Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition) PDF

Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcent...

Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.a Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  Georgia Odyssey Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  This page intentionally left blank Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  Georgia Odyssey second edition James C. Cobb Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. The University of Georgia Press Athens & London Published in association with the Georgia Humanities Council Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  © 1997, 2008 by The University of Georgia Press Athens, Georgia 30602 www.ugapress.org Published in association with The Georgia Humanities Council Atlanta, Georgia 30303 www.georgiahumanities.org All rights reserved Designed by Walton Harris Set in 10.5 / 14 Garamond Premier Pro Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 09 08 p 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Cobb, James C. ( James Charles), 1947– Georgia odyssey / James C. Cobb. — 2nd ed. p. cm. “Published in association with the Georgia Humanities Council.” Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8203-3050-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8203-3050-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Georgia—History. I. Title. f286.c7 2008 975.8—dc22 2008014527 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  For Thomas G. Dyer Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  This page intentionally left blank Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  Preface cousin luther cobb was, by all accounts, a perpetually irascible and disgruntled sort, known to complain in wet weather that the rab- bits were “miring up in the woods” and in dry weather that his children would “never see rain again.” As family legend has it, one day during an especially long dry spell, Cousin Luther was bemoaning the sad state of his cotton crop to his brother James. Taking his brother into the field, Luther declared, “Jimmy, I believe I’ve got the sorriest cotton in Hart County!” Wary of his brother’s mercurial temperament, James made no comment. Luther persisted, however, demanding that James admit that Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. his cotton was the worst he’d ever seen. Seeing that Luther would not relent, James finally responded, “Well, Luther, I’ll have to agree with you. It’s pretty sorry alright.” “By God,” Luther spat back, “It’s better than any you got!” I love this story not only because it reminds me of the kind of people I come from but also because it illustrates the way a lot of Georgians, including me, have felt about our state over the years. We may voice any number of complaints about it, but others who do the same had best tread lightly in our presence, especially if their criticisms are based on fleeting, impressionistic glimpses from afar rather than up-close and personal experience. Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  My attitude toward Georgia does not amount to the love-hate rela- tionship traditionally associated with the great southern writers upon whose company I can surely make no claim. It does, however, approxi- mate the feelings expressed by perhaps the greatest of those writers, William Faulkner, who was able to love his backward and beleaguered state of Mississippi because he had come to understand that, in the case of one’s homeland, “you don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues but despite the faults.” Such love is unequivocal, but it is not uncritical; it manifests itself just as authentically in addressing the faults as in celebrating the virtues. A dozen years ago, I was given a chance to sort out my feelings for Georgia in the opening essay of the 1996 New Georgia Guide, an am- bitious, comprehensive attempt to broaden, deepen, and most of all freshen the perception of Georgia offered in the old 1940 wpa (Works Progress Administration) guide to the state. The response to the essay was quite positive, leading Karen Orchard and the late Malcolm Call to propose that the University of Georgia Press publish the piece, ex- panded to cover the Olympic experience, as a book. The result was the first edition of Georgia Odyssey, which appeared in 1997. Ten years later, with the first edition in dwindling supply, Nicole Mitchell, Nancy Grayson, and Derek Krissoff of the University of Georgia Press asked me to present an updated version of my brief take Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. on Georgia’s history and culture. What follows is my effort to do that in a way that I hope does justice to the facts without totally concealing my sometimes frustrated and disapproving but always deep and genuine affection for my home state. I am indebted to all the aforementioned persons for affording me this opportunity. I also want to express my thanks to John Inscoe for sharing his vast bibliographic knowledge, to Jason Manthorne for his swift and reliable research assistance, and to my wonderful wife, Lyra Cobb, for her clear and critical editorial eye. The prime mover behind the New Georgia Guide project that begat Georgia Odyssey was Dr. Thomas G. Dyer, now University Professor Emeritus and Vice viii Preface Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  