.
In each of the homes the library was the room most frequented. The
paucity of social life forced a book companionship, and when chance or purpose
threw the residents together the conversation turned into channels as unlike the
talk, chat, and repartee of the present day as is possible to be imagined. To
lend color to this life there were, on the eighteen square miles comprising the
island, some five hundred slaves, many fresh from darkest Africa, some of
Moorish or Arabian descent, devout Mussulmans, who prayed to Allah morning, noon
and evening; all loyal and devoted to their respective owners, never questioning
act or motive, taking an absolute pride in their servitude to those of the
family name, and as devoted to their title of Spalding as ever a
McIntosh to his Chief of Clan Chattan in the mountains of Scotland. The work
required of them was of the lightest. Fully one-third of the day was given to
them to devote to their own industries. The women worked their own plots and
gardens; the men fished, wove baskets for
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sale, and hunted. Fish
abounded in the creeks. Oysters, crabs, clams and turtle were to be had for the
gathering, and I honestly believe that in this early stage of the planting life
of the sea-coast there was here perhaps found the happiest form of peasant life
that our country could show.
I have used the words "happiest form of peasant life that our
country could show." I would say that I refer only to that early and almost
initiative stage found in the evolution of the savage into a higher state of
civilization, before there has been born in him that inherent love of
personal freedom which rises in every breast as mental manhood is
approached. Slavery, in its first stage, is not an unmitigated evil; it is an
apprenticeship, through which a race becomes worthy of freedom. The wrong is in
its continuation after a goal has been reached which should have marked the end
of the course. It is as though, in the evolution of plant life, you should deny
fruit to follow after the flower and so bring the species to its end.
It is of the days long anterior to my own that I have thus written.
When first I recall personal memories the
Marquis was long dead
and buried under his fruit trees at "Chocolate";
Monsieur de Boeufeillet,
with Madame, had removed themselves to Savannah;
Mademoiselle Natalie had
been twice married, first to Ralph Clay, Esquire, of Bryan County,
Georgia, and after his death to Doctor Kearney of New Jersey, Surgeon in
the United
--- PAGE 22---
States Army;
Captain
Cottineau was lying in Christ Church Cemetery (now Colonial Park), Savannah.
The Bourbons had come again to their own. Madame Cottineau, with her
brother the Abbé, had been recalled and rewarded by pension and posts in
the restored Court. Madame Cottineau's only son had been commissioned in
the United States Navy, had served in active service, and had died in a duel,
the only duel I have ever known that was instigated and prompted by the generous
and affectionate love he bore to the adversary by whose pistol he fell. The
story is worth telling.
Lieutenant Cottineau, when on a cruise, noticed that a
comrade, like himself, of Savannah, was placed in the disagreeable situation of
finding himself, in naval parlance, "in coventry" with his brother officers. One
evening, when the night-watch had accidentally fallen to himself and this
officer, after a long silence he called to him:
"P_____st,4 come here," and said, "I see you are in a very
bad fix."
"I know it," was the answer, "but what can I do?"
"You must 'call one of them out,'" answered
Cottineau.
"So I would," said P_____st, "but they will
4. Lieut.
P____st, U. S. N. He walked the streets of Savannah the rest of his life, having
been forced to resign from the service. I in my youth saw him haunting the
Pulaski bar and a supernumerary in life.
--- PAGE 23---
say they can't meet me, for
that would break the coventry."
"Then, by G____d, I will break it," was the answer. "Challenge me; I
will meet you."
The ship made port a week afterward. Matters, as arranged, were
carried out, and at the first fire Cottineau fell dead, shot through the
heart.
The
home life of the household was enlivened by a constant
succession of visitors. The word "house-party" was not then coined, but in its
practice was of long standing. The most common mode of entertainment was the
giving of formal dinners. Dancing, unlike at Saint Simon Island, was not usual
until near the fifties. Cards were not approved of and in many families were
held in abhorrence. The men arranged hunting, fishing and shooting parties for
the mornings and forenoons. The ladies rode much on horseback, but never, as is
now common, joined the men in their field sports; conversation and needlework
were their chief resources. Some used pencil and brush, but almost invariably
the work consisted in the mere copying of a print, or a painting. Sketching from
nature or drawing from life was very rare. The first persons I ever saw
cultivating and appreciative of genuine art were my wife's brothers,
Hamilton
and John Couper; and I do remember, in addition, a
Mr. Walker, a
relative I believe of Washington Alston, the artist, who was a visitor to
"Elizafield," the home of Major Hugh Fraser Grant.
--- PAGE 24---
The mistress of
one of these plantation houses, and hostess to this never-ending house-party,
led an arduous life. Servants she had in numbers; but, excepting perhaps a
butler or a head house-maid, they were often idle, incompetent, and needed her
constant oversight and care. Almost every half hour during the day would she be
called to administer to some want or to grant or refuse some request from her
many dependents. At nine the plantation nurse arrived with a list or "tally" of
the sick.
The serious cases had to be visited first, and, if necessary, a
physician summoned; for the others, medicine to be prescribed, weighed and
measured. At eleven the wagon from the quarters came, with probably the whole
carcass of a beef or sheep, and she was required to direct the cutting of the
joints reserved for the table and kitchen and order the disposal of the
remainder. The cook must have a personal interview and minute directions. The
same was demanded by the fisherman, who wished to show his catch and receive
orders regarding the opening of oysters, clams, or the boiling of crabs or
prawn. At twelve the three seamstresses, whose perpetual work was the fashioning
of plantation garments, arrived with their baskets of completed coats, pants or
shirts. These must be "checked up" against the cloth, buttons and thread that
had been issued them and other woolens and home-spuns measured and delivered.
And by now the butler wished to
--- PAGE 25---
know what he had best serve to
the gentlemen returning from their hunt.
At two a tired and weary woman sank into a chair, hoping for a brief
rest. Vain hope--a frightened mother calls for "Missis" to "just run up to de
quarter to see little Nancy, who is fall into a fit." A half mile of
unshaded road intervenes. But go she must. The fit is found to be but
indigestion; and once again this "self-indulgent, pampered child of luxury"
dreams of rest! Not so; old Simon stops to say he would like some pain
killer, also tobacco. Bella says she
must tell her Missis she and
Tom, her husband, have agreed to part; a lesson on marital duties is to
be read, and after that some kind words are to be spoken.
It is more than three in the afternoon before the grateful shade of
the home mansion is reached. Dinner is to be served at half after four and to a
number unknown until the sounding of the bell, but which experience has taught
will certainly have been increased by any stray men or women her husband may
have met during his morning's ride or hunt.
I have refrained from reciting the countless additional duties and
requirements, should she chance to be the mother of a growing family. Then
nothing but the presence of that, to Southern mothers, "best and most blessed
gift of the gods," the colored mammy, whose faithful love and
never-tiring care soothed every childish grief and watched over
--- PAGE 26---
both sleeping and waking
hours, could hinder a daily uplifting of the Psalmist's cry: "Oh, that I had the
wings of a dove, For then would I flee away and be at rest."
The reader may ask: And what part of these tasks and never-laid-down
burdens did the master and husband assume as his share?
I regret to answer that, for the large majority, their duty, as they
saw it, was to look to the proper cultivation of the various crops and to
supervise the discipline and expenses of the establishment. These two completed,
their only other aim was to draw from life, for themselves, just as much
pleasure and amusement as they could possibly contrive. The largest number
occupied themselves entirely in field sports; a smaller portion found interest
in local or State politics; while the small remainder cultivated, in their
libraries, an acquaintance with the best literature of the past and present day,
their reading greatly tending more to history and belle lettres than to
scientific subjects. Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," Hume's and Smollet's histories
of England, and the Annual Register, which mirrored the contemporary life of
Europe, were the books handed oftenest to me in my youth. Afterward, the great
writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu were recommended for perusal as
a diet more suitable to my increased strength of mind.
The sons of "well-to-do" families were sent
--- PAGE 27---
abroad and received fair
educations, with collegiate training. But that of the daughters was in general
intrusted exclusively to governesses. The colleges and finishing schools that
now offer to the feminine sex advantages not inferior to what Princeton, Harvard
and Yale give to their brothers, were unknown. One or at most two years in
Charleston or Savannah gave the finishing touch to an education that was often
followed quickly by an early marriage. Yet, in some way, so great was the desire
for excellence, so bright the minds, and so thorough the grounding, that, in
comparing the style in writing, conversation, and manner of the mothers with
their children of to-day, I am forced to the conclusion that the careful and
special work of the past loses nothing when brought in contrast with the more
extended curricula of the present time.
The
County of McIntosh was first exclusively settled by a
body of Highlanders from the mountains of Scotland, who preserved for a time
their national garb and, in a measure, their speech. "With Claymore plaid and
target," we are told, they met Oglethorpe on his first visit of
inspection,5 offering at night a couch fitted with the only pair of
sheets owned by the good souls that composed the outpost, which the General very
gallantly declined. I have been told that at a comparatively modern day the
5. This was
the first uniformed parade in Georgia.
Wm. McIntosh, son to
John McIntosh, was the first officer to hold a commission in the
cavalry raised by the State of Georgia. See "Georgia Hussars," by
A. McDuncan.
--- PAGE 28---
ballads of Ossian could be
recited in Gaelic by a Miss Jeannie McDonald of Arduch (she having
received them direct from her Highland mother),--a fact, if true, that should go
far in refuting the accepted belief that these so-called translations are only
forgeries of McPherson's.
When we consider the innate love of personal freedom that in all
ages and in all climes has distinguished every mountaineer, a love that seems to
have sprung from daily association with nature in her sublimest form and to have
been nourished by the uplifting peaks that hold always a silent communion with
free thought, free speech, and free men, it ought not to surprise us when we
find so early as January, 1739, a strong and prophetic petition from the
citizens of New Inverness addressed to the Governor-General and praying that he
give no ear to the constant appeal of Savannah and the other settlements for the
repeal of the clause in the Georgia charter forbidding forever the introduction
of African slaves.
I copy it, and it can be read in volume one, pages 90, 91 and 92 of
McCall's History of Georgia, and, if stronger evidence is desired, in the
"Journals of the Trustees," at London, England.
"To his excellency General Oglethorpe:
We are informed that our neighbors of Savannah have petitioned
your excellency for the liberty of having slaves. We hope and earnestly entreat,
before such proposals are hearkened unto, your excellency will consider
--- PAGE 29---
our situation
and of what dangerous and bad consequences such liberty would be to us, for many
reasons.
First. The nearness of the Spaniards, who have proclaimed
freedom to all slaves who run from their masters, makes it impossible for us to
keep them without more labor in watching them than we would be at to do their
work.
Second. We are laborious and know a white man may be, by
the year, more usefully employed than a negro.
Third. We are not rich; and becoming in debt for slaves,
in case of their running away or dying, would inevitably ruin the poor master
and he would become a greater slave to the negro-merchant than the slave he
bought could have been to him.
Fourth. It would oblige us to keep a guard duty at least
as severe as when we expected daily an invasion; and if that should be the case,
how miserable would be to us and our wives and children to have an enemy without
and a more dangerous one in our own bosom.
Fifth. It is shocking to human nature that any race of
mankind and their posterity should be sentenced to perpetual slavery. Nor
in justice can we think otherwise of it that they are thrown amongst us, to be
our scourge one day or other for our sins; and, as freedom to them must
be as dear as to us, what a scene of horror must it bring about!
And the
longer it is unexecuted, the bloody scene must be greater.
We therefore, for our own sakes, our wives, and our posterity,
beg your consideration and interest, that, instead of introducing slaves, you
will put us in the way
--- PAGE 30---
to get some of
our countrymen, who, with their own labor, in time of peace and our vigilance,
if we are invaded, with the help of them will render it a difficult thing to
hurt us or that part of the province we may possess.
We will forever pray for your excellency and we are, with all
submission, Your excellency's most obedient Humble Servants, etc.
New Inverness (Darien), January 3, 1739."
The history says: "This petition was signed by eighteen persons of
New Inverness."
In an old manuscript I have the names as given to
Mr.
Charles Spalding by his father, as follows:
John Mohr McIntosh
John McIntosh of Lynvulgie
Ronald McDonald
Hugh Morrison
John McDonald
John McLean
John McIntosh (son to
Lynvulgie)
John McIntosh of Bain
James MacKay
David Clark
Alexander Clark
Donald Clark
Joseph Burgess
Donald Clark junior
Archibald McBain
Alexander Munro
William Munro
John Cuthbert"
--- PAGE 31---
All of the settlement who could write their names," says the manuscript.
I have written these words with some pardonable pride, for the first
signature is that of a direct ancestor, and others of the same blood follow.
To these men fortune had been niggardly in her favors. Proscribed,
landless, and exiled through participation in the "Stuart Rising" of 1715, they
had brought to a Western world little but sturdy strength and steadfast hearts.
But, besides these, they gave to their General and his associates an
unquestioning loyalty and affection. Their letter addressed to him was issued
with no hope of influencing or even retarding the final decision, for they well
knew the weight of pressure exerted by the older and richer settlements on or
near the Savannah River. Rather was it the declaration of a
Creed and a
warning to the children who might follow them; for in Savannah they had heard,
at convivial meetings, and at home gatherings, the frequent toast of—
"The one thing needful: may
we soon have it"
—drunk deep, with its
approving cheers. Augusta and all outlying posts were of the same mind. But to
these Scotchmen of Darien and McIntosh it was given to see far into the coming
years. As Arnold phrases it,--they saw "straight" into the cloudy future, and
beheld the coveted African undergoing a metamorphosis as strange and as baneful
as any
--- PAGE 32---
that is told in the pages of
Ovid. They saw far, for at that era England herself countenanced and approved of
the desired traffic; and the North, whence even now, after a lapse of near fifty
years can still be heard the faint vibration and echo of the victorious shouts
of '65, was eager to furnish men, money and ships for its prosecution, and a
Phillips, a Parker, or a Garrison would have had no hearing--no, not even in
Boston itself.
On December 29, 1749, the decision was made. As I have said, the
result was sure, and by a vote of a few hundred men Georgia, with its broad
boundaries-to-be--from the mountains of Tennessee to the ocean, and from the
Savannah westward to the Mississippi--ceased to be a province from which by the
very terms of its charter African slavery was forever debarred. The trustees of
the province resigned their commissions and offices, and the government passed
directly to his Majesty George the Second, who appointed
Colonel Reynolds,
of H. M. S., Royal Governor of the last province or colony that England was
fated to make in the limits of the Republic of the United States
Imagination itself may be startled in considering the possibilities,
to province and future republic, had the "Creed of New Inverness" found faith in
Savannah.
I have dreamed that, with a State whose boundaries were the
Mississippi, the mountains of Tennessee and the ocean,--every acre of whose
140,000
--- PAGE 33---
square miles being pledged by
its birth charter to free institutions and free labor,--no soil would have been
found in which to sow the seed from which was to spring sectionalism, division
and a "Lost Cause."
But it was not to be. From the hands of those whose names I have
cited, and from others with like hopes and like beliefs, was the grain cast on
the land from which was to spring
"The harvest," and
"
The scourge:"
--a harvest foretold in the very infancy of the colony.
--- PAGE 34---
II. THE
HARVEST
In the preceding
chapter has been told the result of the struggle between the spirit in which the
Colony of Georgia was conceived, and the utilitarian beliefs and desires of a
majority of her citizens.
At the head of the winning party were the names of
Whitfield,
Habersham and
Thomas Stephens. Leading the slender band who lost
we find John Mohr McIntosh of New Inverness and the Reverend
Mr.
Bolzius of Ebenezer.
I have told the story so that any descendant of this fragment of
very far-seeing men might, if he so choose, point to the date 1739 and say: "In
that year my grandsire wrote, signed and published, so far as I know, the first
protest against the use of Africans as slaves, issued in the history of the New
World, and that every count in the indictment as drawn by him has been made good
by the verdict of years."
To the critic of expressions and sentiments that have been expressed
and uttered I answer that the year of our Lord 1909 has proved the truth of the
arguments addressed to the authorities of 1739, and that now their children's
children, after "times and
--- PAGE 35---
times" of contrary belief, are
forced to recognize the evils that have followed the ultimate decision.
In truth, Georgia at that date was suffering from what
James
Habersham called a "mirasmus" or weakness, like to that of a man who sinks
into lethargy from the want of food. Give to him bread or meat, and in a week
his natural health and strength would return; administer a stimulant such as
brandy or nitroglycerine, and a transitory quickening of heart action alone
would follow and with it but a temporary strength. Man's life is measured by
months; a nation's, by half centuries. To the dying colony was given, not sturdy
emigrants or food, but the stimulant of African slave labor. The tokens of a
quickened energy soon appeared, and the citizens of Savannah openly declared
that, with the granting of "the one thing needful" had come permanent
prosperity.
The natural resources of the country were developed. Planters from
Virginia and the Carolinas, having already exhausted the virgin fertility of
their farms, came in numbers, bringing money and slaves to till the fresh lands
of Georgia. They bought up the smaller grants of land and consolidated them into
large plantations. The Puritan migration into St. John's parish flowed in, and
this united Darien or New Inverness (until then a military outpost) with
Savannah, the capital. Labor being supplied, exports and trade sprang into being
and all went well and "merrily as wedding bells."
--- PAGE 36---
On the Altamaha
the Scotch emigrants of 1735 and their descendants held almost exclusive
possession of the islands and rich river lands, while the pine lands of the
interior had been granted in a great part to that flotsam of rather undesirable
people which is found always to accompany any tide of immigration.
It might be thought that the strong opposition shown by the people
of Darien and Ebenezer to the recent radical change in the laws and policy of
the province would have manifested itself by their slow adoption, and, at least,
to have affected the habits and life of those communities. But in this belief
the power of the temptation would be underestimated. Their consciences being
quieted by previous public declarations openly and boldly expressed, when now to
the sanction of law was added the example of neighbors, accompanied by the
natural craving for an easier life with quickly acquired wealth, it would be too
much to expect faith to an abstract principle; and, as early as 1760, we see the
county passing rapidly from the conditions that had marked its first creation
(which had been that of a military outpost, receiving its orders direct from the
Governor-General, and with no representation in council) to that of a prosperous
and fast-growing agricultural and cattle-raising community.
In this they were greatly aided and encouraged by Spain's cession of
the East and West Floridas to Great Britain. By the terms of the Treaty of 1763
--- PAGE 37---
Great Britain not only
received this grant, but also established royal governments and garrisons at St.
Augustine and at Pensacola, thus removing any fear of Spanish hostility and
adding security to the new form of property. I would here remark that
this treaty and cession displaced Frederica from its military position as a
fortress, necessary in time of war, and eventually brought about its practical
evacuation and reduction in course of time to one of the "dead cities" of
Georgia.
The settlement of Darien, or McIntosh County, as in future I shall
call it, had been peculiar. "Stevens" says it consisted of 110 free men
and servants, with whom 50 women and children were allowed. All were picked men,
the largest number from the glen of Strathl'dean, nine miles from Inverness,
Scotland. They were commanded by their own officers or chiefs, most respectably
connected, and, besides them, there came a number of
MacKays,
Baillies
and Cuthberts. All settled either at Darien or Frederica, St. Simon.
Mr. Spalding says, "From 1735 to 1740, 300 came to Georgia and more after
1753." And Mr. Spalding's grandfather was
William McIntosh, eldest
son of John Mohr McIntosh, the leader in the emigration of 1735, and
William McIntosh was a lad of fourteen at the landing in Georgia, whilst his
wife was Mary MacKay, a daughter of
Donald MacKay, and born in
Scotland before the year 1735.
In the seven years of the Revolutionary struggle
--- PAGE 38---
McIntosh County suffered, not
from its occupation by the regular armies, but greatly from the predatory
incursions of partisans of either side. McGirt plundered, burned, stole
and murdered in the cause of the Crown. Paddy Carr and
Nephew
flogged, murdered and carried off in the name of the State or Committee of
Safety. The people were much divided in sentiment. The
McIntoshes were
all ardent patriots. James Spalding and
George McIntosh endeavored
to remain neutral, or rather conservative,--which in such times is always the
most dangerous course.
