USA > Georgia > Miscellanies of Georgia, historical, biographical, descriptive, etc > Part 7
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19
CHAPTER VI .- THE PINE BARREN SPECULATION IN 1794, 1795.
CHAPTER VII .- THE YAZOO FRAUD.
1
-
1
CHAPTER I.
MIDDLE GEORGIA.
We have seen in treating of the Oconee war how the In- dians gave the name of Virginians to the hosts of unwelcome strangers that began to pour into their immemorial hunting grounds soon after the Revolutionary war, and continued to come in unceasing swarms until at length they filled up the whole country to the east of the Oconee river. Nor was the appellation wrongly given. For it is a fact that this coun- try was mainly settled up in the first instance by direct col- onization from Virginia and, in some parts, from North Carolina, and not by the old population of Georgia spreading out over it .. We find evidence in our statute book of the early attraction of the Virginians thither. As far back as 1783, a petition came from Virginia and was granted by our Legislature, asking that two hundred thousand acres of land might be reserved in this region of the State for such emigrants from Virginia as should wish to settle down in one solid, homogeneous neighborhood ; which reservation is noticed and ratified in the Act of 1784, organizing the coun- ties of Washington and Franklin. This fact, though now long buried, possesses some historical interest still, as bear- ing on the important point that the great mass of the first settlers, who replaced the Indians in this part of Georgia, came from Virginia, particularly those who established themselves on the best lands. And they came not scatter- ingly and wide apart, but in quick succeeding throngs, bringing along with them their wives, children and servants,
3
4
MIDDLE GEORGIA.
and their household goods and gods, -allured by the cheapness and fertility of the lands, the pleasantness and salubrity of the climate, the felicity of the seasons, the happy lying and commodiousness of the country, well wooded, well watered, with easy wagoning access to the flourishing commercial mart of Augusta and with, from thence, a fine navigation by the Savannah river down to the excellent seaport of Savannah, close upon the ocean ; to all which was superadded the known aptitude of the country for the peculiar agriculture to which the Virginians were accustomed. For Whitney, young, poor, but restless with inborn-ingenuity, hospitably domesticated in the house of Gen. Greene's widow, near Sa- vannah, had not yet invented that most wonderful and beneficent machine, the cotton gin, and the cultivation of cotton as a commercial commodity was unknown among us, and tobacco was still the master staple in upper Georgia as well as in Virginia. There are probably some very ancient people yet living who remember those tobacco-growing times and the queer custom of rolling tobacco hogsheads to Au- gusta and the great rigor of the tobacco inspection in that market.
Of the immense preponderance of the immigration from Virginia over that from all other quarters, some idea may be formed from the fact that in my native section when I was a boy, there were scarcely any but very young people who could claim Georgia or any other part of the world than Virginia as their birth place. Scattered here and there a few only were to be found who were born elsewhere out of Georgia than in Virginia. Washington county, however, in the limits which it still possessed up to the time of the present generation, must be set down as being an exception to this remark. For within those limits that fine old county was mainly colonized from North Carolina as I have had the best means of knowing, and my heart will forever attest what an amiable and generous people they and their descend- ants were fifty years ago, for a little earlier than then I made my debut in life among them and lived among them long
5
MIDDLE GEORGIA.
enough to know and love them well and to be loved by them in return-so at least it has always been a satisfaction to me to feel. Maryland, too, sent a little aid, just enough to enable it to be said that she bore a part in conquering these distant wilds. Within my puerile range of knowing, it was but a single family she sent, poor when they came but des- tined to great opulence drawn by toil from the liberal earth. Olten were they called Chesapikers and often in boyish igno- rance, I wondered why. With such exceptions as these, all the rest. the great mass of the people, the elderly, the mid- dle aged, the fully grown and not a few of the very young, were Virginians born.