President for Instruction Emeritus at the University of Georgia. In the course of a truly distinguished career, Tom has led, supported, sustained, and otherwise made possible more good things for the University of Georgia and the people of the state in general than anybody I know. In addition to his innumerable administrative contributions, he is also a scholar of great renown, whose writings include an acclaimed history of the University of Georgia and Secret Yankees: The Union Circle in Confederate Atlanta, a pathbreaking study of a little-known or acknowl- edged Unionist community in Civil War Atlanta. On a personal note, I don’t know if there are truly no friends like old friends, but I do know that there are few friends of any vintage like Tom Dyer. We met as graduate students at the University of Georgia in 1972, and over the intervening years he has offered unfailingly wise counsel and has done more thoughtful, helpful, and courageous things on my behalf than I could ever recount, and, in fact, has probably done even more of these than I know. His intelligence, integrity, and rich sense of humor are legendary not only around Athens but across the state. Although he was born in Missouri (and therefore persists in thinking he knows more about farming than I do), Tom Dyer is, in the best sense of the term, one of the finest Georgians I have been blessed to know. It seems more than fitting, therefore, that this book be dedicated to him. Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Preface ix Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  This page intentionally left blank Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  Georgia Odyssey Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  This page intentionally left blank Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  introduction On his frequent visits to his Little White House at Warm Springs, President Franklin D. Roosevelt repeatedly expressed his deep affection for Georgia and its people, a sentiment that the overwhelming majority of the citizens of his “adopted” state seemed to reciprocate. Yet when Roosevelt attacked incumbent U.S. senator Walter F. George as an op- ponent of the New Deal and called on Georgia voters to oust George in 1938, he was soundly rebuffed. Aware of fdr’s personal popularity within the state, a visiting journalist asked a grizzled old South Georgia tobacco farmer to explain this outcome. Without hesitation, the old man replied defiantly, “We Georgians are Georgian as hell!” Whatever Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. else it encompassed, his sense of what it meant to be Georgian sug- gested an innate distrust of all outsiders and a near-visceral hostility to any changes they might propose, feelings that remained very much alive (and inclined to kicking) some three generations after the end of Reconstruction. Seventy years after the old fellow’s pronouncement, it would be fool- hardy indeed for a person to suggest that he or she knows what it means to be Georgian, much less “Georgian as hell!” Likewise, not many of to- day’s Georgians are likely to recognize themselves in the first few pages of the 1940 Works Progress Administration’s Georgia: A Guide to Its Towns and Countryside: “The average Georgian votes the Democratic Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  ticket, attends the Baptist or Methodist church, goes home to midday dinner, relies greatly on high cotton prices and is so good a family man that he flings wide his doors to even the most distant of his wife’s cous- ins’ cousins.... However cool he may be toward the cause of Negro education, the Georgian is usually kind to his own servants and not a little apprehensive of hurting their feelings” (italics mine). Save perhaps for their religious preferences, Georgians have changed a great deal. Typically, a lot more of them than not now vote Republican about as faithfully as they attend church. Not many of them go home to a midday meal, but if they do, they are likely to call it lunch rather than dinner. Likewise, relatively few Georgians exhibit much curiosity at all about cotton prices anymore. Finally, and most important, we now rec- ognize not only that there are both male and female Georgians but that Georgians come in more than one color as well. In the wake of more than half a century of dramatic changes, even the most reckless essayist would know better than to refer to the “average” Georgian, let alone discuss his or her lifestyle or values. Yet whether we are lifelong residents, homesick expatriates, or fast-assimilating new- comers, a great many of us persist in identifying ourselves as Georgians, believing that we know what this means to us even if that meaning may not be the same for everybody else. Our differences notwithstanding, however, what all self-designated Georgians share either by birthright Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. or by adoption is a common past. Not all of that past is pretty or pleas- ant to recall (whose is?), but any attempt to understand the character and personality of contemporary Georgia must take into account its sometimes disturbing, sometimes appealing, but always rich and event- ful historical odyssey. georgia as a colony As we shall soon see, having absorbed their fair share of critical scrutiny, plus a good bit of plain old abuse over the years, Georgians are