George McIntosh, direct ancestor of many noted families, such
as the Clinches,
Sadlers and others, resided at Rice-Hope,
McIntosh County. His home was burned by Nephew, his negroes run off and
sold, his barns and property destroyed. A letter from him written July 3, 1777,
reads (like words from some old Scottish border story):
"They have taken possession of my estate, destroyed my crops on
the ground by turning their horses on to them; killed and drove off my stock of
every kind; broke open my house, barn and cellar; plundered and carried off
everything of value they could find, wantonly committing every act of waste and
destruction."
Two days after he writes: "I am just informed one of my most trusty
negroes, on my indigo place, has been cruelly whipped until he died in the rope,
because he could not tell my hiding place," and
--- PAGE 39---
adds: "Excuse this
handwriting, for it is done on my knee, and under a tree in my own woods."
The storehouses of
James Spalding at Sunbury were rifled,
plundered and burned, his dwelling house likewise, and everything of value
scattered to the winds; all the accumulations of industry and thrift were
engulfed and destroyed by roving bands of tories or so-called loyalists.
By reference to pages 78 and 82 of Marbury's Digest of 1784, one may
learn the number and names of the families whose persons were attainted and
whose property was confiscated, and know how great was the division in political
belief. It was Governor Gwinnet's approval of the treatment of
George
McIntosh that led to a correspondence with
Colonel Lachlan McIntosh,
brother of George, which terminated in a duel, in which
Gwinnet
lost his life. The meeting took place on Hutchinson's Island. The Governor lived
but an hour. McIntosh was thought to be fatally wounded, but recovered;
was transferred from Georgia to serve under General Washington at Valley
Forge; was promoted to a brigadier generalship of the Continental Army; was
given a separate command in western Virginia; conducted himself so as to win the
personal esteem of his great chief, and lived to receive
General Washington as his guest in the home to which he had retired, two doors from the
corner of State and Bull streets, in Savannah.
Peace came in 1783, and, with it, were resumed
--- PAGE 40---
neglected pursuits and
industries. The State rewarded the returning soldiers of the Revolution with
generous grants of vacant or confiscated lands. Upon these money could be
raised. The soil was new and fertile, while labor could be cheaply
purchased from Northern traders, more especially at Charleston, where a credit
of two and three years was extended, usually for two-thirds of the purchase
money; and by 1810 the scars of strife and heated passions were replaced by the
signs of prosperity.
By now McIntosh County had lost her distinctive Scotch habits and
traditions, and, in social and political manner and belief, exactly resembled
her sister seaboard counties of Chatham, Camden and Glynn. It was at this period
and in the year immediately prior and succeeding that the county and the State
presented its best and most interesting features. The "system" of slavery was
yet in its comparative infancy, presenting none of its worse sides. A genuine
affection existed between the master and those who were then more serfs to the
land than slaves; their value was not then computed in dollars, but in labor
contributed toward the building up and improvement of the home. They were rather
an appendage than an asset to the family,--an asset not to be reckoned until, by
death or gift, it passed to a son or daughter. Fresh from Africa, they lived in
greater safety of person and comfort in life than in their soon-forgotten native
land. In the
--- PAGE 41---
slow, forward evolution of the
savage the thought of personal right had not yet been conceived. No contrasting
of their lot with the fortunes of the other race gave birth to moody
contemplation. The goal that marked the station where freedom of body and mind
was desirable or to be achieved was yet far distant; and the character of the
men to whom they were brought nearest was, in general, kind and just, requiring
no extreme hard labor and granting indulgences that greatly mitigated the
severities of the written law.
In manner, mind, and bearing the planter and gentleman of that day
exhibited a constant courtesy to equal and inferior. They were men of wide
education and often of travel and experience. The fatal "environment" had not
yet poisoned spirit, heart or action. They were distinguished by a universal
desire for the upbuilding of the country and for love of the Union. To a certain
extent they were overbearing in opinion, for the habit of command asserted
itself in their mental as well as their daily life, and, with it, a dogmatism
not open to argument.
I have, in this rapid sketch of events long passed, reached near to
the date of 1843 or 1845, at which time my memories of conversations and of
events transpiring come into use, and in future I shall write as a looker-on,
and not as one telling of a game that he has heard was once played.
The rich lands that bordered the Altamaha, with
--- PAGE 42---
its adjacent islands, had been
acquired by a small number of families, twenty or thirty in number, some by this
time possessed of large wealth, others of smaller means. They were people of
birth, position, education, and refinement in manner and thought; and beside
them, on the less fertile portions, were settled, it might be twice their
number, men of smaller properties but people of fair education and in
comfortable circumstances of life, generally small planters, cattlemen or
storekeepers, owners of but few slaves. And, lastly, we must count an
overwhelming plurality of ignorant and poverty-stricken whites dwelling in the
backwoods, and differing only in their degrees of utter shiftlessness.
In a society so formed, and mingled in such proportions, it was
inevitable that this poorest, but in a democratic state, through its number,
most powerful, class, should sink into a state of dependence upon those who,
possessing the richer lands and greatest wealth, were able in time of need to
offer the most effectual aid and help. There was little solicitation—by an
almost tacit agreement the rôle of patron was assumed by one, and that of client
adopted by the other. Equally unspoken was the promise of political support.
That went without saying, and, with that, there followed a rule of the minority,
a minority which was represented entirely by the wealthy families of the
district and which was immensely the superior in intelligence, education
--- PAGE 43---
and foresight. In South
Carolina this result was attained by virtue of the State's constitution, a
freehold of $1500 being there a requisite for eligibility to a seat in the upper
house of the "Assembly"; and, again, the number of representatives in the
districts was not fixed by the number of white citizens, but by the amount of
property returned. In Georgia, in theory a purely democratic government, the law
I have before cited--the inexorable law of environment--issued its fiat, and, in
practice, a minority represented always by the wealthier class of citizenship
ruled and governed the State. The same goal was reached, but in one by a roadway
not blazed out by the written words of the constitution.
The character of men whose lives were spent in such surroundings,
whose horizon was bounded by the neighboring fields and forests, whose
self-esteem was nourished by a daily companionship and association with either a
dependent of his own color or of one of another race to whom his simple word was
law itself, without appeal, became enervated, in many instances, by the absence
of any necessity for personal exertion; and while to a limited number leisure
and the secured provision of the future induced the cultivation of literature,
science or art, yet such studies or pursuits were seldom prosecuted save as
accomplishments, and rarely was an acknowledged
leadership sought or
striven for. "Eating the lotus, day by day," the serious ends of life were
--- PAGE 44---
ignored, and it is in the
marked difference between the youth of the last half century and those of the
preceding years that the good resulting from the new conditions of life is most
apparent. The one was content with the narrow limits that bounded their natural,
mental and physical visions, and were blind to the progress of the world. By
them the customs, manners and habits of their own little neighborhood and county
were esteemed and cherished as representing the very highest in type. Life was
to them, too often—certainly by the men—regarded as a term of being,
during which as much of pleasure as possible should be concentrated. Their lives
might be intemperate, even vicious, but only in the rarest cases would open
condemnation be incurred, and seldom, very seldom, would ostracism follow.
On the other hand, look!—under the kind though hard hand of
poverty--nurse to near all the youth of the South for the last forty years--see
how we find self-reliance replacing unfounded self-esteem, industry in lieu of
indolence and self-indulgence; while, always, vice or intemperance is followed
by a quick condemnation, with the doors of all reputable society closed to him
who by his own acts has forfeited both his birthright and his opportunities. And
often in happier cases, though the stern law of necessity has left little time
for the lighter graces of the salon or drawing-room, are we forced to recognize
a transmigrated or inherited
--- PAGE 45---
grace of speech and manner,
with a courage in the expression of opinion, combined with a courtesy to all,
which had marked the characters of the men of the earlier date.
The home life of these owners of generally large plantations was
delightful; hospitality was universal, and to be the guest of one family ensured
constant invitations to others. Courtesy, one to the other, was greatly in
evidence in speech and demeanor. Indeed, the "code duello" had long issued its
decree, that the slightest deviation from a studied etiquette demanded quick
reparation, and that to women was due double caution in speech and approach. The
mode of entertainment was lavish, and, though in somewhat of a "castle-racket"
order, had yet, to every visitor, the subtle charm of being made to feel that in
his stay he was conferring a favor and not in receipt of one. To this there was
added a constant change in the company, for in some houses the procession of
incoming and outgoing guests was continuous.
An aunt of mine has said to me that, when a young lady in her
father's house, she scarcely remembered sitting down to the dinner table with
less than twenty-four. And I have often been told of the gentleman and his wife,
who, being asked to dine at a residence on St. Simon, found that during the meal
a boat had been sent to Darien, fifteen miles distant, for their luggage, and
that so much pleased were host, hostess and guests with one another,
--- PAGE 46---
that the stay was prolonged
until two children had been born to the visiting couple--the last of whom was
duly baptized John Couper--.
Emerson has said, in an essay on Intellect, that "Every man finds
his curiosity inflamed concerning the modes of living and thinking of other men,
and especially of those classes whose minds have not been subdued by the drill
of a school education." It is in my conviction of the truth of this observation
that I shall find apology for an attempt to place on record something that may
show the habits and character of that African race which had been transported
and sold by foreign and Northern traders to the residents of the Georgia coasts.
A race docile, obedient and affectionate, especially to the youth of
a family, identifying themselves with grotesque readiness and sincerity to the
standing and wealth of their respective owners, and loyal to the very name;
possessed of the strongest local attachment to places and surroundings, yet
given by a kind Providence a calm and philosophical power of accepting the most
radical changes in life without comment, complaint, or even show of feeling:--it
was as though, deep in their hearts, laid fatalism, as the true creed of their
race. In the soughing of the lofty pines, when no wind blew, they had heard,
caught to heart, and retained the never-ceasing admonition of "To wait, To
await"; and by that counsel they shaped their lives, with what, to the
careless eye, was sometimes indifference and even
--- PAGE 47---
cheerfulness—with what I
should call a "mens aequa in arduis" they met or welcomed the varying
fortunes that came with the changing years.
In the county of which I write their burden was, in general, less
than elsewhere. Public opinion frowned on an unkind master, and self-interest
prompted and, in a measure, enforced sufficient food, clothing and shelter. The
"task" system was universal, and with it came freedom for a considerable portion
of each day. The great wrong, the absolute obliteration of every
personal right, gave little trouble to those who never thought, and they
were, seemingly, perfectly content with a life in which all physical wants were
provided, since neither imagination nor aspiration craved a higher and different
lot. But twice in my life have I known "The Spectre" to which I have alluded to
appear, pervert justice, silence, speech, stifle even thought and, after a brief
day's reign, vanish and disappear; and in one case the provocation was very
great. In general, both races made honest efforts "To do their duty in that
state of life in which it had pleased God to call them."
To a Rousseau, a thinker, and most assuredly to the dreamer--"who
loved, not God, but his fellowman"--this apathy and contentment with what
existed may have been the saddest and most hopeless mental picture shown in the
shifting scenes of the System. To the unreflecting mind and to those
directly interested, it appeared the strongest argument
--- PAGE 48---
and proof in defense. Each
person must judge for him or herself; so much depends upon the ends in life to
be desired or sought to be attained. For myself, I know not in what grade I
should place a soul devoid of aspiration, with imagination--the one gift that
brings us akin to the gods--dwarfed in its power to the mere bodily wants of the
present.
On Butler's Island and Hampton Point were concentrated near one
thousand of the African race, composing nearly one-fourth the slave population
of the county.
Those of the
Butler estate were governed by laws more
arbitrary than elsewhere enforced. By their owners' orders no intercourse with
the neighboring plantations was permitted. The whole estate was made into a
closed district, a self-providing and working colony. The stronger of both sexes
labored in the production of rice and cotton. Others were employed in the
manufacture of articles needful for the support and comfort of the whole. Forges
and smith shops furnished the greater part of the plantation tools. Carpenters
and boatbuilding docks supplied both houses and means of transportation.
Tanneries and shoe shops gave the footwear. Caps and hats were knitted and
plaited by the older men and women and the children, whilst a number of the
superannuated were kept constantly patching and mending garments that otherwise
would have been cast aside. The language spoken by these members and descendants
of many varying tribes
--- PAGE 49---
was absolutely unintelligible
to one not long conversant with them. In their training no attention at all had
been paid to morals, religion or to the improvement of their minds; industry and
thrift had been inculcated, but every sign of independence or personality in
character was checked and discouraged, and, in many ways, this large estate
represented some of the worse features of the "System," especially so since
there alone was the immense influence of the sight-companionship and
example of the superior race altogether lost, and by and through their isolation
all imitation—the germ in general of every mental improvement, as well as of the
bettering of bodily habits—was neither known nor felt.*
Strange to say and contradictory to the theory under which I
write, here, where absenteeism was greatest, loyalty, affection and pride in
their owner's name and wealth was greatest: it seemed as though the very
infrequent and brief visits of master and mistress had ended in the deifying of
them in the hearts of this simple people. So long had they been indoctrinated
with the creed, "To a Butler they owed all things, even life itself," and
that nothing came to them but by the gift of master and mistress, that they
lifted those two high in their
* In 1866, the
property passed to Mrs. Frances Butler Leigh, wife of the Dean of
Hereford Cathedral, England. A church was built and regular evening worship was
held by the Dean.
--- PAGE 50---
hearts, as the one power
absolute, not to be gain-said in the world as they knew it; and, in a measure,
thus they remain to this day—to respect and honor all who bear in their veins
one drop of the Butler blood.
Even now, in 1909, were
Alice Butler or
Owen Wister to
meet a daughter of the Angus,
Alexander, or
Bleach
families--all noted colored foremen of the estate--it would be in this wise:
Jane,
Chloe or
Phillis, as it might be, upon seeing the
approach of "one of the family," would slowly advance to within three
paces, her head held erect, with eyes cast down; then with lowered head sweep,
with bended knee, a deep curtsy to the very ground; then rise, with smiling eyes
and outstretched hand to touch my lady's fingers.
An instructive contrast could be drawn between the mode of life
enforced on Butler's and that followed on the Sapelo Island property.
On the first discipline was supreme, the work constant, not always
very arduous, but unceasing. Every step toward individuality, self-reliance or
independence was repressed and checked. "By the law of the plantation, thou
shalt live," was the order ever inculcated and reiterated. "The master will give
what is needed--what is not given is not to be desired," was early taught to the
young by the old.
On the other island the labor exacted was light, not, in general,
amounting to more than six or seven
--- PAGE 51---
hours. To each head of a
family a certain acreage of land was allotted, and he was expected to provide
from his industry and the natural resources of the island many additions to the
weekly rations which were issued. The raising of poultry, pigs and garden
produce was encouraged, and to a few favored families cattle and horses were
permitted; the absolute personal possession was guaranteed and inviolable.
The young ladies of the "House" gave instruction in the elements of
religion; the Sunday exercises for the children and such of the older ones who
wished to attend, were never omitted, though in practice little but the
decalogue and fervent hymn singing was found to suit the minds and taste of the
hearers. Mr. Spalding had pondered deeply upon the dangers to the Union
as threatened by the "System." A slaveholder himself by inheritance he had not
been blind to evils foretold by his own grandfather. He had seen the
growth of new and free States in rapid recurrence. His convictions and hopes
leant, not toward the ending, but to the amelioration of the conditions of
servitude and the awaiting of events. In early life, when a member of the
State legislature, he had introduced and pressed the enactment of a law which
should make the slave immovable from the estate to which he was born, through
any process of sale. He thus hoped to contract, in a measure, the separating
of families. I need hardly say that this rather impossible but humane
--- PAGE 52---
law received little
encouragement from the then members of the Georgia legislature, and met no favor
even from his fellow-citizens.
He strove, in the management of the large number owned by him, to
teach reliance on themselves, for every improvement in their physical wants and
condition. He gave them the means, the tools and the leisure in which to improve
their own houses or cottages. He had every confidence in their loyalty, so much
so that, in 1813, when a British fleet lay off Sapelo Island he applied to the
Governor for arms and received 80 muskets, with which he armed and drilled his
negro men, saying that from the want of depth of water, only a boat attack could
be carried out and that if that was attempted "he and
Bu-Allah1 [his
slave foreman] would make a good account of them." No landing was made on Sapelo
Island, though on St. Simon's almost constant attacks, with great losses of
property, were suffered. The result of this training has been shown by the ease
with which the transition was made from slavery to freedom by the colored people
belonging to this island. On the one, self-reliance had been taught; on the
other, an absolute dependence on the master.
In the preceding pages I have sought more to
1. He died
leaving twelve sons and seven daughters. He kept all the plantation "Acts" in
Arabic, and was buried with his Koran and praying sheep skin. Three times
each day he faced the East and called upon Allah.
--- PAGE 53---
portray the development of a
people, than to tell the events which would have been a history of the State. It
is my belief that the surroundings, occupations and associations of men and also
of women, enforce the adoption of certain uniform usages and habits of life,
which are so permanently impressed and stamped on the mind as eventually to
become the cause, or rather the creator of a race distinctive in its type;
mentally as well as physically, in faith, as in body. The type is the product of
the habit, and the habit the legitimate offspring of a long-continued
environment.
In Georgia the existing system of labor made it sure that all
industry would be of an agricultural nature, for its form was unsuited to the
prosecution of mineral, manufacturing or commercial interests; it discouraged
the foreign immigration which might have entered into such pursuits, by forcing
a competition, or rather a comparison, repugnant to the ruling sentiment of the
new settler. In the mechanical trades it was almost prohibitory to the skilled
artisan, since the employer, always a planter, could usually find the required
craftsman among his own laborers. With no foreign immigration the growth in
population was greatly retarded and limited to the natural increase, to which
should be added a number, by removals from the Carolinas and Virginia, whose
citizens were already seeking new and unworn lands. The increase of wealth,
being solely due to the sale of the crude products of the soil, and
--- PAGE 54---
not to their enhanced value
after manufacture, was slow. Nor did it require or demand the creating of any
great center of distribution. An accessible seaport only being needed, the most
convenient and nearest was selected, and thus St. Mary's, Brunswick, Darien and
Savannah divided the meager profits derived from the transshipment of the staple
crops of the State. Communication being difficult, for not until 1840 were
railroads in operation, the interchange of ideas, opinions and views was equally
slow, and the mass of the people lived for much the larger part of their lives
in communities more or less isolated one from the other, each having its own
mode of life and, in a large measure, of thought. The members of each community
were busy in the same industry, with every dollar that they possessed
invested in that same industry, and in their minds that occupation assumed a
supreme importance not warranted by its nature. It was this that gave life and
authority to the phrase "King Cotton will order it," a monarch who, it was said,
would dictate a peace between the two warring sections, sections divided by a
deep and impassable chasm of sentiment and faith.
In comparison with the Western, Eastern and Northern States, Georgia
had made slow progress in the march to wealth and population. In the one hundred
and twenty-eight years that had elapsed between 1732 and 1861, her largest city
had only attained to a population of twenty-five thousand.
--- PAGE 55---
Not one rolling mill, foundry
of capacity, or ore furnace testified to the richness of the mineral belt. No
coal mines had been opened in her mountain region. A few small cotton factories,
with perhaps a little more than one thousand miles of railway, alone bore
witness to a growing spirit of enterprise and of expansion into internal
improvements. The pine forests were scarcely touched, and the placid river as it
ran beneath the boughs of the great trees seemed in its murmur to whisper a
reproach at this neglect of its offered free transportation to the markets of
the world. The exports representing the gross income of the owners of land and
personal property were comprised in a total of 500,000 bales of cotton and
500,000 bushels of rice of a value roughly computed of eighteen to twenty
millions. The imports I am unable to state, but their volume was not great, the
general habit of the people tending toward the use of home products.
No large fortunes, or, to be more correct, not many large fortunes
could be accumulated in mercantile business, for as late as 1860 the State
numbered as citizens but 521,000 whites, with the addition of 385,000 colored
laborers. For the support and maintenance of the colored, otherwise than what
was produced by themselves, only about twelve dollars per year was required, and
for at least one-half of the white race but little more. The patronage,
therefore, of those engaged in merchandising was limited in one class in
numbers, and in
--- PAGE 56---
the other and larger class by
their poverty and inability to gratify their desires.
At the close of every year the planter living at home simply, but
abundantly, with, from his comparative isolation, few temptations to
extravagance, often found he had money to his credit ready to invest. There
being within the limits of the State no openings in other industries, it was
only natural that the new investment should be made in more land and more labor.