And not only had they come from Virginia themselves, but as the Trojans carried Illium unto Italy, so did they bring Virginia into Georgia with all her divinities both of the field and fireside, and they filially preserved and perpetuated her here,-her ideas and opinions, her feel- ings and principles ; her manners, her customs, her tone and character as well as her agriculture, her system of labor and her whole rural economy. Nor was it a small district only or a few isolated spots that the Virginians thus overspread and impressed with their own very superior type of society and civilization, but nearly all the best of the fair and extensive region lying between the Ogeechee and the Oconce, and that large part besides of the country be- tween the Savannah and the Cgeechee which was originally comprised in the glorious old pre-revolutionary county of Wilkes, which having been acquired from the Indians under the Colonial regime only a very short time before the out- break of the Revolutionary war, was still very thinly peo- pled at its close, and presented consequently very strong attractions for the best class of emigrants, who came in troops to those parts of the State where the lands, freed from the Indian occupancy, were yet wild and unappropri- ated and, under the old Head Right system, open to the first comers.
And now here and heretofore (in the course of my writing
6
MIDDLE GEORGIA.
about the Oconee war) I have developed the beginnings of that famed part of the State, known as Middle Georgia, and have found and traced its germ, showing whence that germ came and when, where and how it was first planted here, and have also shown what hard and perilous fortunes it had for a long time to encounter from Indian hostilities and incur- sions, whilst striving to maintain itself and get root and thrive in its new soil. But triumphing by degrees over all dangers and drawbacks, and blest at length with favorable auspices and a long spell of prosperity, it struck wide and deep into the generous land into which it had been trans- planted, and flourished apace not only within its early cis- Oconee limits, but rapidly spread and propagated far beyond those limits as new opening was from time to time made by fresh acquisitions of Indian territory : First, from the Oco- nee to the Ocmulgee in 1802 and 1805; then from the Ocmulgee to Flint river in 1821 ; and finally from Flint river to the Chattahoochee and our present western bound- ary in 1825,-full forty-nine years ago, when at length the celebrated Black Belt across the center of the State was com- plete and Middle Georgia finished.
Already, too, some eleven years earlier, the sword of Gen. Jackson had achieved a great territorial enlargement for Georgia on her southern side. For, as we have already had occasion to tell, by the capitulation at Fort Jackson in 1814, the Indians were entirely swept off by the besom of con- quest from the whole Tallassee country, beginning far down on the St. Mary's in the East and stretching all along the line of the then Spanish province of East Florida clean to the Chattahoochee in the West,-being that very Tallassee country for the more easterly portion of which Gen. Clark and Gen. Twiggs, as we have heretofore seen, had at Gal- phinton in 1785, concluded a treaty with the Indians ; a treaty, however, which was not allowed to stand, having been, as heretofore shown, overslaughed by the treaty of New York in 1790.
How important an extension of her jurisdictional limits
7
MIDDLE GEORGIA.
the State was thus laid under obligations to Gen. Jackson and his treaty of Fort Jackson for, those who are curious to know may learn by consulting Early's map of Georgia published in 1818, where the whole of this new extension on our South is represented by one great blank space, not having been at that date yet surveyed by the State and laid off into counties or demarcations of any kind.
Georgia, by the above mentioned events, seeing herself finally rid everywhere of the Creek Indians, began to turn eager, impatient thoughts to her upper or Northern side where the Cherokees inhabited, a people who had far out- stripped all our other aboriginal tribes in the progress to- wards civilization, and whose extreme, immovable attach- ment to their ancestral land seemed to place an insuperable obstacle in the way of our ever acquiring it by peaceful or humane means. But here again the powerful aid of Gen. Jackson was exerted in our favor, being rendered this time in his character and functions as President of the United States. Before his iron will and inflexible policy, backed by his despotic influence over Congress and the country, all opposition had to give way alike among the Indians and that great mass of the Northern people by whom their cause was esponsed. It is now nearly forty years since, by the consummation of his measures, the Cherokees were removed to new homes beyond the Mississippi, and Georgia placed in undisturbed possession of the fine country they left behind, with all its mountains and vallies, its rich lands and mines, its health-giving climate and waters, its charming diversi- fied scenery and those great commanding advantages of geo- graphical formation and position which make it the eternal doorway and key between the Southern Atlantic and the immense transmontane valley of the Mississippi.
SECTION II.
