USA > Georgia > The story of Georgia and the Georgia people, 1732 to 1860 > Part 10
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The State had much land and but a few people, and many of those who had been faithful to the cause of inde- pendence were now to receive a generous grant as a reward for their military services. In addition to these grants, in order to secure immigration, the State proposed to all new- comers to give them from two hundred to five hundred acres of land as headrights. Of these military grants there were five different classes of warrants issued.
First. Those citizens who bravely remained in Georgia during the struggle and served in the militia when called for were to have two hundred and fifty acres. There were 2,923 persons who received grants under this head.
Second. Refugees who fled the State, but fought in the American army ; there were six hundred and ninety-four of these.
Third. Those who were not in active service, but were en- rolled as minute-men; there were five hundred and fifty- five of these.
Fourth. Citizens of other States who came to the help of Georgia as continental soldiers; there were two hundred of these.
Fifth. To those who had served in the navy; to these only nine land-warrants were issued .*
* See Appendix for full list of grantees.
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These military warrants were mainly to be located in the newly opened territory which was included in the two im- mense counties of Washington and Franklin. In addition to these grants, which were to classes, there were special grants made to certain individuals, one to General Greene of the Mulberry Grove property, near Savannah; one to General Wayne, and twenty thousand acres ganted to Count. D'Estaing .*
The headrights were many of them granted before the Revolution by the colonial government, but many more were granted to the newcomers as soon as the war ended, A land-office was opened in Augusta and Bishop Stevens,. who had access to the private papers of Mr. Jos. Haber- sham, who was one of the commissioners for issuing these warrants, gives a somewhat lively picture of the disorder" in the land-office when the warrants were called for. The larger number of claimants were from the newly settled lands of now Columbia and. Wilkes, who, becoming impa- tient at the necessarily slow progress of the commissioners, and perhaps a little too much under the influence of the tafia so abundant in Augusta, broke into the office and. snatched the warrants from the table and made off with them. Many of these abstracted warrants were returned, and many were not recognized.
When the war ended, as we have seen, the counties in. Georgia were Camden, Glynn, Liberty, Chatham, Effing- ham, Burke and Richmond, and to these were now added Franklin and Washington, which included the new ceded lands.
Up to the war of the Revolution there had been no seri -- ous disturbance with any of the Indians in Georgia. The" ruling tribes were Creeks and Cherokees and in that contest.
* This large estate was given by the count to a relative who married Colonel De Lapraier of the French army. His descendants still own a part of the. land.
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both sided with the English, and against the Cherokees an expedition under Colonel Twiggs had been sent out early in the war. As soon as peace came the Georgians took advantage of the victory won and coerced the Creeks into a cession of all the land which lay between the Ogeechee and Oconee rivers, and the Cherokees into the ceding of a considerable strip of their territory, and this new country was now divided into two great counties, Franklin and Washington. The Creeks were by no means reconciled to this seizure of their land and went upon the war-path, and there were frequent raids into the country taken possession of by the whites.
For several years the war known as the Oconee war raged between the Creeks and the Georgians. Forts and blockhouses were built in all the border counties, and the Creeks made a formidable invasion into the country east of the Oconee, and Elijah Clarke, with his forces, had a sharp fight with them as they retreated in what is now Walton county, at a place known now as Jack's creek, said to have been so called in honor of the courage of young Jack Clarke, who distin- guished himself in the battle (Chappel). The Creeks gave the early settlers a great deal of trouble and the new village of Greensborough was burned by them. These troubles continued for nearly ten years, and after the formation of the Federal Union the United States troops garrisoned the frontier until the final settlement made by the general government, after which there was peace for near twenty years.
Georgia was now an independent State and as the land was given away, immigration came in a rapid tide into all parts now opened for settlement. The immigrants were of the same class we have already seen as coming into Burke and Richmond. They were mainly from Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland. Some of them were men of prop- erty, but the larger number were in very humble circum-
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stances. They began life in a very primitive way. The houses were almost universally at this time of logs, and nearly all consisted of but a single room. There were as yet few stores in which merchandise could be bought; there were but few sawmills and even grist-mills were few. In the low-country rice and corn were the staple articles, and they were prepared for the table by being beat in a mortar, and in the up-country, where ashes were abundant, the corn was made into lye hominy. There was along the whole frontier, from Camden to Franklin, a constant menace from the Indians, and men, as in the early days of New England, were required to take their arms with them to church ser- vices. Troops of horsemen were organized in every county to be ready at any moment to pursue the marauding bands of savages who were likely to dash into the remote settle- ment to rob and murder.