It was this constant re-investment of the profits of an industry into one of a
like nature, that produced from the similarity of occupations, like usages and
like habits of life, and the recreations as well as the labors being similar, a
mental standard was conceived by which all opinion and excellence was measured
and contrasted, and the type of the better classes of society was thus vivified
into being. Travel being slow and costly, there was little intermixing of
sections. Books were freely bought, and education among the true planter-class
was even better than now. Reading was more general and of a more solid nature
than at present, for fiction had not yet assumed the task of teaching political,
theological and even legal truths.
All material interests being centered in one form of property, the
deterioration or loss of which meant absolute ruin to each and every one, the
right to hold that form of property became sacred in the eyes of all, and any
criticism became blasphemy. The dependent, or "client" as I have called him,
--- PAGE 57---
of this planter-class was
taught, and believed in his heart, that any change that might come would lower
him to the level of the subject-race, and it was this conviction which gave bone
and sinew to the armies of the Confederacy, recruited in the main from those who
had nothing to gain by the victories of the South. The "guarantee of the
Constitution" became a cry by which foresight and expediency were routed. Both
Jefferson and
Madison lost their power over men's hearts by
presuming to point to dangers they foresaw, and the men and the women true to
the teachings of their lives, and of their material property interests, called
all history and the Bible to the stand as witnesses in their behalf. The habit
of command not only in one form, but of dominancy over three-fourths of the
people, gave personal dignity and courage, and with these there came grace of
person and deportment, for grace is essentially an absence of embarrassment, and
none of them I refer to could feel diffidence at the presence of an acknowledged
inferior. Generosity was usual and common, for it is in the bestowing on others
that our own sense of superiority is most subtly appealed to. In the seaboard
counties of Georgia the universal application of the task system to all labor
gave more leisure to the employer than where, as in the upper and middle parts
of the State, the hours of industry were regulated by the sun.
The forests and streams were filled with game and fish, and the
life, both indoor and outdoor, must have
--- PAGE 58---
closely resembled that of the
English gentry, the amusements being much the same; but the "tone" and what was
deemed correct in manner, to and with the female sex, was almost puritan in word
and deed. A Squire Western as painted by Fielding would have been driven from
the county. Physical accomplishments appealed stronger to general admiration
than scholarly acquirements, except in oratory, which even in the most primitive
nations always has had a supremacy. To be an accomplished horseman, or a sure
shot with rifle or gun, was to gain more admirers than to be a lover of books or
an acknowledged scholar. An agreeable companion and a good raconteur and one who
graced both drawing-room and dancing-hall was oftener met with, than a man
devoted to and eminent in scientific or professional life. By many families
cards were abhorred and considered as conducive to bad habits. The cultivation
of music by men was thought to be effeminate, but in the other sex appropriate
and to be desired. Two vices only, as I remember, ostracized a man forever from
association with his neighbors and compeers. To maliciously lie, or to show any
symptoms of cowardice, was to brand himself as unworthy of mention, much less of
personal intercourse.
To sum up. The governing and higher classes of Georgia were men with
sound hearts, minds and bodies; hardy of constitution and brave, truthful and
frank of manner; generous and graceful in deportment;
--- PAGE 59---
courteous save when one
subject was mentioned; educated and refined in mode of life; somewhat arrogant
and disposed to walk the world with the Irishman's chip—in this case a very
black chip—on the shoulder and dare the united world to touch, or even speak of
it.
There was genuine love for the Union. Not even the unmeasured
devotion borne by South Carolina for John C. Calhoun, not the reverence
and respect felt throughout Georgia for George M. Troup, could secure a
working majority in either of those States to favor a dissolution of the Union.
Not until 1860 was that majority attained, and then only by a wide-spread
conviction that an absolute and entire change of a system—a system in which and
upon which every pecuniary interest of the States rested—would surely follow the
continued confederation.
There is no error more prevalent, or more commonly believed, than
that the ownership of slaves insured very large profits from the capital thus
invested; yet it is true beyond controversy that the net dividends received from
money so placed were comparatively small.
A relative of my own, of most distinguished ability in agricultural
pursuits and who had for fifty years administered as trustee a very large
estate, has remarked to me that, as trustee, for forty years he had had in
charge a large block of Schuylkill River bonds issued by the city of
Philadelphia and
--- PAGE 60---
for the same number of years
600 slaves and 1500 acres of rice lands, and that the estate of
Hamilton
had received more from the bonds than from the Georgia investments.
The records as left by him do not quite bear out this statement but
approach very nearly to it, and we have to remember that the factor of
deterioration might be very present in the mind of the speaker and yet not be
apparent in the book accounts. And, again, the income was not constant but
subject to the fluctuations due to seasons and prices.
I submit a page of tables of expense and amount of sales as
examples:
Long-Staple Cotton Plantation.
--------
Average of Expense Account and Amount of Sales
Hamilton Plantation, St. Simon.
Investment.
120 slaves; value-- $54,000
800 acres land,
$16,000
stock, horses, mules, $2,000
boats, flats, &c., $2,000
$74,000
Average sales of Cotton, &c., $5,277
Expense Account.
Support of 120 slaves $2,200
--- PAGE 61---
This amount covers clothing,
shoes, blankets, food other than
there raised on plantation, phy-
sician's bills and miscellaneous,
and includes overseer and man-
ager; the average for 40 years.
less
expense, $2,200
less taxes, $162
$2,362
$2,915
The valuation of slaves was
placed at $450 per capita. The
books show an annual increase
over the death rate of 4: at
$450,
$1,800
Total—(a little more than 6 per
cent)— $4,715 $4,715
Again the same distinguished manager of great planting interests
gives an itemized statement, showing the value in 1858 of lands, buildings,
stock and slaves owned by a part of the Hamilton estate, in which a total
of $271,000.00 is reached, the 372 slaves are valued at $350.00 each, the 800
acres of diked and banked rice lands at $75.00 per acre, the buildings, stock
and general plant, at what they cost. None of these valuations can be considered
too high. The whole 800 acres he states will be planted, from which he expects a
crop of 36,880
--- PAGE 62---
bushels, which should bring,
after deducting freight and commission, 80 cents per bushel; a gross revenue of
$29,440.00.
In another and more confidential paper, he places the cost of
maintaining, clothing, shoeing, blanketing and providing food not raised on the
plantation, and medical attendance at $15.00 per year to each slave,
Three hundred and seventy-two slaves $5580.00
Salary of himself, as manager ($3500), and
an overseer
($1500) $5000.00
Taxes, Insurance, etc $1000.00
Miscellaneous, Charity, Church etc $300.00
Total $11880.00 Balance $17560.00
not 7% on the sum invested. The books show but a nominal increase, the births
and deaths nearly balancing, and we must remember that this estimate was made by
an exceptionally successful planter, having the use of unusually rich lands, and
engaged in what was thought to be the most lucrative form of agriculture, with
no debts or incumbrances to hamper industry. In these examples are demonstrated
the truth, that money invested in slave property did not, in the older States,
and especially on lands long worked, yield large returns, 7% being fully the
general average. In the new States--in parts of Alabama, Mississippi, and the
sections bordering
--- PAGE 63---
the great river, larger
profits were secured; too often by methods not warranted by laws that should
govern the heart and conscience: and so there grew up a steady and constant
westward migration of this form of property. So early as 1838
Mrs. Fanny
Kemble writes "that her husband,
Mr. Pierce Butler, has thought of
removing his large force of slaves, to middle Alabama, where he is informed
great sums of money may be made." The phosphate beds of Carolina and Florida,
the real foundation of the present agricultural prosperity, were unknown. The
acres under cultivation were quickly exhausted of their primal fertility, the
process of restoration was slow and required the use and ownership of large
stocks of cattle, with the accompanying expense in capital and land, and thus
there came a general and almost universal demand for new territory and fresher
lands. This individual desire, by consolidation, became a political demand that
the "Institution" should be received with its owners into all the Territories
acquired by the Government, whether it be by cession or purchase—and which of a
right should be open for settlement to every citizen of the United States, with
the privilege to there transfer any or all property owned by them, in whatsoever
form that property might be. The ordinance of 1787—adopted by Congress, even
before the ratification of the Constitution—had long previously declared all
territory lying north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi exempt from
--- PAGE 64---
this claim. That ordinance had
been drawn by Mr. Jefferson, and contained the clause "That after the
year 1800 there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any State
or States that may be created from the lands lying within the limits above
mentioned, otherwise than for the punishment of crime whereof the party shall
have been duly convicted."
Like the colonists of Georgia in 1739, Indiana had in 1803
petitioned Congress to be relieved from this anti-slavery ordinance. Three times
did she repeat this petition. John Randolph of Roanoke, himself a slave
owner, had been chairman of the committee to whom the petition was referred, and
in his report recommending a denial to the prayer, he said, "That this labor,
demonstrably the dearest of any, in his and the committee's opinion, was not
necessary to Indiana, as shown by her sister State of Ohio, and that at
no distant day Indiana would find ample remuneration for a temporary
deprivation." But in 1820, owing to the purchase of the Louisiana country, a
great extent of fertile land had become open to settlement, and it is to be
noted that it was a territory that, at the time of purchase, recognized slavery
as the law of the land, and the "Institution" as one of long usage within her
limits. As the country filled rapidly with settlers the question as to the form
of constitution to be adopted was soon raised, and first upon the admission of
the Territory of Missouri as a State into the Union.
--- PAGE 65---
That State became a member of
the Union, with her fundamental law allowing the existence of slavery within her
limits, but by the same Congress a line was adopted, known as the "Missouri
Compromise Line," running westwardly on the parallel of 36 degrees, 30 minutes,
and extending to the limits of the United States. North of this line, no
territory was to be admitted into the Union, but with laws prohibitory of
slavery. South of the line, citizens should have entry with their property, and
any State to be formed of such part, should be admitted into the Union, with a
constitution that might or might not prohibit slavery,
as the people of such
territory "may" choose.
It was believed that by this memorable enactment2 the
irreconcilable differences in the faiths and beliefs of the two sections had
been so adjusted and balanced as to remove their cause from future
legislation. How unfounded was this confidence was soon to be shown--in truth,
no legislation could keep pace with the marvelous expansion of the Western
Country.
Not until years after the adoption of the "Missouri Compromise Line"
were the legislative halls disturbed by the clamors of sectionalism. In 1837 a
petition from the State of Vermont, and other petitions from various societies
and organizations, were presented, and introduced into the proceedings of the
United States Senate, then in session.
2. The effort
was to prevent any controversy on the subject.
--- PAGE 66---
These petitions "prayed" for
the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and protested against any
resolution or act that might favor a future annexation of the Republic of Texas:
excited and angry members desired and demanded that they be returned to their
makers, with votes of censure. Calmer members reminded their colleagues that the
right of petition was inalienable and could not be denied. After too long a
discussion, they were laid on the table, never to be acted on, but still
fruitful of harm, for by them many angry words had been prompted, and worse
still, much bitter feeling engendered. Not until 1845 was Texas admitted into
the Union, and in the act of admission is found this clause: "Provided that any
State, that may be formed of any portion of such territory lying south of the
parallel 36 degrees, 30 minutes, shall be admitted into the Union, with laws
allowing or prohibiting slavery, as the people of such State or Territory may
choose—and any State lying north of said line shall, by its constitution,
prohibit slavery, before admittance into the Union." The great area of the new
State, capable of providing ample limits for the creation of four sovereign
States all south of the "compromise line," had appealed with irresistible force
to the leaders of a party anxious to increase, perpetuate, and solidify their
present control of the Federal Government, and not less strongly to their
constituents covetous of rich and new soil, from which greater returns might be
reaped by their
--- PAGE 67---
"labor." In the
admission of Texas the balance of senatorial power was for a time shifted, the
Union being composed of fifteen pro-slavery and thirteen free States. The war
with Mexico followed as a necessary corollary to the annexation, and by its
successful termination and the expenditure of eighteen millions of dollars as
purchase money, the United States found herself in possession of the great
domain, and countless square miles embraced in the limits of New Mexico and
California, an empire of undiscovered wealth stretching westward to the Pacific,
a land in which the institution of slavery had been debarred by the power from
which it had been ceded and purchased. Not until 1850 was the Government to be
called on to act upon the admission of any State whose limits were within and
whose lands were a part of this purchase, and in addition were south of the
compromise boundary line.
The years between 1845 and 1850 had been filled with party strife
and rancor. Unable to find any solid ground for conflict in any act of the
Government, each side sought opportunity to inflame the passions of its
constituents. Among the most harmful measures, were the adoption or attempted
adoption of "resolutions," resolutions necessarily nugatory in themselves since
they carried no executive force or power, but powerful in furnishing the
elements of party strife and controversy. On a bill appropriating three millions
toward the purchase of New Mexico and California,
David Wilmot of
--- PAGE 68---
Pennsylvania had added,
"Provided that in no part of the territory acquired shall slavery ever be
permitted." The proviso was not adopted and was struck off, but its after
effects were far reaching and cannot be over-estimated. The rejected proviso
became a fire brand with which to spread alarm in one section, and a banner
under which the theorists of the North might rally. In the South, State
conventions were called to consider what measures "were necessary to meet the
danger threatened." In more than one instance conditional resolutions were
adopted which pointed to disunion, as the inevitable result of what was termed
federal aggression. These conventions had met, pursuant to a call, or what might
be styled a manifesto, signed and issued by thirty-nine Senators and
representatives from the South, among whom are the names of the two Senators
from Georgia, Iverson and
Lumpkin, and the address had closed with
the words, "Entertaining these opinions, we earnestly entreat you to be united,
and for that purpose adopt all necessary measures."
In Georgia the convention was summoned to meet at Milledgeville, the
then capital, in December, 1850. The crisis was such that it appeared certain,
to the thoughtful, that as Georgia in solemn assembly determined, so would her
sister States of the South and Southwest act.
Mr. Thomas Spalding of Sapelo Island was requested to allow
the use of his name as a delegate.
--- PAGE 69---
He was seventy-seven years of
age, his health was poor and he was the last survivor of the framers of the
State constitution of 1798. He answered that nothing could prevent him from
using his last strength in an effort to preserve the Union,3 and at the
same time save the honor of the State. He was elected without opposition, was
chosen at the meeting of the assembly, president of the convention, and gave his
large influence and weight of personal character toward the calming of excited
members, and the moderating of the words used in debate. In his opening address,
to which his long life and services to the State lent force, he had recommended
a conservative and dignified course of action, and he succeeded in his hope of
so influencing his fellow members as to free the adopted resolutions from any
threat of a separation of the States. In his valedictory, upon the adjournment
of the body, he was able to affirm his hope and belief, that "This convention
had done much towards the preservation of the Union of States, and nothing that
could imperil it." He died on his way, and before reaching, but in sight of, his
island home, a home that he had
3. Mr.
Spalding's words were, "Gentlemen, I thank you for the honor. I think you
should have at this time some intimation of my views on the subject upon which
we meet. I unhesitatingly say to you that rather than see a separation of these
States under whose Union we have so prospered for sixty-three years, I would
prefer to see myself and all of mine buried under the sods of Georgia."—Savannah
Georgian , January 10, 1851.
erected, low and massive, defiant, like the compact between the States, of storm
and tempest, but fated to be now but a memory and a lesson. Such was the
love of country that existed in Georgia before greed of place and power had
displaced reason and sound judgment in the minds of the leaders, in both the
North and the South.
--- PAGE 70---
We read in
Benton's "Thirty Years in the Senate" that on January 1, 1850, a leading
paper of South Carolina wrote, "When the future historian shall address himself
to the task of portraying the rise, progress, and decline of the American Union,
the year 1850 will attract his attention as denoting the first marshaling and
arraying of those hostile forces, which resulted in the dissolution of the
Union." No statement, so far as it relates to the marshaling and arraying of the
forces, could be more true. By that time and even before that date, the mass of
the Southern people, and especially the young and ardent, had been taught and
trained by their political leaders to expect and in a measure to desire a
separation of the States. They were told that in that alone could safety and
security be found for a form of property to which they were wedded and attached,
to the utter obliteration of all other interests, and by that time the people of
the North and West had determined that in no event was there to be any further
expansion into a new State of a system in opposition to which the element of
sentiment, the consciousness of growing
--- PAGE 71---
power, and hope of national
supremacy had been crystallized into a resolute unanimity, and opposition to any
future extension. It was not difficult to divine to which side ultimate victory
would ensue. The forces of the North were continually recruited by armies of
emigrants, who with marvelous rapidity filled the territories and new lands of
the West, fraternizing in temper, sentiment, and political faith with the "Mover
in" from the New England or Middle States; and had even the inviolability of the
"Compromise" been respected such would have been the character of the
citizenship of any new State as to have ensured a "prohibitory" form of the
fundamental laws to be adopted, for the population of the South was not
sufficient to allow a margin for emigration great enough to become a dictating
factor in the character of any new State, or Territory about to become a State.
In the Congress of 1850 and 1851,
Mr. Clay had brought
forward new measures for a lasting compromise, the adoption of which the dying
statesman declared with pathetic earnestness was necessary to the life of the
country. Almost the first resolution read, "Resolved, That as slavery does not
exist now, by law, and is not likely to be introduced into any part of
the territory acquired by the United States from the Republic of Mexico,
it
is inexpedient for Congress to provide by law, either for its introduction
into, or exclusion from, any part of said territory."
Mr. Davis, Senator
from
--- PAGE 72---
Mississippi, had answered for
the South: "I here assert that never will I take less than the Missouri line,
with the specific right to hold slaves south of that line extended to the
Pacific."
Mr. Clay, speaking for the border States, had responded, "And
now, sir, coming from a slave State, I owe it to myself, I owe it to the
subject, to say, that no earthly power could induce me to vote for a specific
measure for the introduction of slavery where it has not
before existed,
whether it be south or north of that line."
The glove was cast and lifted by the respective champions, the
challenge was accepted, the lists and field of conflict was to be the bill for
the admission of the State of California. In his last speech
Mr. Calhoun
briefly stated, "If you who represent the stronger portion can not agree to
settle on the broad principles of justice and duty, say so, and let the States
we represent agree to separate in peace. If you remain silent you compel us to
infer by your acts, what you intend in that case--California will become the
test question." Mr. Calhoun
was in his grave, in the shadow of stately
St. Phillips, when, by a vote of 32 to 24, California became one of the United
States of America. Her admission with her form of law marked the date from which
a separation or attempted separation became inevitable. With varying fortunes,
attempted compromises, and real concessions, the controversy had extended over a
period of thirty years. The admission
--- PAGE 73---
of this Western State, south
of the line which had marked the limit of 1820, was the very "Crowning mercy
vouchsafed" to those whose watchwords had been "restriction not extension," and
insured to them the future command in the Senate of the United States, and made
certain that from henceforth there could be no enlargement of policies which the
leaders of the Southern sections had made the test questions of their political
future. From now on they must ever remain in a helpless minority.
I have thus written that the reader might realize how great was the
pressure personally, and of environment, toward a division of the Union, or a
secession of States. A proud and powerful portion of the country, hitherto
largely dominant in a Union they had greatly helped to build, and whose
foundations they had laid, found themselves, through the altered spirit of the
age, destined to be silent factors in the councils of the Nation.
Two roads only were open to them, one to fall back and retire into
the impregnable fortress of the "Compact with the States," and surrendering the
hope of extension, to there await the onset, an onset which certainly would have
met with defeat, through desertion and disaffection. But this would have
required from the leaders then in office an absolute resignation of all hopes of
personal advancement, or the holding of power. The other pathway shewed down a
shadowed vista, a possible peaceful
--- PAGE 74---
secession of ten or twelve
States, and offered the establishment of a Confederacy, with a probable after
accession of Cuba and Nicaragua, and in addition it appealed to the pride of the
masses, and held in view the honor and place of a President to be contended for,
with Cabinet officers, and foreign appointments for distribution. No course but
one of these two was open to wise choice. Every other that led away from the
cross-roads marked "California" was but a by-way, lengthening the journey,
concealing the final end, and sure to lead back to one or the other of the great
highways.