I have often thought, in these sad latter days, that it was something to be thankful for to have lived in this period of interesting progress and development of Georgia, and to
8
MIDDLE GEORGIA.
have grown up witnessing, from childhood to manly age, this inspiring expansion of my native land, of which one effect surely was to impregn my young mind with a rich, varied store of dearly cherished, ever-living memories con- cerning the State and what I have seen and known of her, the value whereof, as a resource of mental comfort and lux- ury, I have begun to feel more sensibly as I grow older and become more dependent for my enjoyments on the laid up treasures and recollections of the past. The past is pecu- liarly the domain of old age, in which it loves to roam at large, mustering up the dead whom it has known, reviving bygone scenes and sights, thoughts and feelings, living over again its departed manhood, youth and even childhood. Alas! to how few is such a second, retrospective life ever accorded ! And how obvious, too, that whether any and what sort of enjoyment is to be derived therefrom, must de- pend, in the case of every individual, upon the nature and character of that past through which he has traveled and by which his mind has been, as it were, formed, peopled and furnished. Happy is he who has a past on which he can strongly draw and find amends for the sorrows and adversi- ties of the present! To the young, ardent, hopeful; to the active, sanguine seekers after pleasure, riches, honor ; to the favorites of fortune, who already rejoice in the possession or assured attainment of their respective objects of desire, this resource cannot be expected to appear in a very striking light. But to the aged, whose active career is closed, whose carthly hopes are ended, and who, moreover, lie prostrate and helpless under the blows of fortune, it is a resource second only to the consolations of religion and the concious- ness of an upright lite.
Among all the retrospects on which my mind has long loved to dwell, retrospects, I mean, having relation to those successive expansions and that progressive improvement of my native State, which have, to a great extent, taken place under my own eyes, as it were, there have been none so dear and interesting as those which carry me back to the
9
MIDDLE GEORGIA.
earlier and better days of Middle Georgia-that Middle Georgia that was my birth place and has been my life-long abode, and that, for long, long years, was ever to me as a large earthly paradise in which I always felt myself every- where at home and in warm sympathy with every thing around me. And it is still dear and precious to recall her as she was in her primal period and high meridian, al- though now her glory is gone and she scarce knows her former self amidst the staring ruin and mournful depression which have become her fate.
Striking indeed was the spectacle as her fair, ample spaces presented themselves to view in the several installments of their acquisition and settlement :- At the first, spreading out in all their unmarred primeval grandeur and beauty, a vast and towering woodland scene, nature's ancient, yet ever young, blooming work-then, passing in turn one after another, from the deep night of barbarism in which they had lain for unknown ages into the sudden light and life of high civilization. Elating to witness at the time, grateful to remember ever since, the successive expandings, the triumphal unfoldings of Georgia in this, her rich middle belt, her very zone of charms, as exulting she advanced by bound after bound from East to West, high-strung, hardy, laborious, "disdaining little delicacies," trampling down ob- stacles, disregarding hardships; subduing and transforming rude nature, forests falling before her, the wilderness bud- ding and blossoming as the rose at her touch, rich crops springing up all around her, called forth by her industry from the willing earth. It was the white man with the axe and the plow, the hammer and the saw, and in all the array and habiliments of civilization, superseding the Indian in his hunting shirt and moccasins, with his tomahawk and scalping knife and his bow and arrows. It was Ceres, with her garland of golden sheaves, her basket and hoe and her divine gait and air, putting an end to the reign of Pan and the Satyrs. And no metamorphosis the world ever saw, or fiction ever forged, was more beautiful, picturesque and lovely
10
MIDDLE GEORGIA.
than the change that was wrought, and wrought, too, with a magical ease and suddenness and on a largness of scale that made the wonderful blend with the beautiful in the successive panoramas that were presented.