We have seen in other chapters of the coming of the different churches into the province, and now we have the coming of the first Arminian Methodists into the State. In the year 1786 John Major and Thomas Humphries, two itinerant preachers from Virginia, at the instance of Bishop Francis Asbury, came into Georgia. The Methodists dif- fered from any other denomination in some of their doc- trines and most of their usages. These first preachers were from Virginia, and the good Virginians who had been brought up in the church of England found in these itine- rants, preachers who were nearer akin to them than any other, and they gave them a cordial welcome to their homes, and many of them adhered to the societies the preachers established. The itinerants had no churches, but went from cabin to cabin and held services every day in' the week except on Monday. The preachers were peculiar men in every way. They dressed like Quakers, in straight-breasted cutaway coats of brown homespun, wore white cravats and broad-brimmed hats. They sang lustily, preached boister-
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ously, wept and stormed and exhorted, and were intensely in earnest. They preached a full and free gospel and a salvation possible to all men; they went everywhere and success attended their efforts. They began their work in Wilkes and extended it into Burke, and gathered quite a membership during their first year.
In 1788 there came to Georgia a Methodist preacher who was to have much to do with the future of the State, and whose descendants have been among its most honored children. This was Hope Hull, born in Worcester, Md .; he was a soldier in the Revolution before he was of age, and a Methodist preacher when he was twenty-one years old. > He was a man of handsome presence, of fine intellect, of fluent and eloquent speech, and of broad views. After he located in Wilkes county he established the first high school in the county and employed a Presbyterian minister to teach it. He was a trustee of the State University and an ardent friend of that institution from its foundation .*
There was now in Georgia one organized Episcopal church, the one in Savannah, and several organized Presbyterian churches in Burke and Wilkes and one in Savannah, a Luth- eran church in Effingham, and a Congregational church in Liberty. There were few church buildings, and in the rural districts religious services were held in private houses.
During Governor Telfair's term business began to revive and there was a crying need for a circulating medium. He addressed himself to the work of providing a currency for the State which would be trustworthy and hoped he had accomplished it by adopting, with certain careful restric- tions, the usual resource of States, issuing promises to pay and making them a legal tender. The result was, as it has always been, the paper currency was first at par and then
* In my chapter on Rel gion in the Colony and the State I have given a fuller account of Methodism in Georgia.
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declined more and more rapidly until it was worth only four to one.
During his governorship Nathan Brownson, Wm. Few and Hugh Lawson were commissioned to select a place for a State capitol and to provide for the erection of a building for the various departments and for establishing a State university. The capitol and university were to be in twenty miles of Galphin's old town, and the town was to be called Louisville, and £2,000 from the sale of confiscated property was to be appropriated for the building of the new State house. The place was selected, the town was laid out and in 1795 it was made the seat of government and continued such for nearly ten years, when the capitol was removed to Milledgeville.
The confederated government had secured large loans, based upon its confidence that the States would cede to the government their wild lands. This had been done by all of them except Georgia and North Carolina. The leading people in the new State were newcomers, mainly from Virginia. The State was young and feeble and penniless. A large debt which it could not pay was due to the Con- federacy, and it had only this land to pay it with. It made some rather hard stipulations, which the confederated States thought were too rigorous, and it refused to accept the State's tender on such grounds, and the cession was not made.
The question of title, which was raised between Georgia and South Carolina as to the title of Georgia to the almost unknown land beyond the Chattahoochee, and as to where the eastern boundary of the new State really was, had been settled at Beaufort by commissioners in 1785, and so the free and independent State had a clear title, save as it was menaced by the Spanish claims, to all the territory included now in Georgia, Alabama and Mis- sissippi.
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The very unsatisfactory condition of things for the five years after the Revolution, when the old confederation was going to pieces and the Continental Congress had lost all hold on the various States, led the leaders of Georgia to fall readily into the scheme for a convention of all the States to form a new constitution and a closer union, and during Governor Mathews's time delegates were appointed to go to Philadelphia and take seats in the convention.