a mite sensitive about the way they and their state are perceived. As a result, we 2 georgia odyssey Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  may as well deal with it right now, at the beginning. Contrary to what you may have heard, read, or been taught, Georgia was not settled by convicts of any sort. Even otherwise amiable Georgians are downright touchy on this point. (As a native Georgian teaching U.S. history to northern college freshmen, I used to inform my students that when I heard anyone repeat the outrageous falsehood that Georgians are de- scended from thieves and murderers, it made me so mad that I wanted to shoot him or at least take his wallet.) Those familiar with Georgia’s history as a European outpost know that it actually began not with English convicts but with Spanish explorers and missionaries whose first contact with the area came nearly two centuries before Georgia was chartered as a British colony. Hernando de Soto led the first European expedition into the state’s in- terior in 1540, but despite Spain’s subsequent efforts to establish a foot- hold in what would later be coastal and southeastern Georgia, English incursions began shortly after the founding of Jamestown in 1607 and became more frequent and intense after the nearby Carolina colony was established in 1670. Still, although Georgia received its charter in 1732, it was not until a decade later that forces under Georgia’s founder, James Edward Oglethorpe, sealed Georgia’s future as part of the British Empire by repulsing the Spanish at the Battle of Bloody Marsh on St. Simons Island. Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Along with the twenty other trustees to whom Georgia’s royal char- ter was granted, Oglethorpe had hoped, initially at least, to promote pe- nal reform and the relocation of the homeless and downtrodden to an idyllic New World wilderness offering “fertile lands sufficient to subsist all the useless poor in England.” Like most proponents of noble experi- ments, Oglethorpe was given to exaggeration. He described Georgia as “always serene, pleasant, and temperate, never subject to excessive heat or cold, nor to sudden changes; the winter is regular and short, and the summer cool’d with refreshing breezes.” Georgia was, in short, “a lush, Edenic paradise, capable of producing almost every thing in wonderful quantities.” Georgia as a Colony 3 Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  Charged with overseeing the settlement of Georgia and ensuring its growth, the trustees reasoned that because it occupied roughly the same latitude as China, Persia, and the Madeira Islands, the new colony could supply the silks and wines that England was currently forced to purchase from producers outside the British Empire. Georgia, then, seemed to offer that most rare and wonderful of coincidences, an opportunity to do what was morally good, serve the national interest, and make a buck in the bargain. Moreover, populated by sturdy and sober yeomen and tradesmen — lawyers were banned as were slavery, Catholicism, and hard liquor — Georgia would provide an excellent defensive perimeter for the prosperous colony of South Carolina, which was attracting al- together too much attention from the Spanish in Florida. It was small wonder that many investors and proponents found the Georgia experiment irresistible; nor was it surprising that this seemingly ideal combination of philanthropy, capitalism, and national interest went awry. There was no shortage of people wanting to go to Georgia, and because those chosen as the colony’s initial settlers would receive a host of benefits, including free passage, fifty acres of land, and supplies and foodstuffs for a year, they were screened carefully — so carefully, in fact, that the first Georgians were perhaps the most selectively chosen group of colonists to come to British North America. They came from the ranks of small businessmen, tradesmen, and unemployed laborers, Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. representing what historian Phinizy Spalding described as a “London in microcosm” with the “large debtor element” notably underrepresented and nearly absent altogether. Oglethorpe and the trustees did bend co- lonial policy a bit by welcoming Jews and other persecuted religious minorities like the Lutheran Salzburgers, who established a settlement at Ebenezer in what later became Effingham County. The colony’s economic future hardly went as planned either. The mulberry trees that grew wild throughout Georgia proved unsuitable for silk production, but even when colonists secured the proper vari- ety of trees, silkworms found the colony’s cold snaps a bit too nippy for their tastes. Meanwhile, those who have sampled the fruits of such 4 georgia odyssey Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  modern vineyards as are compatible with the local climate and soils will have little difficulty understanding why Georgia never became the colo- nial equivalent of the Napa Valley. Colonial Georgia suffered an unfavorable balance of trade because its production of goods for export (hampered to some extent by the trustees’ regulations) was too feeble to finance the importation of goods from abroad. Restrictions on rum and landholding were eventually re- laxed, but the young colony languished, remaining the smallest and poorest British royal possession