It was a spectacle which will not occur again ; it is one of those things that has been seen for the last time; it will never more be repeated. Nature exhausted and insolvent, as it were, in this regard, has no more Middle Georgias, no more beautiful, healthful, fertile, well wooded, well watered Southern uplands to offer wild and inviolate as future con- quests to Southern industry and civilization ; nor even if she had, could the other requisite conditions ever be hoped for again. A mighty, though unavowed revolution, settling down firmly into permanent bad government, has rendered them impossible. The maxims and polity of our fathers have been discarded and in their stead a senseless, vindic- tive, prostitute Federal despotism now reigns. Rioting and rotting in low-minded splendor and profligacy, paralytic and shrunken on its Southern side, plethoric and bloated on its Northern, festering with corruption all over, it waves its baleful sceptre over us inflicting on these "delightful pro- vinces of the Sun" a worse than Oriental fate. Already has it succeeded in making us from the richest and most prosper- ous people in the world, the poorest and most helpless. Already are its accursed effects widely seen and felt upon the very soil and face of nature, which we behold rapidly relapsing into uncultivated wastes and dwarf woods of second growth, requiring a second clearing and reclamation from hard-work- ing human hands. And how different a work it will be whenever it shall come, from that which in bygone days an- imated the hearts and hands of the sturdy pioneers of this land in their original reclaiming of it from the wilderness. How little hopeful, how little elevating and stimulating will it be in comparison ! How slow and thankless, how drag- ging and unrewarding ! And then besides, whence shall come the hands to do it? We have them not amongst us. Our whole system of agricultural labor is disorganized and
ยท
11
MIDDLE GEORGIA.
our laborers are not only demoralized but they hug their de- moralization to their bosoms as the chiefest boon of their new found freedom. Nor is it strange to those who know human nature, especially negro nature, that it should be so. Is there, then, any reliet which may be expected from abroad? Is there any outer quarter to which we may reasonably look for the help and reinforcement we need? None whatever. And most especially never shall we again see such another migration, such another transplanted civilization, as that which of yore poured from the bosom of the mother of heroes and statesmen at a most critical period into the lap of young Georgia and grew with her growth and spread with her ex- panding boundaries.
This train of thought brings the mind with force to what is now and must long be to us the greatest and most mo- mentous of questions. The question, namely, of the renais- sanceof Georgia. And first of all, is she to have a renaissance? Is the Phoenix ever to rise from its ashes? Shall Georgia ever emerge from her ruins? or is it to be her destiny and that of her sisters of the South, to swell the long dismal cata- logue of conquered States of ancient and modern times, that have never risen from the blow that felled them, but contin- ued to go down, down, till at length they reached a depth where, hopeless of recovery, they have ever since lain and seemingly will forever lie, wretched, submissive, debased, under the horse's hoof, the despot's heel and the brigand's knife? If such shall not be our lot, it will not be because fortune is our friend or all history is not against us, but it will be because we shall work out our salvation from it by mighty and persevering effort and self-denial. For it will take both in full measure to rescue and save us. Yes, if such is not to be our and our children's lot, it will be because deeply sensible ot the dreadful, impending future, we shall gird ourselves up like men to war against it at every point and by every means and with all our strength of body, soul and mind, resolved to know no rest, no ease, till fate shall be
12
MIDDLE GEORGIA.
fairly conquered and chained to our car, and Georgia restor- ed to honor, prosperity and greatness.
But let me not run before my work. In due time, if strength hold out equal to my task, this great question, which constantly looms up to view, will be reached and here and there handled as I may best be able. It is, indeed, a question of appalling magnitude and difficulty, but one, nevertheless, from which we may not shrink, one towards the auspicious solution of which, every son of Georgia, how- ever humble, is bound to bring his mite of aid.
CHAPTER II.
MIDDLE GEORGIA (continued) AND THE NEGRO.
Besides the very superior character of the country and the first colonists and their descendants, there were other causes that lent their aid to the rapid peopling and improvement of the several successive new Purchases, as they were called, that from time to time accrued to Middle Georgia-from its beginning at the acquisition of the original county of Wilkes, down to its finishing enlargement by the second treaty of the Indian Springs in 1825. Noticeable among these causes was the lucky length of the intervals of time that elapsed be- tween the different Purchases, sufficient to enable each new Purchase to become well peopled, prosperous and solidified before it had to encounter competition for settlers with other subsequently acquired Indian lands. To which add the ad- vantages each new Purchase enjoyed in its turn from its immediate contiguity along its whole eastern side to older, well advanced settlements ;- also that each new acquisition
13
MIDDLE GEORGIA.
as it came in its order, although not very small, was yet not larger than was wanted for the fresh tide of immigration that was waiting to flow into it, and did flow into it at once and fill it up with an excellent population from the very outset.