From 1853 to 1859 Georgia journeyed over a roadway the mile stones
on which were marked "Repeal of Missouri Compromise," "Congress no power to
legislate on slavery," "Passage of Nebraska Bill," and finally "Dred Scott," a
decree which forced the declaration of an "Irrepressible conflict," and from
which, in turn, was the inherent and latent right of secession to be given life
and formed into the Confederate States of America. In Georgia the leaders,
Toombs,
Stephens and
Cobb, who in 1849 had kept the State
faithful to the Union, were now divided as to what action was expedient, but
unanimous in declaring that a crisis in the national life had been arrived at.
Toombs in burning words, and with superb presence, appeared
to all men as the very genius of a revolution. To his aid
Cobb brought
his knowledge of men, and his mastership over men's hearts.
Stephens,
Hill and
Johnson pleaded for time and reflection,
--- PAGE 75---
and counseled the awaiting of
some overt act or legislation tending thereto. At one time it looked as though
the massive intellect of Johnson had raised a barrier over which the wave of
secession could never rise--but this was not to be.
William R. Yancey
summoned every man of Southern birth, irrespective of State lines, to answer to
his name on a common muster ground, and forwarded the "fiery cross" from the
Rio-Grande to the northern border of Virginia. The air was vibrant and tremulous
with expectation of a new birth; a great comet blazed on the horizon, spanning
thirty degrees of the sky, and to the imaginative boding war and disaster; but
to whom? was the question--surely victory to us will mean loss to our enemies.
In these years of controversy the people also had altered. In the
North the constitutional guarantee of slavery, affirmed by the decree of the
Supreme Court, meant only a concession that slavery should not be interfered
with, where it now existed, by Congressional action; not that it should
receive Congressional protection from partisan attack. In the South the
ruling manhood of the States had lost all reverence or love for the General
Government, and to a growing number of the young, thoughtless and arrogant, it
seemed easy to divide the States, organize a Confederacy, conquer and annex
Cuba, Nicaragua and Honduras, and openly or covertly re-open the trade with
Africa: the parent cause of this very difference and issue, but in which
they
saw wealth, success, and self-indulgence.
--- PAGE 76---
Such was the
number and character of the population of the country when the year 1860 drew to
its close, and 1861, big with the momentous issues of the coming events, cast
its shadow upon a people absolutely ignorant and unheedful of the gravity of the
situation.
I say "ignorant," in the sense of being, as a mass, totally unaware
of the immense superiority in numbers and resources of the States which opposed
them, and ignorant of the fact that it takes years and years of careful
preparation to amass and gather the material with which to wage a successful
war. In lieu of arms they had confidence in their own marksmanship, tried and
proved in woodland sports. In the place of numbers they had an unfounded belief
that each Southern soldier would equal a platoon of the Northern invaders.
Skilfully led up to the fever-point of Secession by two superbly gifted orators
who, with tongues of fire, declaimed in every district of the State, and again
and again foretold and promised a bloodless revolution, the State on January 19,
1861, declared herself freed from the bonds of the Union.
If, hitherto, there had been division as to the advisability, there
was none as to the right of this action. With its announcement there came an
entire unanimity. It was as though from mountain to ocean there had flashed an
electric spark, so strong in intensity and fervent in heat as to dissipate or
recreate every thought that did not beat true
--- PAGE 77---
to State sovereignty and lift
that doctrine high above every federal compact and law. The young men clamored
to be enrolled in the volunteer soldiery. The trained officers native to the
State sheathed their swords and resigned their commissions. The old gave their
approval and pledged themselves for the care of those left behind. None believed
war inevitable, but all stood expectant, awaiting the coming of events. All
classes—the rich and the poor, the richer and the poorest—mustered side by side,
every man hopeful and confident of the result should the fateful order of
"forward march" be given.
With 1861 came four years of matchless endeavor to create a nation;
from crude natural resources to develop ordnance and war material sufficient to
supply a half million of men at arms; from one, or, at most, two foundries, to
cast cannon and shell with which to arm a hundred forts and vessels of war; from
caves, until then unknown, to dig sulphur and nitre with which to manufacture
powder and explosive; with hand looms and a few, very few factories, to clothe
twelve millions of men, women and children, and with the labor of three millions
of slaves to feed four times their number; with the added waste of a war
throughout which an army of invaders pressed in on every border--surely, if ever
faith manifested itself it was in those days and those years.
The South, to a man—ah, even to the man-child
--- PAGE 78---
—was in arms. As the lad of
sixteen reached his birth date the mother laid her sacred and trembling lips to
his brow, bade him god-speed, and hurried him to fill the place of some dead or
crippled kinsman or brother. Indolence fled, and, in its stead, there was born a
glorious belief in the justice of the cause and the eventual sure success of
their arms. No laggard, unless he indeed were dead to shame, could face the
accusing eyes of mother, wife or sweetheart. They formed the last and true
reserve to the armies in the field. They sent forward recruits gathered from
"the cradle and the grave" to skeleton battalions, and they cheered sinking
hearts by a steadfast assurance of final victory. By them the want of every
comfort and necessary of life was borne without a murmur and met with a smile.
To them are due the noblest memories connected with the history of the
Confederacy.
Victories—alas, barren of results—came at first in unbroken
succession, until finally, depleted in number to a handful, without food or
munition of war, unshod and half clothed, the fragment that once was "The Army
of Northern Virginia" surrendered on the 9th day of April, 1865. And so ended
the long and heroic struggle--throughout which deep-rooted convictions of
guaranteed constitutional rights had been arrayed in hopeless conflict against
the spirit of the age and the awakened conscience of mankind--through which and
by whom a barrier has been built, over which foreign
--- PAGE 79---
intervention could never pass,
not even when prompted by every material interest.
It was my lot, as captain of Company G, First Georgia Regulars,
Anderson's Brigade, D. R. Jones' Division, Longstreet's Corps,4 to serve
with that army, and the remembrances of those days and years are fixed in my
mind and my heart, as were they in the passing spirits of the two great leaders,
one of whom died with the order, "Tell Hill to cross the river and rest
in the shade"; while Lee's last words were: "Say to
A. P. Hill to
move forward."
With the fall of the Confederacy there came to many despair, for
never in the history of the world had a whole people--every one, with scarce an
exception--been reduced to a universal poverty. The whole system of industry had
been based on the permanence in value of slave holdings. They had formed the
collateral, in numberless transactions, the maturing of which business
obligations had been extended by State laws and on which now not only payment
became due, but interest for five years. This slave labor had been the basis of
all credits and all industries. Robert Toombs
4. The battle
flag of the First Georgia Regiment is in the custody of the Georgia Historical
Society, having been there deposited by its last Colonel,
R. A. Wayne,
the best and bravest soldier I have ever seen. Upon it is painted the names of
the battles in which the regiment took part--"Lewnville, Dam No. 1,
Williamsburg, Peach Orchard, Savage Station, Malvern Hill, 2nd Manassas,
Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Lake City, O'Lustee, John's Island, Evacuation of
Savannah, Cheraw, Bentonville.
--- PAGE 80---
had said: "Gold, in its last
analysis, is but the sweat of the laborer's brow"; and trebly true was the
saying, of this Southern and purely agricultural region. In the necessarily
excited feeling of one race, fields and lands that, until then, had yielded
great returns, laid idle, reverting to swamp and forest, whilst the former
tillers—more than three-fifths of the number of the inhabitants—awaited their
expected "mule and forty acres," supporting themselves by petty theft and chance
employment, and reveling in idleness. By the act of a madman and criminal5
the South was delivered over to the theories of
Charles Sumner and the
envenomed hatred of Thad. Stevens. The magnanimity shown in the terms of
surrender dictated by Grant, and approved by
Lincoln, was
dissipated in the fierce heat of partisan controversy, and the crime of the 14th
and 15th amendments was attached to the Constitution.
Through these amendments a race, knowing not even the elements of
government or order, was placed, by the disfranchisement of a majority of the
whites, in absolute control of the legislative halls, and became masters of the
State. Such travesties
5. In an
article on Julius Cæsar, found in the Brittanica Encyclopedia, I read: "Those
who excuse or deify Brutus, as some did during the French Revolution, know
little of Roman history. Dante has been a better judge. The divine poet relates
to us with appalling realism, that in the center of the earth, in the bottom of
the pit of hell, Lucifer holds in his three mouths the three greatest
malefactors the world has even seen—Brutus, Cassius and Judas Iscariot, who
betrayed his master with a kiss."
--- PAGE 81---
of legislation had never been
witnessed. Such reckless issuance of State bonds and promises to pay had never
before been thrown on the market. Not until 1870 did the white race regain
control--and of the manner and in what way it was regained, it is right and best
that those who were actors therein and those who have knowledge thereof should
keep silent. Suffice it to say, the State's life and her honor demanded the
price, for, without it, even "honor was lost."
And so we reap "The Harvest" gathered by the offspring of those who
clamored, in 1739, for "the one thing needful" to the growth of the
colony; and in the result there is nothing that falsifies the "protest and
declaration" made by the men of "New Inverness."
"Nor in justice can we think otherwise of it but that they are
thrown amongst us to be our scourge one day or another. And we therefore pray,
for our own sakes, our wives, our posterity," &c., &c.
"The Harvest" has shown that, after many years, the foretold "one
day or another" had arrived; that the "scourge" had fallen, and, with it, a
ruined and impoverished land cried out in witness to the fruit of the "Seeding."
"The sessamon was
sessamon, the corn was corn;
He cometh, Reaper of the things he sowed.
Sessamon, corn, so much cast, in past birth,
And so much weed and poison stuff.
" -- "Light of Asia."
--- PAGE 82---
III. THE
AFTERMATH
From 1865 to 1870 the fields from which had been reaped the fateful harvests of
the sixties lay either fallow or unproductive. From the inexperience of
employers in the management of a disorganized labor, and from the "cost of
borrowed capital" loaned on call, little more could have been hoped for. Yet
some foundations had been laid upon which industry might rebuild former
prosperity, for immediately after 1866 citizens of the North had been very
generous in their aid. Capitalists, moved by the mixed motives of a hope of gain
and the laudable ambition of re-creating this section of a common country, had
jeopardized great sums in internal improvements. Friends and relatives,
estranged for years, had hastened to give or advance largely of their means to
those to whom misfortune had come. Too often were these sums sunk without real
benefit to giver or receiver, not from culpable extravagance or dishonesty, but
from the inability to meet conditions which it had been impossible for either
party correctly to measure. The inherited habits of generations could not be
--- PAGE 83---
laid aside at the bidding of a
"pocket journal of daily expenses" (about the only books that were kept); nor
would the newly made freedman recognize the obligation that followed his
"contract of hire," nor that his yearly or monthly wage could only be made good
by the sweat of his brow.
It was in those years that the measures most harmful and distasteful
to the South were formulated by Congress into laws. Had the South simply been
let alone, the passions created by the war and fostered long previous to that
struggle would soon have disappeared. The personal freedom of the colored race
being secured, the accompanying benefit to much the larger number of the white
citizens of the State would shortly have been recognized. The loss of property,
immense as it was, had fallen on a class greatly outnumbered in every election
return. The opportunities offered for the creation of new business relations
were the same to all, and to many the war had been in itself an education, in
which reliance upon one's own energy had been taught; and to some the habit of
command had become natural. No doubt, for a time, sympathy with those who, until
now, had controlled political action might have ruled in the minds of many; but
sympathy, strong as is its effect upon men, has but a short term of life, and
all legislative action would have been in the hands of men open to new ideas,
new convictions and new situations. The equal chances for advancement offered to
everyone,
--- PAGE 84---
more especially to that large
majority of white citizens whose lives had been, till now, clouded by the
contact with the now emancipated race, and the dominancy of their owners,
would have insured loyalty and love in lieu of the sullen acceptance of
defeat,—which, at first, was too evident.
But this fair and hoped-for end was not to be attained. The theories
and policies of Sumner and
Stevens were adopted. A U. S. general,
with his attendant troops, was sent to govern the State. Amendments to the
Constitution were passed, which, by declaring the absolute equality of the two
races, in fact made certain the eventual annihilation of the colored vote
in all practical legislation. Race antipathy was stirred; and while, at first,
threats and intimidation were the weapons used on a people not yet free-men in
spirit or courage, it was soon perceived that some legal process would be safer
and more effectual.
And so there came about the creation of what was termed the "White
Primary," an organization by which the Democratic party has made victory certain
throughout the Southern States, and from which was born the "Solid South."
Some words are here necessary to explain from what cause and in what
way this strong party weapon was able to overcome all opposition and insure a
unanimity of purpose and action from all white citizens of Georgia.
First. The population of the State in 1868 was
--- PAGE 85---
nearly 54 per cent white and
46 per cent colored. By the calling of a primary to which
none but white
voters were eligible, the pride of race was appealed to, so as to force into the
Democratic ranks all who felt the tie of their blood. To do otherwise would have
been to ally themselves, in a weak minority, with an overwhelming plurality of
colored electors.
Thirty days or more prior to any State or county election each and
every candidate for office submitted his claims to a vote in the
Primary,
supervisors and magistrates for which were duly appointed by the authorities;
and he bound himself and his supporters to abide by the result. In fact,
endorsement by the voters in the primary became a prerequisite to any candidacy
in either a State, district or county election. The members of that organization
being limited to the white race, their whole vote was necessarily cast for
one candidate, a member of the organization. There could be no division of
strength by contesting aspirants. And when to the actual majority was added the
percentage that could be drawn by money and the natural influence of employers,
the party power became certain and overwhelming.
And in this manner and by this organization were the numbers, weight
of influence and intelligence of one race so vivified and animated as to make
the late federal amendments to the Constitution absolutely null and of no
effect. Every effort toward their enforcement drew closer the bonds which bound
--- PAGE 86---
their opponents in a close and
irresistible union—a union composed of seven States of the South, and
aggregating one hundred and sixty votes in the electoral college, fourteen
Senators and eighty members of Congress.
With the assurance of white supremacy came a New South, a South that
turned all its energies to the rebuilding of the State and the laying of a solid
foundation upon which business prosperity could rise. A new constitution was
adopted and ratified, one which guarded the interests of the people by limiting
the rate of taxation and defining the amounts and the issuing of bonds by State,
county or city. Mindful of the need of education and recognizing the prevalent
illiteracy, now supplemented by the absolute ignorance of the newly enfranchised
citizen, the legislature of 1872 pledged one-third of the whole yearly revenue
to the support of a system of free schools. Separate schools were created for
the races, but the pro rata in the distribution of the fund was the same
irrespective of color, and this was done when the tax collected from the
freed-man did not amount to one per cent of the money appropriated. Railroads
which heretofore had been separate corporations, with lines having neither
proper connections nor terminals, were merged into "systems" which united the
points of production with the centers of consumption and manufacture. Aid was
extended to the State University, and every effort was made to encourage the
colleges
--- PAGE 87---
that had been founded by the
religious denominations in years prior to the war.
Gradually the character of the people has changed with their new
surroundings. Emulation and ambition have appeared in the sons of men who had
been content with illiteracy; their descendants are found always at the schools,
and many are seeking and have gained honor at the colleges. Indolence has become
a stigma, and a readiness to seize all opportunities for advancement has marked
the upward tendency of a class who hitherto had given little promise to the
future. The excessive use of alcoholic drinks has greatly lessened; indeed, it
should be the proudest boast of the prohibition party that they have created the
feeling among young men of the present day that it is "bad form" to
drink at all: in my youth it would have been termed effeminate not to do so.
The home capital of the State is steadily increasing. Great banks
with sufficient means to furnish the money necessary for large enterprises, if
not common, are not infrequent; and our State and our people are now no longer
altogether dependent on Eastern or Northern capital. All this has been the fruit
of the patient labor of a people who in 1866 had seen little promise in the
coming years.
To one who has known the people of the South prior to 1865 there is
nothing so fruitful in hope and more productive of thought than the rapid upward
progress in education, manner and mode of life
--- PAGE 88---
made by that very large
portion of her citizens that has hitherto been known as "The Cracker," "The
Pinelander," or as "Poor white trash." No writer on, or traveler through, the
South has failed to make note of them. Their mode of living stained the fairest
diary of travel. Gilmore Simms, in his Revolutionary tales, portrays
their characteristics in no flattering colors; and yet, in
Horry's Life
of General Marion, we read of an interview between
Baron de Kalb
and the General, during which the latter said:
"The people of Carolina form two classes, the rich and the poor. The
poor are very poor, because, not being necessary to the rich, who have slaves,
they get no employment, and, being unemployed, they continue poor and care not
for the country. As to the rich, they are afraid of their losses should the
British burn their houses and carry off their negroes and stock. And so we get
no recruits.
Mrs. Kemble says in her
Journal, page 146:
These are the so-called "pine landers" of Georgia,—I suppose the most degraded
race of human beings claiming an Anglo-Saxon origin that can be found on the
face of the earth. They own no slaves, for they are almost without exception
abjectly poor, and will not work, for that they conceive would reduce them to an
equality with the abhorred negro.
Olmstead
writes:
--- PAGE 89---
Among the people inhabiting the pine forests, clearly a majority of the white
population, are a class of uneducated, poverty-stricken vagabonds. I mean by
vagabonds, simply people without habitual and definite occupation or reliable
means of livelihood. They will own or pre-empt a few acres of unproductive, or
what is considered here worthless, land. They build a log cabin; clear a small
patch for corn or potatoes; own swine that roam the woods, and, it may be, a
small bunch of cattle. With them life has no future. The women take such care as
they deem right of the home and garden plot, and the men hunt game in the winter
and fish in summer.
In the year 1909
the offspring of these very men have forged to the front
throughout the State.
They have been quick to grasp opportunities for the improving of their fortunes,
and many are now men of far more than comfortable means. They send their
daughters to the best institutions for education, and their sons to the State
University or business colleges. To a large extent they are representative of
the best element of the State. By their new environment a new man has been
created; shrewdness has been developed, industry has grown; but, as yet, the
higher senses of honor and reliability remain either unfelt or, if felt, lie
dormant for the present in breasts to which in future years will come a finer
culture, and, with that, a higher appreciation of the value of personal
character.
As for those and their descendants who bore the
--- PAGE 90---
losses incurred by the
Emancipation—victims, as they were, of an inscrutable judgment to be awarded by
the sword—it becomes me to speak with a reverence born of love and a common
blood. They were true to their inherited beliefs and the teachings of years.
They contended for what they believed were rights guaranteed their fathers, and
by them transmitted, in trust, to their children. Unmindful of the years that
had rolled by and of the ages in thought, they essayed, with the mere
words of a legal document, to estay the convictions of the world and the birth
of a new people,—unmindful that there is a power divine which is fixed and moves
to good:
"It maketh and unmaketh, mending all;
What it has wrought is better than hath been.
Its threads are love and life; and death and pain
The shuttles of its loom."
They appealed to
the sword, and they have accepted the award as not only final but as one
creative of a finer type of the general manhood of the State than was
possible under the old order; that is to say, a higher average of education and
intelligence has been produced by the altered social and educational conditions
under which they live; for, while their own individual rate has been lowered, by
the uplifting of a much more numerous class the net result of the whole has been
immensely raised, and there can now be found no one so bound by tradition or so
narrowed in nature, as not to feel in his
--- PAGE 91---
heart that all that has come
to pass has worked for the bettering of the people as a mass and a whole.
Nor can any deny that the men of Appomattox, who found no homes to
receive them and only destroyed farms to restore, have built from the ruins of a
State a commonwealth greater by far than that which had preceded it.
To the race composing near one-half the population to whom has been
given freedom—not from toil, but liberty of person and the right to hold and
enjoy the fruits of their labor—has come, in addition, hazards and
responsibilities in life that call for the exercise of the greatest patience and
self-control. Their danger lies in their own number, which prompts the
unthinking to overweening estimates of their own strength, a strength which has
already been discounted in all practical legislation, and is only realized in
the labor unions which, until recently, have been unknown in the cities and
workshops of the South. To them, the old maxim of their race, "Wait, oh wait,"
is now more especially to be counselled.
SUCH HAS BEEN THE AFTERMATH OF THE SEEDING AND THE HARVEST
A Commonwealth
more than doubled in numbers; cities quadrupled in population, wealth and
taxable values; education more general and yearly increasing; a white
citizenship emancipated from the bonds
--- PAGE 92---
of a fatal environment, and in
the year 1909 a generation of men and, more marvelous, of women, loyal to the
Great Republic and proud of her stand amongst the nations,--a generation whose
hearts beat true to the notes of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," which daily sways
in the morning air from the halls of every schoolroom,—a generation who, in
their loyalty to the present and to the future, are not disloyal or forgetful of
the faith that moved their fathers, and has transformed defeat into what we know
as "The Lost Cause," a cause that has been hallowed by a poverty nobly
borne, made sacred by the blood that has flowed, and consecrated in memories
that breathe only of courage, constancy and endurance.