in North America. In later generations, Georgians would balk at admitting that their state had begun as a buf- fer for South Carolina. Likewise, they would not rush to concede that Georgia ultimately survived by becoming more like South Carolina. Yet early on, discontented Georgians began to cast envious eyes on the wealth and lifestyles of the Carolina rice planters whose crops provided a major export commodity that supported a much livelier commerce than Georgia enjoyed. Georgia’s trustees had warned steadfastly against slavery and single- crop plantation farming, but their moralistic arguments were no match for the avarice and ambition of their critics — especially the prominent members of Savannah’s business community, not to speak of George Whitefield, the colony’s leading minister of the gospel. The arguments of the proslavery faction were ably summarized by Thomas Stephens, Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. whose father was actually secretary to the trustees and their chief agent in Georgia: And indeed the extraordinary Heats here, the extraordinary Expences in maintaining, hiring and procuring White Servants, the extraordi- nary Difficulty and Danger there is in clearing the Lands, attending and Manufacturing the Crops, working in the Fields in Summer, and the poor Returns of Indian Corn, Pease and Potatoes, which are as yet the only chief Produces of the Land there, make it indisput- ably impossible for White Men alone to carry on Planting to any good Purpose.... The poor People of Georgia, may as well think of Georgia as a Colony 5 Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  becoming Negroes themselves (from whose Condition at present they seem not to be far removed) as of hoping to be ever able to live without them; and they ought best to know, and most to be believed, who have made the Experiment. Ignoring protests that “those folk who wanted to bring in Negroes... would put an end to Men’s Work,” the proslavery advocates pushed their case until they got their way in 1750. Two years later, when Georgia became a royal colony after the trustees returned their charter to the Crown, the ill-fated efforts to maintain it as a morally pristine back- woods utopia came to an end. By 1760 more than one-third of Georgia’s population were slaves, and by the eve of the American Revolution, the figure was nearly one- half. James Wright, who became the royal governor in 1760, had held a variety of positions in the South Carolina bureaucracy, and hence he led the way in the Carolina-ization of Georgia. Governor Wright played a key role in Georgia’s physical growth as well, negotiating treaties with nearby Indians that increased the colony’s land area approximately fivefold. Meanwhile, Georgia’s population increased almost tenfold in the 1750s and 1760s, and expanded production of rice (amounting to some twenty thousand barrels on the eve of the Revolution) and indigo spurred the colony’s economic upturn. Though South Carolina had a Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. head start, by 1770 Georgia was beginning to contribute its share to the growing value of American colonial exports and was perhaps on its way to becoming another jewel in the crown of British mercantilism. Although the trustees had been specifically forbidden to own land, hold office, or profit from the colony in any way, their successors in the royal government chafed under no such restraints. Indeed, Governor Wright and his cohorts were soon among the colony’s most affluent landowners and slaveholders. By 1773, sixty people owned at least twenty-five hundred acres each, and together they held more than 50 percent of the colony’s slaves. Colonial policies encouraging land specu- lation facilitated this consolidation of wealth, while ambitious yeomen 6 georgia odyssey Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  faced major financial obstacles in becoming rice or indigo planters. As time passed, the small farmers of Georgia saw themselves steadily losing ground relative to the affluent planter minority, and they blamed their difficulties on the royal government that seemed so acutely attuned to planter interests. Colonial officials responded with open contempt; Colonial Council president James Habersham described their critics to Governor Wright as the people who were “really what you and I under- stand as Crackers.” As this reference suggests, Georgians can assert a long-standing claim on, as one writer described it, “one of the oldest pejoratives in America.” In recent years, the term Cracker has enjoyed widespread usage as a de- rogatory reference to whites — usually poor whites — employed pri- marily by blacks. Historically, however, Crackers suffered the abuse and slights of a number of socially superior whites, both northern and south- ern in origin. Ethnically, the original, prototypical Crackers were prob- ably of Scotch-Irish descent. Dr. Samuel Johnson had defined a Cracker in 1755 as a “noisy, boasting fellow.” Backcountry Crackers enjoyed a re- ciprocally disdainful relationship with their Anglican, low-country de- tractors. In 1775 Rev. Charles Woodmason, an English-born Anglican missionary, quickly became disgusted with the uncouth Crackers who disrupted his sermons and seemed inclined to “bluster and make a Noise about a Turd.” Crackers, Woodmason believed, behaved so be- Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. lieving “they have a Right because they are Americans — born to do as they please... to any Body.” As time passed, the stereotype of Cracker as backwoods boaster was augmented by the practice of “cracking” corn to produce the meal for corn bread, which was the staple of the Cracker diet. A somewhat less opprobrious derivation came from “whip- crackers,” herdsmen who used long whips tapered to a cracker to drive their cattle in the unfenced forests and free ranges of antebellum Georgia and Florida. Cracker herdsmen were often people of consider- ably better economic circumstances than appearances might have sug- gested, but the term remained a derisive one, especially among blacks, who often ridiculed the “white trash” who occupied the scrub lands Georgia as a Colony 7 Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  around the plantations and who, after emancipation, proved to be their major antagonists. The Cracker/planter schism grew more pronounced as Georgia drifted into the American Revolution. Drifted is an appropriate term because Georgia played a relatively minor role in the conflict. Georgia was the only colony to comply with the Stamp Act, and it sent no of- ficial delegation to the First Continental Congress. Georgia’s emergent political leaders reached no firm consensus on the question of inde- pendence, and within the colony, matters of faction and in-group/out- group squabbling remained paramount. Defenders of the Crown faced opposition from a coalition largely drawn from the Savannah area’s “Christ Church” faction consisting of socially elite but out-of-power planters and merchants and the “country” faction consisting of non- Anglican upcountry planters and farmers and artisans from the towns. This coalition was loose at best, as exemplified by the fatal shooting in a duel of Button Gwinnett, a volatile leader of the country faction, at the hands of Lachlan McIntosh, a member of the more conservative Christ Church faction. Naturally, when the British showed up and occupied Savannah in 1778, matters became even messier. War may be a misleading term for the American Revolution as it played out in Georgia, for it implies a degree of organization and structure seldom observed in the thirteenth colony during the conflict. Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. While it may not have been war, it was certainly bloody. With Tories in control of Savannah and the low-country plantation areas, fight- ing raged in the backwoods, where guerrilla activity amounted less to pitched battles and sieges than to skirmishes, ambushes, lynchings, and cold-blooded murder. From this context emerged one of Georgia’s most heroic and my- thologized historical figures, Nancy Morgan Hart, a backcountry pa- triot of the first order, who at the time of the Revolution lived in the Broad River wilderness of present-day Elbert County with her husband, Benjamin Hart. Legend and lore have it that Nancy was anything but 8 georgia odyssey Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  the stereotypical southern belle. In 1825 a Milledgeville newspaper offered this description: In altitude, Mrs. Hart was almost Patagonian, remarkably well-limbed and muscular, and marked by nature with prominent features. She possessed none of those graces of motion which a poetical eye might see in the heave of the ocean wave or in the change of the summer cloud; nor did her cheeks — I will not speak of her nose — exhibit the rosy tints which dwell on the brow of the evening or play on the gilded bow. No one claims for her throat that it was lined with fiddle strings. That dreadful scourge of beauty, the small-pox had set its seal upon her face. She was called a hard swearer, was cross-eyed and coarse-grained, but was nevertheless a sharp-shooter. Legend has it that local Indians stood so in awe of Nancy that they named a stream near her cabin “War Woman Creek.” In Nancy’s case, the truth may indeed be stranger than fiction and thus all the harder to verify, but her most documentable exploit went something like this: Disdaining flight in the face of the British advance into the hinter- lands from Augusta and Savannah, Nancy had made her cabin a refuge for patriots who sought to harass the local Tory populations. When six Tories descended upon her cabin and accosted her about this, she feigned submission and appeared to comply with their demands to pre- Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. pare a meal for them. As she did so, she dispatched her daughter Sukey to the spring, ostensibly for water but actually to blow the conch shell kept there to summon help when it was needed. Meanwhile, as the smell of turkey, venison, and hoecake filled the cabin, the Tories broke out a jug of whiskey and began to pass it around, even asking an all-too-amenable Nancy to enjoy a swig or two. As the mood grew mellower, the men failed to notice that Nancy was pushing their muskets out through cracks in her cabin wall. When they finally realized what she was doing, she immediately shouldered a musket and demanded that they “surrender their damned Tory carcasses to a Whig Georgia as a Colony 9 Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  woman.” Nancy’s crossed eyes presented her Tory captors-turned- captives with a dilemma. It was difficult to tell where her gaze actually fell, as one of