Furthermore, whilst adverting to these favoring causes, let us not forget that capital one-the humble, laborious, unpaid hands by which most of the harsh, heavy work was done, and without which such celerity of reclamation and improvement would have been impossible. Let not the poor negro and the important part performed by him, be left without special and in the phrase of the schools-honorable mention. Indeed not only in Middle Georgia in the several installments of its early settlement, but everywhere and at all times in the South, he was most useful and assistant, and justly acquired a hold more lasting than the relations out of which it grew, on the kindly feelings of those whom he served so long, so loyally and so well. How it is going to be with Southern men and women a generation or two hence and afterwards, cannot now be foreseen. . It may be that they will get to be quite as dead and unsympathetic towards the negro as the negroes themselves were wont of old to feel that Northern men and women were in comparison with those of the South. This undesirable result is certainly that to which the new order of things seems to tend. But as for us, who were born and bred in a better day and under more propitious relations and influences than now prevail, such deadness and want of sympathy may be pronounced impos- sible so long as the negro continues to deport himself in his new state of freedom no worse than he has thus far done, in Georgia at least. We would be narrow, nay ! even little in soul, if we did not look with large charity on the demorali- zation which the great shock and change through which he has passed, have undoubtedly wrought in him. For alas ! are not the evidences thick around us of our having also un- dergone a demoralization not less great and signal, from the mighty shock and change, to which we likewise, have been
14
MIDDLE GEORGIA.
subjected. Verily, kindness for the negro, a humane and friendly feeling towards him, a true indescribable sympathy with him, began with the lives, imbued the infancy and childhood, ran on with the growing years of the present generation of Southern men and women, and became so in- timately entwined with their very natures as to be ineradica- ble except by his own egregious and incorrigible delinquency and worthlessness. It is our true interest that he should do well, and attain to a higher level in morals, merit and intel- ligence. Never shall we be disposed to underrate him, or to withhold from him a generous credit for all that he shall deserve in the future, any more than a just remembrance of all he has done in the past.
He is emphatically the child of the Sun, born of his most burning rays, and happily framed to live and labor, strengthen and exult under his fiercest glare, in the most firery climes. He is also eminently submissive, cheerfully servile in his nature, and apt and docile in a high degree in things that hold rather of the hand than of the mind. In all respects he met our Southern agricultural and domestic needs most admirably ; and certainly among the great ser- vices he rendered us, that in which he was most important, was the conquest of the forest and the subjugation of rude nature to the axe, the plow or the hoe. It is impossible to look back on the immense amount of hard, heavy, valuable work done by him in first opening the country for culture, and afterwards as a life-long laborer in the very fields clear- ed by him, and then reverse the picture and gaze upon the widespread ruin he was subsequently made the involuntary, unwitting cause, (for he was the cause of the war and all its consequences) of bringing upon the scenes of his previous useful industry, without being painfully impressed in rela- tion to him. How strikingly has it been his lot to be forced to be in the beginning, a blessing, in the end a curse to us and our land ! Yes ! forced both in the one case and the other. And now he has become a sore problem indeed ; a warring, uunatural, morbific element in society, incapable of
15
MIDDLE GEORGIA.
assimilation with the body politic, upon which he has been hitched, as it were, by sheer extraneous violence, and by a tie quite as baleful and criminal as that by which the fa- bled tyrant Mezentius, chained the bodies of the dead to the living. Can the living ever impart life and health to the dead through a bond so revolting ? Will not the dead rather impart their own death and putrifaction to the living? And do they who, on the horrid maxim that there can be nothing wrong towards the vanquished, have inflicted this monstrous wrong on us and on human nature itself, and who are still exulting over their helpless victims,-do they cheat themselves with the idea that God is no longer just, and that the terrible curse of bad, wicked Government which they have vindictively fastened on us and our posterity, will not react in some way on themselves and make them and theirs writhe in long retributive agony under the eventual conse- quences of their unprecedented crime? For how can that great mass of ignorance, depravity and shameless unfitness, which they have clothed with the awful power of Government throughout the South, be prevented from working its deadly effects in National as well as in State affairs ; from sending corruption and ruin through the body politic of the Union, as well as through those of its oppressed and outraged Southern members ?
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.