--- PAGE 93---
IV. THE
PILOTS
In the chapters
that have been written the dangers encountered and partial wrecking of the State
have been told. The voyage of one hundred and thirty years was ended. The ship
which had been freighted with such fair and noble ideals as "Not for thyself but
for others," and the self-denying ordinances adopted by the trustees; the decks
of which had been paced, and whose beams had echoed to the daily prayers of
John and
Charles Wesley, "Loyola"-like souls, whose hearts
"burned to lead the heathen into the ways of civilization and the paths of
Godliness," had soon met disaster, for the crew had found it expedient to
flotsam the larger and nobler portion of the cargo.
George Whitfield,
the gifted orator, man-of-affairs, and evangelist, had counseled, assisted and
directed the movement. Habersham, the epitome of business sagacity, had
given his aid. The representatives of Savannah, and all outlying districts, had
concurred and approved. Only the fervid Celt of Darien and the sturdy German of
Ebenezer had remained true to their indentures, as it was written in their
shipping articles.
--- PAGE 94---
I shall now
endeavor to recall the names of those who, as masters of the deck, or as pilots
at the helm, gave out the courses to be sailed, pored over the chart and guided
the "Empire State" as she made way into an uncertain future.
Of
James Edward
Oglethorpe, her builder and
first Governor, no words but those of grateful and unstinted praise can be
written. He was the embodiment of courage and resolution, and had the rare power
of infusing with his own high spirit all who acted under and with him. Indian
hostility was transformed by his presence into friendly association, and
threatening savage tribes became faithful and devoted allies. Industry and
self-abnegation marked every day of his stay in Georgia. Distances were not
measured, or hardships to be endured considered, if his presence was to be to
the advantage or the safety and interests of those he had led to this primal
world "Where wild Altama murmured to their woe."
He added not one dollar to his private fortune by his stay in a new
land, for save and except a modest home on St. Simon's, of the thousands of
square miles that through him were ceded or sold to the white man, not one acre
was reserved or appropriated to himself. Unlike
William Penn, he
retired to his English home, landless and with no lordly fortune carved from a
Western empire.
--- PAGE 95---
Great as were his labors, pure
and disinterested as was his life, he has yet not passed into history as an
accepted hero, builder of states, or even as a philanthropist.
Boswell
says Dr.
Johnson remarked of him, "Sir,
Oglethorpe never
completes anything." So when in 1743 he left Georgia, he bade farewell to an
unfinished work. Yet it is of him that Dr.
Oliver Holmes
writes, "His was the first example in modern times of the founder of a colony
who lived to see that colony recognized by the world and by the
Mother
Country, as a sovereign and independent power." In the sixty-five thousand
square miles that make the State of Georgia, no stone, no tablet commemorating
his labor, or sacred to his name, was erected until 1903, when the Daughters of
the American Revolution of Brunswick, Georgia, lifted a granite cross, which
bears upon its tablet,"
In memory of
James Edward Oglethorpe
Founder of the Province of Georgia
Philanthropist and lover of his fellow-men
Most ardently, of those of poor estate"
Of
the two royal governors who succeeded him, Reynolds and
Ellis,
there is nothing of moment to relate, and nothing is recorded greater than a
wearisome detail of the granting of lands and the growth of Indian discontent.
To the third, Sir James
Wright, whose fate it was to defend and
support the measures adopted by a home government incapable
--- PAGE 96---
of weighing
either the temper or the strength of the colonies, we owe both sympathy and
respect. Assuming the governorship in 1760, the material interests of the
province had been fostered, and Indian invasions and hostility had been checked,
but in 1765 bills for the taxation of the North American provinces had aroused
anger and discontent which grew by 1774 and 1775 into an open confederation with
those provinces whose wishes were for absolute independence. Governor
Wright's large fortune ($160,000) was confiscated and sold for the benefit
of the new State. He himself, with his very numerous friends and
supporters, lost the proceeds of years of thrift and industry, and were banished
from the soil of Georgia. Great division of opinion prevailed. Family ties were
broken. Alexander
Wylly, Speaker of the Assembly of that date,
clung to the Royal cause; his brother, Richard, to the "Republican or
patriot" side. The McIntoshes of Tombigbee, and of the elder house of "Moy,"
through John McIntosh,
Lachlan McGilveray and
Roderick McIntosh were faithful to the King, whose "salt they had
eaten." The McIntoshes of Borlam, now of Darien, were ardent republicans.
James Spalding claimed neutrality, but his partner in business,
Roger Kelsal, a retired army officer, raised a royal company, and he
was driven from the State.
At McIntosh Bluff on the Tombigbee River, near its confluence with
the Alabama River, is found the
--- PAGE 97---
home of Captain
John McIntosh, and with him his eccentric uncle,
Roderick,
a daughter, and a son, William, also an officer in the British Army; and
other sons who died early in life. The daughter,
Catherine, married
George Troup.
Pickett, in his history of Alabama, says that
George Troup was an officer in the British Army. Major
Wm. J. McIntosh, of "Fair Hope," McIntosh County, a cousin of
Catherine Troup, and a near neighbor to him when he resided at and owned
Belleville, McIntosh County, says, "He had been extensively engaged in
commercial pursuits, and was a person of much polish and literary acquirement."
His son, afterwards Governor George
M.
Troup, in a letter
to Pickett, writes, "I actually know nothing of my father's life, and
have no record except the births and deaths recorded in his family Bible." The
mother of Catherine
Troup was
Marian McGilveray, of
Inverness, Scotland, and a frequent visitor to her husband's home was
Lachlan McGilveray, British Agent to all the Indian Nations from the Ohio to the
Atlantic and Gulf. In an old letter book of Mr.
Spalding's I read,
"And those, who like myself, have known this highbred couple, can well
understand how a transmuted refinement must cling to a family, even when the
adventitious gifts of fortune have been taken away."
George Michael
Troup, the eldest son of
George Troup, is historically the most important personage of his
State between 1801 and 1839-1852. No
--- PAGE 98---
Governor of
Georgia, until 1861, has had to meet questions of such moment, and lay out the
policies to be followed. His gift of prescience and foresight of dangers to be
met was of inestimable value to the people he served. His resolution and courage
was adamantine. His addresses to the different convening State Assemblies, when
read in the twentieth century, startle a thinker with a conception of
"what might have been" had his counsel been adopted and carried to its
legitimate end. Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, in his published
reminiscences alludes, without mentioning his name, to the "success of his
policies" had they been adopted by the people of Georgia.
From the
McIntoshes of Borlam, now of Darien, came
Lachlan,
the first general officer from the State to be commissioned by Congress; his
elder brother, William, colonel of cavalry and first to hold that rank
under State authority; his son, John
McIntosh, lieutenant colonel
of the only regiment of infantry raised by the State and offered and received
into the Continental service, and others of the same name, who in after years
wore the badge of the "Cincinnati," so much to the credit of the parish of St.
Andrews.
In the Medway, or St. John's settlement, there was entire unanimity.
Every one of these zealous lovers of religion and of liberty were outspoken in
words, and ready to support their words with deeds. Patriots in hearts, they
were ready to peril life and
--- PAGE 99---
goods in the
cause of liberty. Had it not been for the weight of their influence, it is quite
possible that the energy of Governor Wright, with his official strength
and patronage, might for a time have held the province aloof from the
confederation and loyal to the crown.
In Savannah, the republicans or "Patriots" were led by
Noble W.
Jones,
John Houston,
Archibald Bulloch
and George Walton. Under the call of these four distinguished men,
the first meeting in favor of avowed and open resistance was held at the Tondee
tavern on July 14, 1774, and a liberty pole raised amid the cheers and speeches
of an attending crowd.
Steadily dissatisfaction grew, but Georgia's position toward England
was peculiar and unique when compared to that of the other provinces. She had
been the youngest and most favored colony, and had received large grants of
money in aid of her maintenance and for supporting her defense. Many of her
wealthiest and most respected citizens had at one time or another held offices
of trust and emolument under the home government. Her population was small and
extremely scattered. Westward and northward she was watched by Indian tribes,
sure to be pledged as allies of the British forces should war be declared. Of
manufactories she was destitute. But the Patriots were aggressive and confident.
In their ranks were found all the young and adventurous, hopeful of attaining
distinction and influence,
--- PAGE
100---
and they were
counseled and led by men of determination, patriotism and matured wisdom1.
In the Tory or Royal party, lethargy prevailed, the lethargy that comes with an
attained competence and years of ease. Many sought to conceal their faith behind
a pretended conservatism, or an avowed neutrality. On May 10, 1775, the news of
Lexington—"the shot that echoed around the world"—came, and on the night
following the first overt act in Georgia, of a rebellion to be afterwards
ennobled into a Revolution, was enacted. Noble W. Jones,
Joseph Habersham and
Edward Telfair, with a few followers, broke into
the King's Magazine, seized five hundred pounds of powder there stored, and it
is said sent the same to be used by the guns at Bunker Hill. Governor
Wright
was arrested by a self-appointed committee and confined to his house. He broke
his parole and took refuge, with the help of Mr.
Mulryne, aboard a
British man-of-war. For a short
1. During the second week in January, 1775, a district congress was held by the
inhabitants of St. Andrew's Parish (now Darien), in which a series of
resolutions were passed embodying with great force and earnestness the views of
the free-holders of that large and flourishing parish. The resolutions were six
in number. The first expresses their approbation "of the conduct of the loyal
and brave people of Boston" and their acquiescence in all the resolutions of the
American Congress." The fifth expresses "our disapprobation and abhorrence of
the unnatural practice of slavery in America, and our purpose to urge the
manumission of our slaves in this Colony." (Stevens: "Georgia," Vol. II,
page 87.) Signed--Lachlan
McIntosh,
George Threadcraft,
John McIntosh, and some thirty more names.
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period the
Council of Safety, with Mr.
Bulloch as President, presided over
the whole territory, passing many bills or ordinances for the raising of troops,
and acts that banished from the State, and confiscated the property of such
persons as they judged were friendly to the former government.
The invasion, from Florida, of General
Prevost, with the
landing of Colonel Campbell on Tybee Island, the capture of Savannah and
after advance to Augusta, gave for a time an absolute supremacy to the Royal
cause, the State authority having been restricted to the one County of Wilkes.
Confiscatory bills were passed by both sides. At almost every meeting of the now
fugitive State Assembly, some citizen was denounced and exile pronounced. Two
hundred and eighty persons of reputation and means were proscribed, and their
estates declared forfeited to the government. In many cases the rigor of the law
was extended to "their heirs and assigns." How great this proportion, will be
realized when we learn that in Pennsylvania, with her large population, but
ninety-eight were proscribed; in Virginia but a few and in New York none. The
close of the war found the new government triumphant in arms and principle, but
bankrupt of all assets except the public land, whose value was yet unknown.
The men who had distinguished themselves by energy and courage
during the war became naturally the leaders in the days of peace. It was his
deserved fame as a soldier that gave to James
Jackson,
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as of a right,
the power to greatly influence the growth and character of the State.
Successive governors were chosen and elected, whose very names have
now been forgotten. Their duties were chiefly the forging into shape, and
bringing into practical working the still inchoate State government. The Federal
Union was effected by the adoption and ratification of the Constitution of the
United States. Senators and Representatives took their seats, and the great
wheel of a government "of the people, for the people and by the people" turned
on an axis that rested on the expressed will of the citizens of the entire
thirteen States.
In 1793 Governor
Mathews had been elected to the Chief
Magistracy in Georgia. A Virginian by birth, a gallant soldier of Morgan's
Corps, his reputation was spotless. But on December 24, 1794, a bill had been
passed by the legislature then sitting in Augusta. This bill was entitled, An
act providing for the sale of the Western Territory to several Companies. On
January 7 it was presented to the Governor and signed by him. By its provisions
thirty-five millions of acres, as then estimated, now known to have been eighty
millions, were sold to four companies for the sum of five hundred thousand
dollars, or less than one cent per acre. By the publication of the act and the
knowledge of the signing of the warrants, every part of the State was roused
into indignation. Grand jury presentments demanded
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that the
interests of the people should be protected. Judges and men of influence
declared that both fraud and bribery had been used in effecting the passage and
signature of the act. Wm. H. Crawford, the foremost Georgian of his day,
declaimed in private and publicly against such an abuse of the legislative
power, and asserted that the legislature had exceeded its just powers in selling
the public domain. James
Jackson, Senator at Washington, resigned
his seat and office and hastened to Savannah to offer himself as a candidate for
legislative powers. He was elected from Chatham County, and consecrated his life
toward the rescinding of the bill, and the annulment of the act. Judge
Beverley Evans, of the Supreme Court of Georgia, has published an
elaborate account of the "Yazoo Speculators," as it is termed by him. The facts
as told by him are indisputable. With his conclusions some may differ, for even
the argument of Jackson before the rescinding legislature might have
served as a brief for the counsel of the United States in 1824. The affidavits
to the acceptance of bribes by members of the legislature, ordered "to be
engrossed in the journals of the House, so as to be forever preserved," lack
strength and directness, and are in general rambling assertions of
conversations, heard or overheard. In truth, the conviction of the parties
concerned, and the rescinding and burning of the records, came not from the
evidence produced, but from a general belief that a totally
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unnecessary
sacrifice had been made of the State's only great asset. The Federal courts, to
which the rights of a holder to whom fifteen thousand acres had been
transferred, and, by the way, whose title from the selling parties contained
no warrantee clause, but in lieu thereof a clause specially
exempting
the vendor from a re-payment, found four counts as good against the defendant.
First,—That the land belonged to Georgia, and not to the United
States or to South Carolina. See Jackson's argument in which he asserted
the title to be in the United States, if not in South Carolina.
Second,—That the legislature had the power to sell.
Third,—That no subsequent legislature could by any act affect the
rights of third persons under grants of a previous legislature.
Fourth,—That a legislative act could not be attacked collaterally.
Under this decision of Chief Justice
Marshall, in after
years, the United States, having accepted a cession from Georgia in 1802 of this
same territory, conditional upon her paying to Georgia one and a quarter
millions of dollars, and also extinguishing any claims on Georgia for
previous grants made by her, paid to the four companies, claiming under the
Georgia Act, for final release, five millions of dollars; five millions
in 1814 for $500,000 paid to Georgia in 1795, three hundred and ten thousand of
which had been paid back to the holders of the certificates,
--- PAGE
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and receipted for
by them. The profit and loss account of the Yazoo claimants stood in 1814 thus:
$189,000 paid in 1795; $5,000,000 received in 1814. The companies to whom this
money was paid are as follows:
To T.B. Scott,
John C. Nightengale,
Wade
Hampton and their associates, who had
paid to Georgia as the Upper Mississippi
Co. $35,000
$355,000
To James
Gunn,
Mathew McAllister,
George
Walker and their associates, who as the
Georgia Co. had paid to the State
$250,000
$2,225,000
To Thomas
Glascock,
Ambrose Gordon,
Nicholas Long and associates, who as the
Georgia-Mississippi Co., has paid the
State $155,000
$1,555,000
To Zechariah
Cox and associates, who had
as the Tennessee Co. paid the State
$60,000
$600,000
To the Citizens Company
$300,000
Such
was the final disposal of a claim in the prosecution of which the bitterest
feelings and passions had first been engendered, and then nourished, and which
in its end furnished the nucleus for more than one of the great fortunes of the
South.
I shall not attempt to tell in detail the history of
--- PAGE
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Georgia. Too many
dry and arid wastes would have to be traversed in the journey, deserts that bear
no fruit of taste or of interest to reader or writer. The itinerary of such a
march would closely resemble the diary of an individual, who born in poverty had
by slow and patient accumulation attained to competence, influence and command,
and in it only the wearisome items of a natural development would be disclosed.
No pioneer life with capture and rescue as told by
Cooper or
Boone
would thrill the imagination of youth. No especial revolutionary hero like
Marion or
Sumter would make of patriotism and courage an undying
object lesson. The Germans of Ebenezer, in the cultivation of rice and cotton,
had forgotten the convictions that made their fathers, for conscience sake,
exiles from Moravia. The Puritans of Medway, busy in the building of fortunes,
the getting of money and the training of newly imported Africans, had relaxed
the rigor of their religious observances; and the Celt of New Inverness,
ignoring the prayer of 1739 and the endorsement of 1775, had yielded to the
environment and was indistinguishable in mode and habit of life. Intermarriages
had been frequent, and with that the German, the Saxon, the Covenanter and the
Scotchman had been fused into the one distinctive type—the Southern Planter of
America.
Here and there an oasis is met in this "dry as dust" recital
of bare facts, episodes in a monotonous movement toward strength and population.
At
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times some leader
appears on the stage, whose message is to the people, and still more to the
people yet to come. Wm.
H. Crawford, with his superb
presence and commanding genius, illustrated the State. He was envoy in Paris,
when, after Waterloo, the princes and the great men of the world, like ravens to
the carcass, were gathered, and the Iron
Duke is said to have
remarked, "Mr.
Crawford's personality is the strongest and most
imposing of all these notabilities." George
M. Troup rises
to make his opening address to an audience who for twenty odd years hearkened to
his voice, saw and appreciated the wisdom of his counsel, but shrank from its
adoption as a child would shrink from a plunge into the cold waters of a stream.
Some words are due to this Representative in Congress, Senator at Washington and
Governor of the State, whose fortune it was to deliver the prologue to the
coming drama or tragedy of States' rights versus a centralized government. His
principles and character were almost Spartan in their severity. When a candidate
for office, he was urged by his friends to show himself at Milledgeville, the
capital. He answered, "A candidate for the executive chair should not debase
that high office by seeking to influence voters." His political creed was the
same as that of James
Jackson, declaring that the will of the
people was the only and one sovereign power, confining the powers delegated to
the central government to a strict construction of the words used in the grant,
with a
--- PAGE
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vigorous denial
and rejection of the doctrine of "implied powers," and the declaration
that by that construction the one word, "necessary," inserted in the last clause
of the Constitution might be used as a lever with which to overthrow the
separate and sovereign rights of the individual States. At the commencement of
his administration Governor Troup, owing to the non-removal of the
Indians from the soil of Georgia, had found himself beset with difficulties.
Twenty-six millions of acres of the lands of the State had been occupied by
these aborigines in 1802, at which time a cession had been made to the United
States, of the "Western Territory." That Government had bound herself by Article
four of that compact to extinguish for Georgia all Indian claims in the reserved
limits of the State, "as soon as it could be done peaceably and on reasonable
terms." By treaty, fourteen millions of acres had been acquired by the
Government as agent for Georgia. Twelve millions were still held by two tribes,
the Cherokees and Creeks, who were yearly becoming more restless and aggressive.
Their removal was imperative and necessary to the peace and welfare of the
country. The position assumed by President Adams and his Cabinet was that
the proviso, "so soon as it can be done peaceably and on reasonable terms,"
debarred Georgia from making any demand upon the Federal powers, and in spirit
if not in words asserted that the State's claims would be adjusted and the
Indian "rights be extinguished"
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at such date as
might be convenient to the Congress of the United States. Governor
Troup
refused to acquiesce in this decision, and protested in forcible words against
such an invasion of the essence of the compact. In his letters to President
Adams he denied that the Indian held a "fee simple title to the land," and
affirmed that by royal proclamation of 1764 the boundaries of Georgia had been
fixed, and the holding of the red man reduced to that of tenants-at-will. For
the royal right to so fix boundaries, and grant great areas of land, he
cited as precedents the history of the colonization of the Western World,
whether Spanish, French or English. For Georgia's title he referred to the
Treaty of Ghent, 1783, and the judgment of the United States Supreme Court,
which had said in 1810, first that the lands belonged to Georgia, and second
that the legislature had the power to sell. If Georgia could sell, then as a
corollary, the power to enter into and occupy followed. The labor and cost of
this entering into possession and removal of the tenants had been assumed by the
United States as part payment in a sale of more than fifty millions of acres of
Georgia territory, of which two States had already been created. That the
proviso "so soon as can be done peaceably and on reasonable terms" had in equity
a time limit, and that in the twenty-three years that had elapsed since the
pledge was given, a full period for its execution had been granted. His words,
happily, had effect, and a specific
--- PAGE
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promise was given
that should a majority of the heads of the tribes agree to a removal, that then
by virtue of that agreement and treaty, the United States would demand of the
"Nations" an exchange of their Eastern for Western homes. Commissioners holding
State and Federal authority for the making of a treaty were appointed. A meeting
or council with the head men and chiefs was held at the Indian Springs on the
Oconee River, where an agreement in accordance with the wishes of Georgia was
reached. Some threats of resistance ensued; one notable murder or execution was
a consequence, but in time, by the provisions of that treaty of February, 1825,
the State entered into quiet possession of the whole territory, and for the
first time in her history extended her laws and jurisdiction over all the lands
embraced within her limits.