them learned when he sought to make a furtive move for his musket and paid for his mistake with his life. A quick-thinking Sukey promptly passed her mama another musket, and after a second Tory fell, the remainder thought better of such foolhardiness. Eventually Benjamin Hart arrived and quite possibly earned his lasting reputation as a wimp by suggesting that the Tories be shot. The fiery Nancy ob- jected vociferously, insisting on hanging the men on the spot. Though most of Nancy’s exploits are totally unsubstantiated, on December 12, 1912, a gang of workers grading a railroad discovered six skeletons in shallow graves about a half mile from the apparent site of Nancy’s cabin. This discovery may or may not have substantiated Nancy Hart’s most famous escapade, but in this case, as in not a few others where Georgians are concerned, image and symbolism count far more than reality. Nancy Hart was a fitting symbol of the white population of upcountry Georgia in the Revolutionary era. Crude, illiterate, no strangers to hardship or conflict, they were survivors, and the longer they survived, the more social and political momentum they gained. opportunity and slavery in Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. antebellum georgia Because royal forces remained in control of the more established popu- lation centers for much of the Revolutionary conflict, the backcountry naturally gained independence and influence during this period. With political power redistributed, men like Elijah Clark, the hero of many a backcountry skirmish, rose to prominence. Although the impact of the confiscation of Tory property is easily exaggerated, it helped to reshuffle Georgia’s economic hierarchy, as did the disruption of agriculture and commerce brought on by nearly seven years of armed conflict. British bounties on the production of indigo were gone forever, and rice pro- duction remained below prewar levels for nearly twenty years. 10 georgia odyssey Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  As the once-mighty fell, the once-lowly rose. Public land policy was a boon to the ambitions of an upwardly mobile yeomanry. Fees were minimal, and heads of household could claim as much as two hundred acres of land for themselves with additional allowances for their depen- dents and for up to ten slaves. A desperate Revolutionary government had offered generous land bounties to any white man who had fought for the patriot cause in Georgia, including not only non-Georgians but even British deserters. As a result, few white males failed to qualify for free land. So-called treaties with various Indian tribes made more land available and helped to unleash a veritable orgy of speculation and corruption culminating in the 1795 Yazoo Land Fraud, in which four land compa- nies bribed legislators to approve their acquisition of 35 million acres (nearly 60 percent of the land area that now constitutes Alabama and Mississippi) at the cost of only five hundred thousand dollars. In the wake of this scandal, the legislature quickly shifted to a lottery system that made land available at about seven cents per acre. Under this new plan, more than one hundred thousand individuals and families laid claim to approximately three-fourths of Georgia’s land. After the Yazoo fraud, Governor James Jackson opened the nego- tiations that led in 1802 to the ceding of the western lands beyond the Chattahoochee to the federal government. This action allowed Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Alabama and Mississippi to escape the fate of being part of Georgia, and in the bargain, Georgia acquired two neighbors for whom its residents would in years to come thank God again and again. As part of the ces- sion agreement, Georgia’s leaders secured a promise that all remaining Indian land claims in Georgia would be erased as soon as was feasible. Andrew Jackson’s victory over the Creeks in the War of 1812 helped to facilitate this process, and under pressure from land-hungry Georgians, the state’s officials mounted and maintained a relentless campaign of harassment and legal and political coercion until 1838 when the last siz- able contingent of Cherokees, Georgia’s only remaining native people, was marched along the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. Opportunity and Slavery 11 Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  The removal of the Cherokees was one of the most shameful chap- ters in the state’s history, one that revealed the rapacity and brutality that lay behind the emerging economic and social order in antebellum Georgia. John G. Burnett, a soldier who served as an interpreter, was a sad witness to what he called “the execution of the most brutal order in the History of American Warfare.” Burnett remembered seeing help- less Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes and driven at bayonet point into the stockades. “And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning, I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward the West.... Many of these helpless people did not have blankets, and many of them had been driven from home barefooted.... The sufferings of the Cherokees were awful. The trail of the exiles was a trail of death.” In the half century following the Revolution, Georgia emerged as a social, economic, and political paradox as its leaders gave both rhe- torical and legal sanction to the promotion and extension of liberty, democracy, and opportunity, even as they increasingly acknowledged the state’s growing dependence on slavery. By 1789 all taxpayers (includ- ing women in theory though not in practice) were entitled to vote. The state had a popularly elected two-house legislature, and opinion leaned ever more heavily toward popular election of all public officials. The new constitution of 1798, however, acknowledged federal precedent Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. by calculating a county’s representation in the legislature according to a formula whereby five slaves were deemed the equivalent of three white constituents. This move reflected not only the resurgence of the old plantation counties, but the spread of slavery into the upcountry as well. The pivotal event in this trend was, of course, the appearance of a viable cotton gin, a machine, developed by Yankee tutor Eli Whitney on a plantation near Washington, Georgia, that separated cotton fiber from the seeds and, thereby, made it feasible to grow hardier varieties of the plant in hitherto unsuitable upland areas and in larger quantities 12 georgia odyssey Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  than was possible when the fiber and seeds had to be separated by hand. The impact of the cotton gin may be measured by comparing Georgia’s cotton production in 1791 (one thousand bales) with its output in 1801 (twenty thousand bales). Georgia was soon leading the world in cotton production, which increased about 10 percent a year from 1825 to 1860, largely in response to the demands of the rapidly expanding English textile industry. As incessant planting led to depleted soils, the center of southern cotton production began to shift toward the newer, more fertile southwestern states. Still, with the insatiable looms of Lancashire to feed, cotton was paying for two-thirds of all American imports, and as the nation’s fourth-leading producer of cotton in 1860, Georgia re- mained a pivotal player in the national and international economy. The more cotton Georgia planters grew, the more slaves they needed, and a slave population of just under thirty thousand in 1790 had swol- len to almost sixty thousand by 1800 and to well over a hundred thou- sand by 1810. On the eve of the Civil War, nearly a half million slaves, perhaps 75 percent of them concentrated in the fertile Black Belt (a strip of land which ran roughly across the middle third of the state), constituted 44 percent of the state’s total population. The cotton boom not only revitalized slavery, but it also democra- tized slave ownership, at least for a time, as yeomen farmers managed to acquire both land and slaves. As historian Numan Bartley observed, Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. “After almost a century of frequent strife and social conflict, white Georgians seemed to have arrived at a consensus that rested on the pro- duction of the white staple with black labor on land that had been taken from red people.” Although Georgia had more slaves and slaveholders than any state save Virginia, in 1860 fewer than a third of Georgia’s adult white males actually owned slaves, and almost half of these owned fewer than six. Overall, only 15 percent of the state’s slaveholders owned twenty or more slaves. These figures put slaveholders in a decided mi- nority within the white population, but they were an exceedingly pow- erful minority whose political clout extended well beyond what their Opportunity and Slavery 13 Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  numbers on the census pages would suggest. In both 1850 and 1860, more than two-thirds of the seats in the state legislature were held by men who owned slaves, nearly half of them twenty or more. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white Georgians would include in their reminiscences of the slavery era recollections of the happy, contented retainers who seemingly toiled without fatigue, sang rather than sweated, and generally bore their enslavement without frustration or resentment. This imagery was of great psychological value to whites. It assuaged their guilt over slavery and ultimately reaffirmed the wisdom of the Jim Crow system. It even proved valuable to the would-be architects of the New South who, in their search for popu- lar acceptance, seemed at every turn to invoke the glories of the Old South. That this mythology was patently implausible seemed to make little difference. Certainly, ample evidence to the contrary abounds in interviews with former slaves conducted by wpa (Works Progress Administration) workers during the New Deal. Born in Georgia in 1844, William Colbert recalled the story of his brother January, who slipped away to see a woman on another plantation. When he was caught, January’s owner tied him to a pine tree and announced: “Now, nigger, I’m goin’ to teach you some sense.” Wid dat he started layin’ on de lashes. January was a big fine lookin’ Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. nigger, de finest I ever seed. He wuz jus four years older dan me, an’ when de massa begin a beatin’ him, January never said a word. De massa got madder and madder kaze he couldn’t make January holla. “What’s de matter wid you, nigger?” he say. “Don’t it hurt?” January, he never said nothin’, and de massa keep a beatin’ till little streams