It was in this year that the movement known as "Slavery
Agitation" first assumed a menacing front. Ohio and Vermont had before, through
their representatives, presented at Washington the petitions of societies and
individuals, living and fostered within their limits; but not until February 18,
1825, had a Senator or Representative of any State offered of himself a bill,
ordinance or resolution which struck expressly and directly at the maintenance
of an "Institution," without the guarantee of which it would have been
impossible to form from the Confederation of States the great Republic of the
United States.
--- PAGE
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On
the date above, the Hon. Rufus
King, of New York, laid on the
table of the United States Senate the following resolution:
"Resolved by the Senate of the United States of America, That as
soon as the portion of the existing funded debt of the United States for the
payment of which the public land of the United States is pledged, shall have
been paid off, then and thenceforth the whole of the public land of the United
States, with the net proceeds of all future sales thereof, shall constitute and
form a fund, which is hereby appropriated, and the faith of the United States is
pledged, that the said fund shall be inviolably applied to aid the emancipation
of such slaves, within any of the United States, and to aid the removal of such
slaves, and the removal of such free persons of color in any of the said States,
as by the law of the States respectively, may be allowed to be emancipated, or
removed to any territory or county without the limits of the United States of
America.3"
The
introduction of this resolution by a Senator of the ability of Senator
King
made a profound impression upon the people of Georgia. The character and spirit
of the movement was instantly recognized by Governor
Troup, and in his
message to the legislature of June 25, 1825, he said, "The spirit
3. It was this resolution which caused the adoption of bills and acts
forbidding the "manumission" of slaves by many Southern States; up to this date,
manumission had been frequent. See Mabry's "Statutes and Laws of Georgia."
[this note was mis-numbered in the original text—ALH]
--- PAGE
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which animates
these disturbers of our peace is of no ordinary kind; it is the same that
rallied under the banner of the cross, sought to propagate religion by the
sword; it is the spirit of the crusader, and that never dies. Temporize no
longer; make known your resolution that this subject must not be touched. I
entreat you therefore, most earnestly, now, that it is not too late to step
forth, and having exhausted the argument, to stand by your arms." It is of this
and the subsequent action of 1849 that Senator Hoar speaks in his
Memoirs, and says had it then been adopted, there would have been no opposition
to such State action, for at that time Northern feelings had not crystallized
into bodies strong enough to have resisted. Afterward, ignoring the share of the
public lands due to Northern States, Governor Troup said, "Mr. King
proposes to buy out our interest in our property, by the sale of our
own landed property." From that time and onward he was the avowed champion
of the rights of the States as reserved to themselves, and an enemy to all
centralized power. To the day of his death, he held the ear of the people and
the respect of his bitterest political enemies. In 1852 he was nominated for the
Presidency at a convention held in Montgomery. In his letter of acceptance he
said, "I do so, solely for the purpose of furthering an organization of a
States' rights party." He was the John
the Baptist and
forerunner of the future President of the Southern
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Confederacy. His
whole life was spent in the political arena; for even after his retirement from
active participation, his letters were sought and solicited as of one who could
speak with the authority that is granted to great knowledge and experience in
public affairs, and in a sense to many they were ex-cathedra utterances to which
all were bound to give adherence.
EXTRACTS FROM GOVERNOR TROUP'S MESSAGES AND LETTER:
"It is worse than
useless to conceal anything from ourselves—it is far better to lay bare the
naked truth—and in good time.
I say, prepare for the last resort. Are we to surrender because
the civilized world, and more than half of our own country are against us? I
answer, "No, by no means."
Prepare now for the last resort by the establishment in every
State, without any delay, of military schools, foundries, armories, arsenals,
manufactories of powder. Have you not observed that our adversaries are
constantly growing stronger in all the elements of power, population, wealth and
military resources, and are sustained by a government strong and ready for the
combat? Create from your militia a military organization. They know you have
courage, but they see no artillery, no munitions of war. If ready, we yet may
save ourselves. The victory is not always to the strong, and Alexander conquered
the world with little more than thirty thousand men.
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When the adversary becomes strong enough to alter the
Constitution and abolish slavery, what are you to do?
I do not favor conventions of the Southern States. I favor each
Southern State making for itself, and at its own cost, such preparations as will
cause, and ensure respect for her station. The militia forces should be
transformed into effective military organizations, arsenals with foundries for
cannon and manufactories of powder and all munitions necessary for war, should
be owned and built by the State.
Cease braggadocia and act."
From
the date of Mr. King's resolution Georgia was constantly and continually
embroiled in an aggressive and bitter correspondence with the Federal
authorities. The claims regarding the removal of the Indians, and its
long-deferred settlement, had done much to destroy the friendship and comity
that should have existed, and from 1825 to 1850, the date of
Mr. Clay's
"compromise measure," the party favoring division had been growing in number—not
yet able to count themselves as a majority. Each year had added recruits to
their number, while in the hearts of their opponents the abstract love to the
united government had been supplanted by a utilitarian belief, that for the
present it was better and more expedient to hold to the established form and
order.
After the retirement of Governor
Troup from active politics,
and the death of his great rival, General
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Clarke,
the leadership had fallen to four men, all eminent for energy, oratory and
mastership over men's minds and hearts. This group consisted of Senator
John MacPherson
Berrien,
Howell Cobb,
Robert Toombs and
Alexander Stephens. Others there were of more or
less weight and influence, but they were but the decimals in any column of
figures arranged as an exhibit of personal and political strength. The four that
I have named were the units, that at a glance disclosed how great their value to
the aggregate. The senior of these four, Senator
Berrien, had held every
office in the gift of the people, and was distinguished at the Bar and Bench
before he had accepted any public office. His power as a debater and speaker was
uncommon, and his perfect dignity, combined with courtesy and grace of
deportment, had insured to him the friendship and confidence of all with whom he
might be associated.
The Honorable
Howell Cobb, after long service in the
legislature, had been elected to Congress in 1842, and had risen rapidly into
national prominence. His speeches were impressive, but his greatest strength
laid in his personal intercourse with those with whom he was thrown. His
suavity, good nature, broadmindedness and common sense disarmed his political
opponents and drew all wavering minds to his side. In practical politics and the
management of friends and opponents he had no equal. As Speaker of the House of
Representatives he was
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distinguished for
fair dealing and urbanity, and in the trying position of a divided party and an
antagonistic executive, he had gained the esteem of all of his own party and
incurred the hatred of none but the most violent of his adversaries.
Robert Toombs, a genius, if this State has ever
produced one, was of a totally different type. Princely in person and mind, his
fiery soul brooked no evasion in words, or concealment of thought or intention.
His utterances were Danton-like in audacity, and with him words were vivified
into living things with which to overwhelm and stifle opposing forces. In debate
he reached the heart of a subject, not by any process of reasoning, but by an
instinctive sense of the field upon which the argument rested, and all not
estranged from him by their nativity, or else immuned by education and early
association, if thrown into personal contact, yielded and bowed to his vehement
and towering spirit.
Alexander Stephens, perhaps the best loved of the
four, added to mental gifts of the very highest order, the clear sagacity of a
deep and calm thinker, and, when aroused, the power of intense and impassioned
speech. His pure, generous and courageous life endeared him to all. Of him
Toombs once said, "Richmond district will return
Stephens to Congress
until he dies, and then, his heirs and assigns."
The men that have been named were, in truth, the officers who guided
and directed the State in her long progress from colony and province to that of
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sovereign State;
from statehood to membership in a great and growing republic, and onward, first
into the morning lights of a confederacy of sister States, and then into the
midnight gloom of the "lost cause."
Oglethorpe, founder and guardian;
Wright, who sought
in vain to hold a people true to their sovereign and to the "salt they had
eaten"; Bulloch,
Jones,
Walton,4
Hall,
Gwinnet,
Habersham and
McIntosh, who saw a nobler future, in
an armed resistance, than that offered by a slothful, peaceful and prosperous
dependence.
George M. Troup, self-chosen champion for his sovereign!—The
State!—whose counsels, if followed, might have led to some safe passageway
through the narrow strait, already beset Eastward, Westward and Northward "by
the spirit of intolerance," and other spirits born of the new age and awakened
4. In the words of another writer, those who did not know
Robert Toombs can form no conception of "The splendor with which he moved amid the
dramatic scenes of 1859 and '60. A man of marked physical beauty, golden tongued
and lion hearted, he gloried in the whirlwind and caught his inspiration from
the storm. He inflamed by his speech and swayed by his magnetic fire. To the
rights of the South as he comprehended them, was his supreme
devotion pledged. In tone and manner emphatic, even to the verge of menace, and
essaying by sudden bursts, savoring almost of inspiration, to decide the fate of
great questions. Such was Robert
Toombs, greatest of Georgia's
sons. Mighty was his influence in precipitating the coming struggle. Most potent
were his persuasions in inducing Georgia to secede from the Union. He died
unreconciled to existing conditions.
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thought.
Berrien,
Cobb,
Toombs and
Stephens, who, true to their
blood-bond, gave their all, their mentality in counsel, and their blood and
their strength in the field in aid of their native land.
And now as we close this brief record of a part of Georgia's past
history are we not forced to acknowledge and recognize the supremacy and power
of the surroundings and environment of a people toward the declaration of their
creed and the shaping of the characters and actors in national and political
life?
The fate of the State rested on a form of labor which in a measure
forbade the inflow of workmen and artisans, the want of whom checked the coming
in of capital, since it restricted industrial activity to the one pursuit of
agriculture and limited its profits to those arising from the sale of the crude
products of the soil—a system not of intensive farming but of the plantation
type, necessitating often a removal to and a residence in the new and remoter
portions of the State, forcing a comparative isolation in family life, and a
consequent ignoring of the standards of belief brought into being and accepted
by the world. As the years progressed in thought, an accompanying mental
isolation, which insured and built up a false estimate of
personal value and
strength, since its only contrast, at home and abroad, was with the
offspring of indigence or the "chattel" held to till the fields; a gradual, if
not rapid, exhausting of the soil, a demand for new territory,
--- PAGE
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capable of giving
larger returns, a demand adopted by "client and patron," or by poor and rich, as
necessary and their right under the terms of the Union, and the support of which
was absolutely necessary to all who might seek public office. From which came
the demand for "equal share in all territory acquired by the General Government"
with its after momentous consequences, thus providing the fulcrum for the lever
destined to change the fate of a nation and its life, and provide the
down-pressing weight of the harvest that had come from the seed that had been
sown in 1740 throughout the Colony of Georgia.
To close this sketch of Georgia's past history and make no mention
or reference to the present condition and probable future of the race that has
been transplanted from the shores of Africa would be to ignore the most
difficult, weighty and momentous problem that ever has been offered for solution
to any government or nation.
It is well to state what are the elements of the discord and
differences that confront us, but first it is just to tell of the present
character of the people to whom forty-five years ago was given the right of
citizenship and freedom from the bonds of slavery. In that less than half
century of years they have risen from absolute illiteracy and poverty into,
comparatively, a much higher rank. Great advancement has been made by them in
mental and, in my belief, in their physical abilities, and by this I mean,
--- PAGE
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in their power to
utilize to the best advantage such strength, vitality and knowledge as they may
possess. Even in feature they have changed, and are no longer so typically
African, and I refer especially to those in whose veins there runs no drop of
mixed blood. As mere laborers, they are unexcelled and have no superiors,
whether it be in the field, the mine, the forests, or on the city wharves. They
are not addicted to the formation of "Union Societies," and in general give to a
contractor less trouble—excepting the necessary overseeing—and more work, for
the same money, than any laborer on the face of the earth. Their power of
existing and thriving on the smallest daily allowance is remarkable, and were
thrift added, wealth would follow. But in this respect the whole race are living
paradoxes. The same man or woman that will thrive and grow strong on a daily
expenditure for all needs of ten cents, will at another time when receiving one,
or more than a dollar a day, expend for "excursions," shoddy clothes, and
make-believe finery, every cent of his or her increased income. And, should that
cease, drop back to their former manner of life with no sigh of regret. One of
them once said to me, "You see, we black people are like this: what we have not
got we don't want, but what we have we'll 'joy." They seem incapable of taking
thought of to-morrow, and as a class, not without notable exceptions, they
remain poor and add little to the realized wealth of their communities. The
primary
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branches of
education are quickly absorbed, and reading, writing and some knowledge of
figures has become common, and now that the temptations of the whiskey and gin
saloons have been by law suppressed, it is hoped the criminal record will be
lessened. Their rate of increase will not be accurately known until after the
census of 1910, but in my belief will be found identical with that of the white,
less the added immigration to the latter. In habit of life they are cleanly.
More so at least than is often found to be the case with laborers and workers of
a different nationality. The homes of large numbers are well kept and show a
love for neatness and the acquisition of the comforts of life. The women are
good mothers and ambitious that their children should excel at their school
studies. Chastity is not regarded by them or the men as the crowning virtue of a
woman. Indeed, no universal or individual condemnation seems to follow a lapse
from purity, and until their own sex shall create a "caste" which shall enforce
such condemnation there can, and will be, no change. After marriage and while
the ties of marriage are acknowledged, I am inclined to think the larger part of
the colored women feel bound by honor and custom to lead lives consistent with
their vows. But before marriage and when the quickly uttered "we will part" has
been said, they consider themselves released from any covenant. The number of
mulattoes is steadily decreasing. The union between the white man and the
colored woman is now
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greatly
restricted to casual intercourse, and the lifelong association with a woman of
color is plainly less often met with than in the days of slavery.
In the words I have written I have endeavored to be absolutely just
and to present in the fairest manner the better qualities and attainments of a
people whose future is at least uncertain. The habits and characteristics that
militate against any radical improvement are these: a want of thoroughness in
the completion and execution of any work intrusted to them; this, combined with
an absence of persistence, and great slovenliness in the execution, debars them
from leadership in branches of labor where, individually, they may be skilled,
and restricts their fields to mere manual tasks; and again a total or rather a
too general disregard for truth, in verbal statements, has gone far toward
discrediting even their sworn testimony before the juries of the country. And
worse than all that precedes, a universal attempt and effort to screen and hide
from the officials of the law any criminal who may escape has destroyed faith in
their loyalty to good order and good government. With them no individual
disgrace accompanies and follows a conviction for crime or felony. The returned
penitentiary convict or released server on the chain gang resumes the same place
in his society and home circle as had been relinquished by him at the time of
sentence. No social ban or stain accompanies crime, and the failure to do so is
largely the cause and germ from which
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spring crimes,
felonies, and misdemeanors. Such is the nature, character, habit of life, and
industrial value of the twelve or fourteen million of people of African descent
whose presence and residence within the Southern States gives rise to, and
forms, the unknown quantity, in the equation, or race problem, which is to be
solved, one day or another, by the citizens of this land.
To them are opposed seventeen millions of a different race and
birth, possessed of all the realized wealth of the communities, and the owners
or masters of every industry; they alone enact the statutes under which both
parties must live, and from them are chosen the judges, the juries, and the
officers of the law. Centuries of educational advantages have developed their
minds and taught them the value and power of organization. The same centuries of
absolute supremacy have given to them undoubting faith in their right to this
supremacy. Experience has taught them what colored legislation means, and faith
in themselves teaches that Federal laws can give but useless paper titles to
State citizenship, and now they are resolutely determined, cost what
it may, to remain masters of the country, and as firmly resolved that there
shall be no fusion of interests, division of places, or mixing of blood. To the
inferior race they say, "With your rights of person and property safely guarded"
you must remain content. That with educational facilities we give you, "Be ye
silent and with your labor build up the country." Having
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thus outlined the
character and industrial value of one party to this problem, and the claims and
demands of the other, both of whose future is involved in the settlement, the
difficulty of finding a possible, practical and acceptable solution becomes
evident.
And first, it should be recognized that at present the labor of one
is necessary to the prosperity of the other, and that any general removal or
migration of one would need to be gradual and extend over years of time, for a
different course would bring disaster and ruin to the business and agricultural
interests of the South, and, furthermore, no demand for such removal is likely
to be made by the white race, since a dread of any radical change is strongly
felt by every party where monied interests are at stake. By so much, then, is
the problem simplified; accepting this theory, the question will be not what
shall be done with the negro? but what shall be done with the negro as a
permanent resident in the South. Nearly equal in number to the white and
increasing at the same rate; improving in education and power of organization
and slowly, very slowly, adding to their fortunes, can it be hoped that existing
conditions will continue, and that the citizens under the Federal laws can be
practically debarred from the privileges of State citizenship, for this, in
fact, is the outcome of the unexpressed declarations. In an article published in
McClure's Magazine, Mr.
William Archer, a scholar and
writer of note, gives his conclusions and adds those of a man of Southern
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birth, now a
resident of Virginia, and supplements the two with the baseless assertions of a
distinguished professor of Oxford, England, noted for his critical knowledge of
history and political economy. Each of these gentlemen has solved, in his own
opinion, the question, or rather foretold the final end which will be reached by
way of a solution.
If we could give faith to the Virginian, we could dismiss every
thought on the subject, for he says, "Owing to the constant trend of the colored
men, from the fields to the cities, and their inability to withstand the
temptations there met, combined with a strenuous competition and bad hygienic
surroundings, the race as a whole is dying out, from the losses incurred from
the diseases and vices which are encountered in the slums and tenements of the
great cities."
The Oxford professor asserts that there is no such thing as
antagonism; that the feeling that is so called is purely imaginative, and is due
solely to past environment, and will in time disappear; that all State laws
forbidding the marriage of those of opposing color will be repealed and that a
thorough amalgamation of the African and the Caucasian will follow.
After a consideration of these statements and an investigation by
himself, Mr.
Archer rejects both. The first as improbable, the
second as impossible. He then lays down four possibilities, one of which, he
asserts, must be the end or solution of the race question
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in the States of
the South. Those as stated by him are as follows:
First. We may worry along in the present condition until the colored
race dies out or is reduced by disease and vice to a negligible quantity. This
is the Virginia solution.
Second. The education of both races to such a point that they may
continue to live side by side without clashing politically or materially. This
is Professor Booker
Washington's solution, known as the "Atlanta
Compromise."
Third. Amalgamation by the repeal of all laws which forbid
intermarriage. This is our Oxford professor's solution.
Fourth. Segregation of the colored race into some Western territory,
to be set aside by the General Government for the sole occupancy of the African
race. This is Mr.
Archer's solution.
Upon reflection, it becomes apparent that in one of these "four
possibilities," as stated by Mr.
Archer, must be found the end of
this race question, for collectively they embrace every resolution that might be
adopted, and every action that might be taken by those interested.
"Possibility Number One" asserts the decadence in vitality and
number of the colored race, and foretells their extinction or dying out. I
reject this as unproved by statistics, as contrary to the laws of nature, where
a people have a sufficient amount of food, shelter, and other necessities of
life; as false to
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my own
observation, and unmindful of the safeguards that the late prohibition laws have
thrown as barriers from temptation. Number one can, therefore, be eliminated
from discussion, and we can turn to number three, leaving number two for future
examination.
Number three is comprised in the one word "Amalgamation," and that
is the repeal of all laws which forbid the marriage of persons of different
color. This according to the "eminent English authority" is sure to take place
sooner or later. He pronounces racial antipathy to be merely "imaginative
suggestion" which has its birth in past environment. Such a baseless assertion
could only be born of a total ignorance of the status and life of the two
parties to the question. The repugnance to the legitimate union of the two is
based upon a deep conviction that the offspring of such a union would be lowered
in the scale of humanity. And for its absolute rejection, it would only be
necessary to appeal to the heart of every white man or woman, whether native to
the South or resident by adoption. Again the product of such amalgamation as has
been shown in that of the West Indies and the Republics of South America has not
been of a character to commend itself as an example to be followed; while
finally, the law-making power being now undeniably in the hands of the white
race, no member of any future convention or legislature would dare face wife,
daughter, sister, or mother after supporting or
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fathering the
repeal of a law which had declared that women of their color were
alone
eligible to the bearing of legitimate children to the men of the white race.
This alone insures the permanency of the present statutes, and
practically declares that possibility number three, or Amalgamation, must, like
number one, be rejected and dismissed from consideration.
Passing on to
Mr.
Archer's suggestion embodied in
number four, and in which he has adopted the "Segregation" of one race and its
removal to a separate territory, wherein none but those of African descent
should have a right of occupancy, we are met at once with the difficulty of
determining the manner in which this migration and exodus of over twelve million
of people is to be effected. If voluntary, what inducement could be offered
strong enough to overcome the interest and ties that bind them to their present
places of residence—what power could be invoked sufficient to outweigh that
inertia which resists any movement or change of place, always encountered in
natural life as well as in inanimate nature: I know not, and cannot even imagine
any State or Federal offer great enough to induce a successful move in that
direction. Voluntary segregation may safely be pronounced incompatible with the
temper and disposition of the party directly interested, and for involuntary
segregation, or compulsory removal, no possible sanction
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of law could be
obtained, even in the States to whom the question is vital. So indispensable is
the labor of the one to the other in all agricultural and other business
interests, that no legislative action compelling segregation could meet with a
support sufficient for its enactment.
In 1865 and 1866 such a movement was possible. The newly emancipated
slave would have given quick assent to any expressed wish of the General
Government, and a "trek" of the entire race would in all likelihood have
followed. No property interests then offered obstacles to emigration, but now it
is to be noted, that small as is the aggregate of real estate held by the
colored citizen, so minute are the divisions that very many holders are
represented in what appears as but a fraction of the realized wealth of the
country. Had such a policy been adopted in 1866 the South would have started
later on the path of recovery. The shifting of class distinctions would have
been greater than what has taken place, and the changes in fortune
larger and more
numerous. But 1909 would have found more solid
prosperity and no sword of Damocles, or race question, overshadowing. No solid
South would have been needed, as a guard against irresponsible law making. But
now it is too late to speak of the transfer of a whole people, of an exchanging
of material interests and established habits of life, and for these reasons one
who knows the temper and spirit of the two parties must reject the possibility
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of any
segregation of the colored race, and turn to number two as the only solution
possible.
Thus have we been forced to abandon and dismiss from consideration
three of the four "possibilities," in one of which
Mr.
Archer has
rightly affirmed must be found an answer to a question which involves the future
well being of a part of this union of States.
The second proposition alone remains to be examined, and, since
collectively the four embrace every possible solution or action, the adoption of
the one now to be examined is inevitable. It asserts that by the education of
both races a point may be reached where the two may live side by side without
clashing in either material or political life. Before the acceptance of this
assertion it will be necessary to define what in our belief is here meant by the
word "education," for certainly no mere advance in literary or even industrial
development could warrant a change from the use of the word "possibility" to the
more hopeful term of "probability." A cultivation of a higher order will be
absolutely requisite and the progress to be made must be in schools dedicated to
justice, forbearance and patience. The now dominating class must learn to give
absolute justice in personal as well as in property rights, excepting
only their right of being recognized as giver and law maker; the other in the
acceptance of personal and property guarantees must simply strive to do
their best in that state of
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life in which it
has pleased God to place them. With this utopian idea of moral improvement
realized, it might be possible to find warrant for writing, "We can educate both
races so that they may live amicably and without clashing," even when grown, the
one to thirty, and the other to forty millions. This education must take its
origin in absolute justice, with personal and proprietary rights guaranteed to
one and practiced by the other, and in patience and forbearance in acceptance by
the one. No other course can avert final and sure disaster. It should be the
part of those to whom is intrusted the duty of enacting the statutes under which
both must live, to see that as a first step the law should deal squarely and
equally with white and black, giving to each the right of trial before his own
peers, a part at least to be of his own color, in every jury empaneled before
which either might be arraigned.
This first step taken, others would then follow. Many nations have
lived in great happiness under a despotism when the despot was just and true in
his government, and it may be that we might yet repeat the story, otherwise an
"Armageddon," or battle of races, will one day ensue.
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V. ST.
SIMON’S AND JEKYL ISLANDS
I
cannot end this record of past years and personages that are now no more, and
make no mention of the homes and the people that were once to be found on the
islands of St. Simon's and Jekyl.
In a book more read and reverenced in olden days than at present, we
learn that once "A Sower went forth to sow." A great artist for our inspiration
has depicted the scene.
Amid the brown and freshly turned furrows of our Mother Earth, with
extended arm and noble gesture, stands the grand figure of a man instinct with
life and primal strength; from his open palm he casts the seed, nay, "The Word,"
fated, some to fall amid the dry stones of the fields, some on fruitful soil,
and to return twenty, even thirty fold. No sainted Madonna wears a more rapt
expression, for the harvest to be reaped from the seed being sown was the
knowledge and reception into the heart, of The Truth, in which I conceive
is to be included all the eternal verities, equities, and duties incumbent upon
man throughout this life.
The island of St. Simon's had been peopled entirely
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by men of Scotch
nativity, and its lands had in the largest measure been granted to the
MacKays,
Cuthberts,
Grants and
McIntoshes, all
connected by blood or marriage with the colonists of New Inverness. When the
leaders of that outpost had deemed it fit and proper to declare to the world and
the general commanding "The Creed" under which they had hoped to live, their
kinsmen of Frederica and St. Simon's had remained silent, and had not joined in
that declaration for "Satan" in the guise of a growing property and ease of
life; "had taken away the good seed" and substituted a love of trade and of
military importance. Unmindful of "The deceitfulness of riches" and of the
warning of "The Scourge that would some day or other return," the men of
Frederica and of the islands had not lifted voice for, or against, the popular
demands; the material rewards had quickly appeared and were evidenced by an
increase of population and of wealth, as then measured, and a little direct
trade with the Mother Country.
With 1742 all attempts of Spain against the coasts of Georgia had
terminated. The victory at Bloody Marsh had been a practical assertion of what
is now known as the Monroe Doctrine. "Frederica," the chief settlement of the
island, was garrisoned by a battalion of regular troops of "H. M. A." The wants
of the soldiers furnished a ready market for all that might be raised on the
farm.
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The
young men found employment at the outposts, as guides, scouts or teamsters; the
older made their homes more attractive by the cultivation of the orange, vine,
fig and mulberry. The trade in peltries and furs with the Indian tribes,
northward and southward, was inaugurated and great prosperity followed.
I doubt if anywhere within the circle of British colonization such
picturesque contrasts of social conditions could have been found as in the
narrow circle of Colonial Georgia, for in Savannah might be found the
adventurers of that day, many of them the loose-living English gentlemen of
Fielding's novels, and most unfitted for pioneer life. A few miles to the west
the steady German tilled his fields under his own pastor and teacher, and was by
his terms of emigration exempt from any call to arms, even in defense of his
adopted land. But a day's ride to the south a band of Puritans, of strictest
tenets, had planted their stakes and given "hostages to Fortune," whilst
southward and on the very frontier could be seen their moral antipodes--the
fervid Celts of the Altamaha and the islands; amid these latter free and
friendly roamed the Red Man of the Woods, to whom the bonnet and the kilt of the
Highlander had become a "token" that symbolized friendship and fair dealing.
By 1810 St. Simon's had become a social center. Almost every acre of
arable land was in cultivation, and the owners were, in general, persons of
refined
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tastes and
liberal education. Some were retired officers of the British army, who had
traveled and seen the world in many phases. The mode of life was essentially
simple, but the hospitality was immense. Every door stood open to the stranger,
and to be the guest of one was to be made welcome in every household. With the
exception of the master of "Hampton Point" there was no extreme wealth, but
there existed a much happier condition, there were none without an easy
competence, and many possessed incomes far above the average. In number there
were fourteen homesteads or plantations, as they were then called, and on the
island there was a slave population of about twelve hundred.
The church was well supported and well attended. One service, at 11
a.m., was given to the whites, and a lecture in the afternoon to the colored
race. The effect of this mode of instruction was shown in the improved character
of the island slaves, who, in general, were far in advance of their race in
intelligence and civilization. This church, one of the oldest in the State, had,
I believe, the unique distinction of being perhaps the only one in Georgia to
which a clerk and a pew-opener were, on each succeeding Easter Monday, duly
elected. The clerk, pronounced by the congregation "clark," was, for many years,
the venerable Mr.
Davis. He sat on a high seat immediately in
front of the officiating priest and led the responses in a fine bass voice. The
pew-opener, the estimable Mrs.
Davis, never failed in attendance.
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At nine the
congregation had commenced to arrive. The older ladies came wearing "calashes,"
made of wire and green silk—a sort of miniature buggy top—which were laid aside
upon entering their pews. They then gathered together for gossip and talk, which
did not cease until the "Dearly beloved" was uttered by the preacher. The men
seated themselves upon benches built under the trees, received their mail, which
was always brought to the church door by the postmaster, read letters and
discussed the last news from Milledgeville, Washington or Charleston, until the
sound of the organ called them to worship. The children played in the shade
until summoned, and they in general were dismissed when the sermon commenced.
The young people of my own family were not allowed to leave the church, but at
the first verse of the litany we seated ourselves upon the floor and opened our
lunch baskets.
At the northern end of the island was situated the home of
Major Butler. This gentleman was, at the outbreak of the Revolution, an officer
in the British army. He married an heiress of the
Middleton family of
South Carolina. He had resigned his commission and became an ardent supporter of
the colonies. He afterward removed to Georgia, and brought great wealth with
him. More than 800 slaves called him master. They were equally divided between
the rice place in McIntosh County, of Butler's Island, and the cotton plantation
of Hampton's Point. Here everything was pervaded by a
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species of
military rule. No one came to visit him but was met on the landing by a vidette,
who enquired your business and escorted you to the mansion. Everything was made
on the plantation. Tanneries existed, a shoe-making establishment, a manufactory
for clothes, socks, caps, furniture, etc., and indeed almost every industry was
represented. No person, however old or feeble, was allowed to be altogether
idle. One story I recollect that typifies this fact. An old woman coming up to
him said: "Master, I am old, I can work no longer." "It is true," said
Mr.
Butler, but calling his head man he said: "Flora is not to work,
but get a goose, give her a line and say to her each day she must lead my goose
to graze for an hour," and for ten years did goose and woman pasture together at
Hampton's Point.
The
Butler mansion, or "big house," as termed by its
dependents, was placed at the confluence of a bold creek, with the river that
ran in the front. Spacious and comfortable, it made no attempt toward
architectural beauty, the only striking feature being the seven massive chimneys
that towered over the roof and broke the line of sky and the great avenue of
oaks that led landward. A full corps of servants was always in attendance,
irrespective of the presence or absence of the family, and these included a
hunter, a fisherman, four boat hands, a housekeeper and her many assistants.
Here I think feudalism died; for the relations between the
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"Major" and his
slaves much resembled that which once existed between a grand seigneur or a
great lord and his "villains." The language used by the house servants has
always been to me productive of both amusement and thought. Very often the words
uttered were misplaced and at the same time carried great strength of
expression. One once said to me, when indignantly expostulating against an
encroachment on his mistress' lands, "I say to de surveyor, when he tell me
'twas vacant land, 'for Lawd sake, Mr.
Penman, ain't you know dere
is no modderless land in Georgia, or else white man would long before now done
adopt him.'" Another in excusing her son for some negligence in the execution of
his work, said, "You know my child was born 'short o' knowledge.'"
Here
Aaron Burr spent a few months alone in an
enforced retirement after his fatal encounter with
Hamilton. Of the
manner of his entertainments he thus speaks in letters to his beloved "Theodosia":
Hampton Point, August 1804.
I am quite settled. My establishment consists of a housekeeper,
cook and chamber maid, seamstress, and two footmen, two fishermen, and four boat
men always at my command. The laundry work is done outside, etc."
Again on another day, having dined and evidently dined well, his bright soul
breaks out as follows:
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Hampton Point, September 1804.
Madame:—
J'ai bein diner, and J'ai' fait' mettre mon writing deck sur le
table a diner. What a scandalous thing to sit here all alone drinking champagne
and yet, ("Madame Je bois a votre sante, et a celle de monsieur votre fils.")
and yet I say if champagne be that exhilarating cordial which ("Je bois a la
sante de Madame 'Sumtare'") can there ever be an occasion more appropriate. ("Mais
buvons a la sante de mon hote et bon ami Major
Butler.")"
Again:
"Mr.
Cooper has just sent me an assortment of French wines, clarets and
sauternes, also an orange shrub, a delicious punch sufficient to last at least
twelve months—and so on."
Separated only by the narrow creek that I have mentioned was the home of
John Couper of "Cannon's Point." This place was surrounded by orange and olive
trees with other semi-tropical plants; even the date here yielded its tardy
fruit. Mr.
Couper had here resided since 1780 and had had personal
acquaintance with all the great men of our country, and his conversation,
enriched by anecdote and reminiscence, was charming. His life was extended to
the age of 92, and he had always indulged himself in a lavish hospitality. He
was looked up to by all as a type of integrity—generosity, kindness and humor;
"his man Johnson" he had taught to play on
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the pipes, and
when appealed to in the great church war, known locally as "organ or no organ,"
he had sent Johnny to the next Sunday meeting with his bagpipe and a note
recommending the wardens of the church "to try the pipe as a compromise."
At the extreme southern point was the home of
Major Wm.
Page, whose only child had married the
Hon.
Thomas Butler
King. Around this home hovers only recollections of grace,
beauty and courtesy. An indescribable air of refinement environed and encircled
it. Thomas Higginson, the author and man of letters, who visited
it, when abandoned in 1863, writes, "The loveliest spot I have seen in the South
and with a garden filled with hyacinthine odors." That garden had been
the creation of Mrs.
Ann Page
King, to whom all
plants that breathed sweetness were especially dear. Of her in the fashion of
old days had long been written in an album:
Good sense, good nature, and good breeding
Went on a pilgrimage
They visited the fair of every clime
And rested on sweet
Ann Page.
Not
great poetry, but from the heart.
The woodland paths and roads on the island had great beauty,
overhung as they were by majestic oaks and towering magnolias, which last lifted
their sweet blossoms high to the heavens. The views over the waters and the
green marshes were entrancing, especially when colored by the sumptuous sun
settings.
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The very air,
clouded by myriads of birds and slowly sailing greater birds, had a softness not
felt elsewhere, and peace, contentment, and moderate well doing with a general
competence seemed ever present.
Jekyl Island remained a government reservation or military post from
1736 to 1766. In the latter year it was granted by the Crown to
Clement Martin, and was afterward sold under a decree of court to four French
gentlemen, and finally it passed into the possession of
Capt.
Poulain du
Bignon. In his family it remained until the organization of the
Jekyl Island Club in 1886. The Club has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
in buildings and improvements. Many of its members have built winter residences
of the most costly character, and the whole island now presents a most beautiful
appearance. Shelled roads and the beautiful beach offer drives that cannot be
excelled, while everywhere bridle and bicycle paths wander amid the oaks and
sink into the dells that border the ocean. Game of every kind abounds, and under
the "strict preservation" rules of the club multiply to an extent elsewhere
unknown. A palatial club house offers accommodations to members and their
families, and in its management and cuisine it is not excelled even by the
Waldorf or Netherlands. The owners of the island are the capitalists of the
country and no money is spared toward making of it an ideal Southern home. But a
great novelist has written in "Endymion,"
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"In nature the
insect world is strongest." Here in this delta of the river of wealth we find a
Rockefeller, a
Flagler and a
Lorillard, and just as their
Island Eden is most attractive, when the jessamine scents the air, when the
crabapple and dogwood begin to illustrate the winter's woods, they are driven
from their homes, and flee before the tiny sand fly, native and sprung from
Southern soil. Neither wealth, position nor art can secure immunity. The war of
the rebellion was largely won by numbers and money, but here, like ghosts at
eventide, the reserves of the South arise and declare that in their land no
permanent home shall be made. In millions the "little people" come, and before
them the four hundred flee away.
In closing this short and geographical sketch of the country I trust
I may be pardoned a digression as to the characteristics of the people who here
made and established their homes. If great generosity of heart, great honesty of
purpose, unbounded sympathy with the oppressed and unblemished integrity in life
can outweigh the faults arising from impulsiveness and excesses, in a great
measure attributable to the habits of the day, then the men of the past ages
have little to fear in the judgment yet to be meted out.
Charles the
fifth, Emperor and absolute ruler over one-half of Europe, said to Titian the
great painter, as he seated himself for portraiture, "Paint me not as I am, but
as what I might have been." "Think not what evils I have committed,
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but (rather with
my power) what temptations I might have yielded to." So with many of
these men, brought up from childhood with the belief in their own superiority
over all of an inferior race. "Think rather of what they refrained from, than of
sins committed." "Lead me not into temptation," the child of to-day lisps at his
mother's knee. Far more did those of a past age need that supplication that
should have come from the inner heart. In time, Providence rights all wrongs,
and in my judgment the expiation has been full and complete.
In this retrospect of the past I have been more mindful of the facts
and surroundings that forced and made the history and life of a people than to
collect the dates and particular events that were comprised in that life.
I have thought to shew that the drift of political and domestic
thought was the inevitable result of the situation, comparative isolation, and
immediate material interests of those who, virtually a minority, yet composed
and governed the State. If I have failed to impress my view upon any reader I
pray his or her pardon and indulgence. If I have in any case gained the favor of
even one I shall feel rewarded in my effort.
The century is now ended. Behind me lie days of harassment and days
of struggle, days of "Reconstruction and days of Destruction," days when brave
hearts strove to gather the fragments of a lost prosperity and other hearts as
brave sank into cynicism
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or despair. One I
remember who, having spent his all, finally disappeared, leaving upon the table
in his room three packets, each containing a little gold. Upon them were
written, "This for my last week's board," "This for my funeral expenses," "This
for masses for my soul." On the last was added, "Go to wharf No. 23. On its cap
sill you will find the end of a rope. Pull on it and you will find me."
"Requiescat in pace!" Did he remember Goethe's hymn to our parent Earth?
"'Let me in.' 'Let me in,' Oh Mother."
--- PAGE
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APPENDIX I
On every plantation, both among the field- and the house-servants, would be
found one or two recognized and professional story-tellers.
Joel Chandler
Harris has only approximated to the "true-and-true"
adventures of Brer Rabbit which every child of the years gone by has heard told,
not read. Their recital demanded a subtle dramatic power, calling in certain
passages for a recitative, declaimed in cadence to a rhythmic march and the
clapping of hands. The voice was modulated to suit the situations; the general
tone, a low falsetto. I have thought that had a graphophone then been in use the
records would now be in great demand. Among the more primitive or field laborers
the basis of all the stories were the deeds or perils of the denizens of the
woods or waters, and were given in true dialect intermixed with unmeaning words
or gibberish, but which possibly were remnants of a tribal language. In tales
related by house-servants (generally nurses or housemaids), a distinct change
would be apparent; a forward evolution of construction, with something
approaching to a poetic thought; and always a moral or maxim of life was
inculcated.
--- PAGE
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I
have thought that in some I could detect an unconscious imitation of some novel
or drama from the library: reading aloud in the family circle was then much more
common than now, and no one could possibly tell whose ears might be drinking in
every word and sentence. The "dialect" was improvised and became what might be
termed a "patois."
It is very many years since I have heard one of these plantation
stories, but I add a specimen of each.
The first is that of the original African. The second, one next in
progress; and the last, from the mouth of one who had nursed three generations
in my mother's family, and whose heart was as white as my own.
HOW BUH WAS'
GOT HIS LEETLE WAIS'.
One
time Buh Was' meet
Buh 'Skeeter in de road, en 'e
say:
"Huddy,
Buh Skeeter?"
En
Buh Skeeter say: "How do you do,
Buh Was'?"