of blood started flowin’ down January’s chest, but he never holler. His lips was a quiverin’ and his body wuz a shakin’, but his mouff it neber open; and all de while I sat on my mammy’s and pappy’s steps a cryin’. De niggers wuz all gathered about and some uv ’em couldn’t stand it; dey hadda go inside dere cabins. Atter while, 14 georgia odyssey Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  January, he couldn’t stand it no longer hisself, and he say in a hoarse, loud whisper: “Massa, Massa, Have Mercy on Dis Poor Nigger!” Not all masters were as cruel as January’s, but the potential for such brutality was always there in the slaveholding society of early nineteenth-century Georgia. Though many of Georgia’s slaveholders were quick to take on the airs and trappings of aristocracy, most of them sprang from humble or, at best, modest origins. Margaret Mitchell cap- tured quite well the origins and rapid rise of many a Georgia planter in her Gone with the Wind depiction of the short but swaggering, “loud mouthed and bull headed” Gerald O’Hara. “With the deep hunger of an Irishman who has been a tenant on the lands his people once had owned and hunted,” Gerald longed with “a ruthless singleness of pur- pose” to have “his own house, his own plantation, his own horse and his own slaves. And here in this new country... he intended to have them.” Chafing in the employ of his brothers in Savannah, Gerald capital- ized on two of his prime assets, his facility at poker and his “steady head for whiskey,” to become the owner of a gone-to-seed plantation. With what he could borrow from his brothers and secure from mortgaging the land, he bought a few hands and moved into the old overseer’s place while he dreamed of a great white house to replace the one that had Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. burned down a few years earlier. Clearing fields and planting cotton and borrowing more money and buying more slaves and land, “little, hard- headed blustering Gerald” soon had his dream house and even won social acceptance when the lordly Mrs. Wilkes conceded that despite his “rough tongue... he is a gentleman.” And what was the educational and cultural pedigree of this newly anointed gentleman? He could read, write, and cipher, but “there his book knowledge stopped. The only Latin he knew was the responses of the Mass and the only history, the manifold wrongs of Ireland.... After all, what need had he of these things in a new country where the most ignorant of bogtrotters had Opportunity and Slavery 15 Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  made great fortunes? in this country which asked only that a man be strong and unafraid of work?” New Hampshire native Emily Pillsbury was one of many critical and condescending northern visitors who seized on the educational defi- ciencies of the so-called planter aristocracy in antebellum Georgia. “To those educated in New England, the ignorance that is seen in many por- tions of the northern part of Georgia is truly astonishing; many cannot read a word, or write their own name. I have had merchants say, that in transacting business with many men of great wealth, they have found them obliged to use a mark for their signature.” Like so many northern observers, Pillsbury often confused poor whites with the South’s sizable body of independent yeoman farmers. She gave little credit to Georgia’s nonslaveholding whites for their in- dependence and self-sufficiency, noting with disapproval that “besides coffee they seldom use any thing that is not the product of their own industry.” In addition to their victimization at the hands of the planters and their inherited inclinations to poverty, Pillsbury traced the plight of Georgia’s lower-class whites to the absence of a system of common schools. It was here that she drew the sharpest and perhaps most ironic distinction between Georgia with its “deplorable state of ignorance” and her native New England: “At that age when the youth of the North Copyright © 2008. University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. are confined at hard lessons for six hours a day from one season to an- other, these [Georgia] children are wasting the spring of their lives, in the fields and woods, climbing trees, robbing birds’ nests, or breaking up the haunts of squirrels, and engaged in every such kind of mischief, enough of which is always to be found for idle hands to do.” “Mischief ” was hardly confined to children in antebellum Georgia. In 1835, humorist Augustus Baldwin Longstreet described a violent en- counter between Billy Stallings and Bob Durham, who were believed by their Georgia peers to be “the very best men in the country,” which, as Longstreet explained, “means they could flog any other two men in the 16 georgia odyssey Cobb, James C.. Georgia Odyssey (2nd Edition), University of Georgia Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=3038808. Created from ugalib on 2025-01-23 16:52:30.  county.” Each man had his own following, and though there was much agitated speculation as to which of these two “best” men was actually the better, the fisticuffs-loving locals were much frustrated because the two actually got along quite well, despite the best efforts of one Ransy Sniffle, who, in Longstreet’s words, “never seemed fairly alive, except when he was witnessing, fomenting, or talking about a fight.” Whereas