En
Buh Was' say: "How yo' Pa do,
Buh Skeeter?"
En
Buh Skeeter, 'e say: "My Pa do berry well, I tenk
you."
"En yo' Pa put-tetter1 patch, how him do?"
En
Buh Skeeter, him full ob swonger, en 'e say:
1. Potato
--- PAGE
147---
"Oh, my Pa put-tetter
patch, him berry fine! Oh, sich big put-tetter! W'y
Buh Was', de
bigges' put-tetter in my Pa put-tetter patch is ez big ez de bigges' pa'at ob my
laig!"
En
Buh Skeeter, 'e roll up 'e breeches tell 'e show 'e
leetle tie (thigh).
En w'en
Buh Was' yeddy dat de bigges' put-tetter in
Buh Skeeter Pa Put-tetter patch ent no bigger en de bigges' pa'at of
Buh Skeeter leetle bit o' laig, 'e clap 'e han' ter 'e side, en 'e
laf, en 'e laf; en 'e draw in 'e breff tell, w'en 'e stop laffin, 'e wais' all
drawn in--
En 'e nebber come out no mo'!
Now, children, you say I mus' tell you a new story. You ain' yeddy
'bout poor Simon; I ain't b'leve I tell you 'bout him befo'.
Simon use to lib on old
Marsa Shellbank place,
w'er de crik run up rite in front o' de door, an' you kin see now de old oak
snag rise up out de water. Now, Simon bin berry lub fish, an' ebery
Sund'y, w'en 'e wife say "Simon, praise-bell, dey ring," 'e answer: "I
ain' feel well," or maybe 'e say: "It e'e too hot;" an' all de time 'e hab 'e
yie cock fo' see eef de tide rite fo' fish.
Well, one Sunday mawnin'
Patty git up, cook pot o' rice, mek
coffee from some ole Missis bin gib um, an' Simon an' she eat dere wash-mout
wat come befo' dinnah. Praise bell ring: Patty say: "Come,
Simon,
you yeddy to him; come." Simon answer:
--- PAGE
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"I got misery in
my back; I ain't gwine." Patty mek answer:
"Las' Sund'y
Uncle Billy say:
'Patty, how come
Simon nebber show 'e face in de praise-house, an nebber harken to de w'ud
o' de Lord?' Simon say: 'I got misery in my back.'
Patty say, I
tell brudder Billy: 'I ain' know wat you do, but w'en I does come home I
sure fine de pot dirty, an' fish bone to clean up.' An'
Uncle Billy
say: 'You tell Simon, 'e better tek care, old debbil ketch him yet, ketch
him sure, ef 'e doan stop fish on de Sabbat.'"
Patty stop talk, an' look long on
Simon; den she rise
up and go to sing hallalulah in de praise-house.
Jist soon as 'e see
Patty gone
Simon reche for de rod,
and mek for de ribber. 'E sit on de snag I bin tell you 'bout, an' 'e fish an' e'
fish--de bell, dey ring yit--an' one time 'e say, I ain' b'leve fish gwine bite
to-day, and 'e look to'rds de church. Jist den 'e feel a nibble; fish tek de
bait; Simon ju'k; dat suttinly bin a big fish.
Simon mek play, up
ribber, down ribber. One time fish mos' clear, but
Simon land him, carry
him to de house, clean him an' cook him; an' den 'e eat dat whole fish, and
reche up for his pipe to smoke. Just as Simon rise up de fish inside
Simon begin to sing, and say:
Eat
bones and all, Simon;
Eat bones and all; you,
Simon.
Oh-de sinner, oh-ah-de sinner
Simon.
--- PAGE
149---
So
por Simon tried to eat do bones, but 'e kan't; an' den de fish inside him
begin to sing again:
Go down to de ribber,
Simon;
Go down to de ribber,
Simon.
Ah-de sinner, oh-ah-de sinner
Simon.
So he
had to go out o' de house to de ribber, an' 'e scaid till 'e knees do tremble;
an' de fish, soon as 'e foot touch de water, begin to sing again:
Go a
little deeper, Simon;
Oh-ah de sinner
Simon:
Go deeper, go deeper,
Simon.
An'
Simon scaid, scaid to death—had to go; first to 'e waist, den to 'e mout;
an' 'e den stop a while, an' de fish sing again:
Go
down to de ribber, Simon;
Go down to de ribber,
Simon;
Go deeper,
Simon—Simon,
Go a little deeper, you sinner
Simon.
An'
den poor Simon gone, gone, gone.
Now w'en
Patty come home from church, she fine de door open
an' a pile o' fish bones on de table an' de pot ware
Simon bin cookin',
an' she call Simon.
No answer; an' she call three time, an' no sound come back. An'
Patty put 'e han' to 'e head an' study, an' den 'e say to 'eself: "I bin
tell Simon ef
--- PAGE
150---
'e don't stop
fish on a Sabbat, de debbil sure gwine git him, an' my wud done come true."
An' chillum, eben now, once ebry yere, you kin see
Simon fish
from de ole snag in Shellbank crik, in de night time.
"
Mary Bell”
(AS TOLD BY NURSE "BABA")
Mary Bell was the handsomest lady in the Ogeechee country, and all
the gentlemen in Liberty and McIntosh wanted to marry her, and near every day
one of them would call; but she was proud and dearly loved fine dress and fine
things, and she would have none and told them she would marry no one who did not
come for her in a coach, and that the horses must have harness mounted in
silver.
Now, when the devil heard this he thought he would try his chance.
So he dressed himself in his finest clothes, and got into his coach drawn by his
two black horses, "Woe" and "Wodin," with their shining silver trappings, and
drove up the wide road that led from Rose-Dew to the house where
Mary
lived. And after he had met Mary he told her of his beautiful home, and
showed her Woe and Wodin as they stood at the gate, and said he had many other
fine things and lots of money. So Mary thought him a very nice man, and
she promised to marry him.
Then he invited her, with her sister
Nancy, to
--- PAGE
151---
lunch at his
house, where they could look over his beautiful furniture and surroundings and
all that belonged to him, and they went with him. But when he had shown them
into the parlor he pretended to leave them for a moment, and, locking the door,
went out on his business.
Now the devil had a nice young man, that is, he had been nice until
he fell into bad company. His name was Jack, and his business was the
care of the devil's three horses. He was very sorry when he saw so beautiful a
woman as Mary enter the devil's parlor, and he climbed up to the window
and called out and said: "You must never marry the man who brought you here, for
he is very bad, and in truth he is the devil himself."
And
Mary and
Nancy were frightened, and
Mary
said: "Oh, save me, only save me and I will marry you." And
Jack
answered: "I will try, but it must be now, while the devil is away, going to and
fro throughout the world." And he saddled Woe and Wodin for
Mary and
Nancy, and the other horse for himself, and led them under the window. Then
he got a ladder and they came to the ground, and he put
Mary on Woe,
Nancy on Wodin, and the third he mounted himself; and he told them: "We will
have to jump over the gate, for it is bolted and locked, and we will have to be
careful and not touch the bell that hangs over it, for if we do it will give the
alarm and the devil and his army of angels will surely catch us."
--- PAGE
152---
Jack jumped first, and he went clear.
Nancy followed, and she did not
touch bell or clapper. Mary came last, and, though the horse cleared the
gate the long feathers in her hat, which she would wear, flew up and struck the
bell, and it rang out loud:
Ding-dong, the ladies gone, long-time,
Ding-dong, long-time, gone.
Now,
when the devil heard that, he flew to his stable to get his horses to follow
them, and when he saw all three were out he was so mad he did not know what to
do, but he started after them on foot, and knowing, if the horses could but hear
his voice, they would stop and refuse to go further, he began to sing:
--- PAGE
153---
Whoa, Wodin, whoa--e-e Woe,
Whoa--e-e Woe, who--e-e," &c
And
Jack saw the horses turning their ears backward and listening and he said to
Mary: "Look in your horse's left ear and you will find a black bean;
throw it behind us, over your left shoulder." And
Mary did as he told
her, and straightway there grew a great wood behind them so thick and tangled
that nothing, not even a bad spirit, could pass through it. And when the devil
got there he was mad, for he could not get through but had to go back for the
angels who served him to cut a pathway. It was soon done, and he followed the
trail still singing:
Whoa--e-e, Wodin, whoa;
Woe, whoa--e-e, Wodin," &c.
And
the horses heard him and they trembled and stopped, and nothing that
Jack
or Mary did could make them take one step forward, while behind them they
could see the devil coming, not fast, but as quick as his cloven hoof would let
him.
Then
Jack said: "Mary, look in the pocket on the side
of your saddle and you will find an egg; throw it over your left shoulder and
behind us." And Mary did so, and straightway there ran a great river
between them and the figure that followed. The horses stood still, looking back
at their master, while Mary,
Jack and
Nancy made their way
on foot homeward; and the devil, first calling to the horses by name, sat down
and waited until they swam the river and stood by his side.
Before night they were safe at home, but
Jack would not go
with them; he had lived so long, he said, sinning and serving the great tempter
to sin, that he was unfit to be with them, smirched and besoiled as he was by
his remembrances. So he hid himself in the woods, that he might be by himself
and think how best he might escape.
As for the devil, whom they had left on the river bank, when he saw
how fast the water ran he knew he could never get across at that place, but
swore he would follow the stream to where the tide from the ocean met its
current, so as to make still water, and,
--- PAGE
154---
having crossed,
he would yet force Mary to keep the promise she had made. Thro wood, thro
waste, his way he took, guided only by the water as it ran to the sea. Through
swamps of bay and magnolia, where white-cupped flowers breathed heavy sweetness,
by waters whose green margins were starred with lily and spiderwort, under
dark-shadowing oaks and cypress, he journeyed. The birds hushed their song at
sight of the figure that cast no shadow; the screech owl alone looked down on
him, with the eyes that foretold sickness and trouble; and when he came to the
ferry at Rose-Dew, where ocean and river met, the water was not clear and
running, but dark and turbid as his own spirit.
Day was breaking as he crossed the water—still, only until the flood
pressed in from the sea. No morning song of awakening nature hummed in the air;
the grass grew scorched and cracked under his footsteps; all living things fled
at his approach, for, changed though he be in shape, by their innocence they
knew him; to only those born of Adam and
Eve, whom he had blinded
in times before, did he seem but a gentleman who, in the fair morning light, was
seeking the house that could be seen on the hill in the distance—the house where
watched the woman who had craved fine things and who in her desire for them had
promised him love and wifehood.
With no call to servant or knock at door the evil one entered, as of
a right. In the hallway stood Mary
Bell, with a clasped book in
her hand.
--- PAGE
155---
"And
why did you so rudely leave my house, and you, my promised wife, madame, I ask?"
"A little of my own will, and still more of Heaven's promptings,
caused me to leave your house, sir," answered
Mary Bell; and then,
lifting and opening the Bible, she cried: "Away from me, Satan; in God I trust."
And the devil trembled and his frame shook, and there came a whirlwind which
blew him out of the window, as Mary dropped on her knees; and the thunder
rolled by, and there was silence.
And as the devil passed through the woods he spied
Jack
sitting by a tree, and he rushed at him and caught him, and said: "You I will
keep and torment." Now Jack had been all night thinking about
Mary,
for he now knew that he loved her and that a soul had been born in him, and he
prayed God to give him a new life; and though he was mightily frightened, he
remembered what his mother had read to him when a child. So he answered: "I have
sinned much, but God's mercy is greater." And at the name of God the devil
rushed into the woods and vanished.
And a little dog that belonged to
Nancy Bell, that had
found Jack when he was in hiding, came and licked his hand; and
Jack
told the dog to go and find Mary
Bell, and the dog went home and
jumped into Mary's lap and kissed her on the cheek, and took her by the
skirt and led her to where Jack sat. And when they saw each other they
ran, and put their arms around each other's necks, and
--- PAGE
156---
on the following
day they were married. And afterward they lived very happily.
Now, the devil, when he had to go home, was very mad, so mad that he
tormented everything in his sight, and he took and beat his old wife, and he
beat her again and again until the very sun was sorry for her and rained down in
tears, so that even now, whenever it rains when the sun is shining we say, "The
old devil is beating his wife."
The
following is a letter received in 1865 from "Prince," who, with his wife
Judy, had been left at Resaca, Georgia, at the approach of General
Sherman, and who there remained a caretaker until 1866:
Dear Mausser:
I yeddy say me kin write one letter to my Mausser. Dem people
bout yah tink say Mausser, en de res ob de quality folks nebber bin gwine come
back no mo'. So Mis' Cobb him tec one ax en him breck open dat closet do'
wha got one lock on em, way Misses keep him jahs en him bottle; en Mis'
Cobb
him teaf all Missis preza'aba en ting.
Wen me see ebbry ting bin gwine, me tec de clabber-seen ile, en
me put em up tell me want bittle fer eat, den me sell em fer some flour in one
bag. Me no tink me oughter sell Mausser ile.
Me en
Tyra en
Judy go fer git Mausser hog frum
Mr.
Jones. Him ent bin dey, but him wife say him buy em. Wen we go to
Mr.
Jones him no bin hab time to yeddy wha him wife bin say, else
him would hab
--- PAGE
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lie too. Wen we show em de order say 'e de use de hob, dem bin mighty mad, en
dem cuss we. Mr.
Jones flo' being cobber wid Mausser corn wussa
nurrar foot.
Yeddy me wen I tell you Mausser,
Judy yent wut shucks;
she wunt wuck; it one shame fer one big strong 'oman fer mec Mausser feed em en
him no wuck. Me tell em ef 'e no wuck e must n't eat Mausser corn, en 'e do
berry well now.
Mausser niggar would ha bin hab nuff corn to las me tree year,
only cause de wah come tru yah, en dem soldier dem teaf all me corn en we
cotton. Mausser, me berry sorry me tec dat ile.
To morrow de Chris'mas. We wish wonnah bin yah, fah gie me
someting good. Us wanter see wonnah, but we cant tinker ridin' on dem ting who
go wussa nurra bud de fly. [A train?]
Yo humble sa'vant,
Prince.
--- PAGE
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APPENDIX II
On
page 14 I have used the words "spectre of a coming débâcle." I have meant to
allude to a mental fright, or vision of a possible future, which at rare
intervals seized a community, stifling for a time even in men of the highest
character and principle any regard for justice or the primal equities of life—at
such moments every ear was closed to reason, and courtesy was transformed into
intolerance and justice to indifference.
I submit the following letters. The first is from the U. S.
Collector of the Port of Brunswick and Darien in answer to inquiry as to "truth
of reports," made by the U. S. District Attorney.
The second is in answer to report to the Department made by the
District Attorney, and is from the Secretary of State, Hon.
Lewis Cass.
The third is from
Lord Lyons to the Secretary of State
at Washington. I regret I have misplaced the instructions to the District
Attorney for Attorney General
Black, which were in effect that it
was Georgia, not the U. S., that was bound to take action. The injustice to an
innocent man was not even protested against by men who in all other respects
were models of integrity and culture. Did
--- PAGE
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they not lay
themselves open to St. Paul's reproach of himself when he wrote concerning the
stoning of Stephen, "And I also was standing by, and consenting?"
(Written in response to an inquiry from
Hamilton Couper,
U. S. Atty., regarding the newspaper account of sale).
Darien, 1st., March 1860.
Dear Sir:
Your letter came to hand this morning and not being in the
county at the time of sale spoken of, have endeavored to glean such information
as to enable me to reply to your inquiry. The negro was sold by an order from
the Mayor's Court (James
M.
Harris at the time Mayor) to a
Mr.
Striplan of Tatnall County, for $550.00, for a term of 65
years, $200.00 of this amt. was paid into the City Treasury, $250.00 to Capt. ,
and the balance in fees etc. Mr.
Striplan fearing (as I learn)
some trouble following his purchase, if illegal, to his loss sent the negro West
and disposed of him for $1200. Mr.
Thomas W.
Baker
interposed several objections to this sale as counsel for the negro, but was
over-ruled and the sale ordered to go on. He can give you a more full and
satisfactory explanation of the whole proceeding.
Very truly yours,
Woodford Mabry.
U.
S. Collector Port of Brunswick & Darien. Hamilton
Couper, Esq.
Savannah.
--- PAGE
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Department of State,
Washington, 28th March, 1860.
Hamilton Couper, Esq.,
U. S. District Attorney,
Savannah, Georgia.
Sir:
I have received your letter of the 23rd. instant, and in answer
have to inform you that the subject you refer to, in its present shape, is not
one with which this Department can interfere. No representation has been
received by the authority of the British Government, and the matter seems to be
one over which the laws of Georgia have jurisdiction. With respect to the
propriety of your acting in your private capacity as assistant counsel, I
consider it a question entirely for your own decision, and in which this
Government has no right to interfere.
I
am, Sir, Respectfully,
Your obedient servant,
L.W. Cass.
Washington,
March 30th., 1860.
Sir:
Mr.
Molyneux, Her Majesty's Consul at Savannah,
has brought to my notice a very serious outrage of which a colored British
subject, named William
Brodie, a native of the Bahama Islands, has
been the victim. My attention has also been called to the matter by the Governor
of the Bahamas.
It appears that on the 27th of July, 1858, (or about that date)
Brodie, who was at the time a seaman belonging to the American barque "Overman"
of New
--- PAGE
161---
York, James
Stirling, Master, was arraigned in the Mayor's Court
at Darien in Georgia, on a charge of attempting to entice a slave to run away;
that he was convicted (in opposition, it is stated, to the evidence) and that he
was sentenced to pay a fine of five hundred dollars or be sold into slavery.
Being of course unable to pay the fine, he was, it seems, put up for sale and
purchased by a man named Striplan, of Tatnall County, Georgia.
This flagitious proceeding came to the knowledge of
Mr.
Consul Molyneux only at the beginning of the present month. He
immediately took the advice of counsel, and was informed that the Mayor's Court
at Darien had no jurisdiction in the case; that the sentence was one which
no
court in Georgia had authority to pronounce; and that the parties implicated
were amenable to the State Courts of Georgia, but not to the Federal Courts.
Accordingly Mr.
Molyneux gave instructions to institute forthwith
a criminal prosecution in the State Courts, with a view to bringing the
perpetrators of the outrage to justice.
But in the more important and more difficult task of tracing
Brodie and restoring him to freedom,
Mr.
Molyneux is anxious
to obtain the assistance of the Federal authorities; and it is with the object
of soliciting that assistance that I now do myself the honor to address you.
It appears that
Brodie was removed by
Striplan
from Darien, McIntosh County, Georgia, to Tatnall County, in the same State, and
thence sent to the West and sold. Mr.
Molyneux apprehends that
under these circumstances it will be almost impossible to find him without the
aid of Striplan. He suggests that the most effectual
--- PAGE
162---
means
of inducing Striplan to co-operate in the search would be to give him
notice of a prosecution on the part of the Federal Authorities; and he begs me
to request that instructions to that effect may be sent to the United States
District Attorney.
I lay this distressing case before you, Sir, in full confidence
that you will urge the competent authorities to give effectually, and without
delay, all the aid which it is in the power of the Federal Government to afford,
toward redressing the grievous wrong of which Brodie has been the victim,
and especially toward discovering the unfortunate man and restoring him to
freedom.
I have the honor to be with the highest consideration, Sir, your
most obedient servant,
(Signed) Lyons.
Minister for Great Britain.
The Honorable Lewis
Cass.
Department of State.
Washington, 31st. March 1860.
Hamilton Couper, Esq.,
U. S. District Attorney,
Savannah, Georgia.
Sir:
Since my letter to you of the 23rd. instant, I have received
from Lord Lyons, the British Minister here, a communication
respecting the case of William
Brodie, a copy of which I enclose.
It is impossible for this Department, for the want of sufficient
information, to give any specific instructions as to the course which it is
proper to take, and I will thank you for any suggestions which may occur to you
on the subject. From present appearances, a
--- PAGE
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great wrong has been done by the sale of
Brodie and his deportation to an
unknown place. The authors of the wrong, as I understand from your last letter,
are likely to be dealt with under the laws of Georgia as they deserve, but in
the mean time the unfortunate victim ought to be restored to his rights. I hope
you may be able to adopt or suggest some measures which will lead to his
discovery and to such redress as he may be entitled to under the laws.
I am, Sir, respectfully,
Your obedient servant,
L. W. Cass.
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