Wm. Few, Abraham Baldwin, Wm. Pierce, Wm. Houston, George Walton and Nathaniel Pendleton were selected as the delegates. Of these Few, Baldwin and Houston took part in the convention, but Mr. Few was the only one of the delegation who signed the original Constitution .* When the Assembly in Philadelphia adjourned + the Geor- gia Legislature called for a convention to meet in Augusta and ratify the new instrument, and on the second day of January, 1788, this convention did "fully and cordially assent to ratify and adopt the proposed Constitution."
The convention which ratified the Constitution of the United States and made the first draft of a new Consti- tution for the State, which was adopted in May of the next year, consisted of :
John Wereat, Wm. Few, Jas. McNeal, Wm. Stephens, Jos. Habersham, Edward Telfair, H. Todd, Geo. Mathews, Florence Sullivan, John King, James Powell, Jno. Elliot, James Maxwell, George Handley, Christopher Hilary, J. Milton, Jared Irwin, Jno. Rutherford, Joshua Williams, Jos. Carmichael, Henry Carr, Jas. Seagrove, Jas. Webb, Henry Osborne, Robert Christmas.
There was no hesitation, and no stipulations were made by Georgia, and no debate concerning the propriety of rati- fication was engaged in. Georgia was the fourth State to
* See Madison Papers.
+ Appendix.
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other States, as it was in October, she became a member of the Federal Union. There was no submission of this rati- fication to a popular vote, but the free and sovereign State, acting as a State in convention, without any dream that she was surrendering anything more than was delegated to the general government, became one of a Federal Union of thirteen sovereign States.
It is now my purpose to give a bird's-eye view of each county as it was established, giving a larger amount of attention to the parent counties, and not confining myself to the limits of time I have fixed to the general history, but bringing the history of the counties as such to the present time (1900), avoiding, however, all allusion to the part borne by the county during the great war between the States.
CHATHAM.
This county was named for the Earl of Chatham, and was the earliest settled of any portion of Georgia. It has the Savannah river on the east and the Ogeechee on the south and west and includes the islands adjacent. On these two rivers are some fine rice lands, but away from the rivers the land is mainly marsh or sterile pine woods. The agricultural resources of the county apart from its rice lands are not considerable. The river bottoms upon which rice was grown were magnificent estates before the war; and even since it ended, although the slaves have been freed, there have been some very extensive planta- tions, and though some of them have been worked for over a century they are still planted profitably. Many of these rice plantations have, however, been abandoned, and where there were in the beginning of the century well-kept fields there are now only marshes. Some of these old rice plan- tations are now market gardens, where great quantities of early vegetables are grown for the northern markets; but
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many of these fine old places are simply abandoned. Raising vegetables for the northern markets is carried on in the county very extensively. Some of the swamps around the city have been drained by canals and ditches and there is much land now arable which was waste, and many of the freedmen have gone into these low places and bought small tracts and now make a scanty living by planting small crops.
There are some famous plantations near the city. Mul- berry Grove, where General Greene died, is a market gar- den. Bonaventure, where the Tattnall family had their home, is now a famous cemetery. The Hermitage, the seat of the McCallisters, with its magnificent avenue of live-oaks; and Beaulieu, the seat of Governor Stephens ; Whitefield's Bethesda Orphanage ; Jasper Springs, where Jasper captured the British guards and released the pris- oners, are places of interest in the county. The history of Chatham is so interwoven with the early history of Georgia, and especially that of Savannah, which is given at length elsewhere, that it is not necessary to say much of the county in this place.
There is a comparatively small white population outside of the city and the various suburban villages. Thunder- bolt, Tybee, Isle of Hope and White Bluff are on the sea- shore, and Pooler and Monteith and a few other small vil- lages on the lines of railway. There are few schools and churches save for the negroes in the country districts around Savannah, but the villages are well supplied. In 1790 there were only twenty-five hundred white people in the county, Savannah included, but there were eight thou- sand two hundred slaves on the plantations and the sea islands. The sea islands were famous for the homes of planters who resided in the city during the winter and on their estates during the summer.' They were not adapted to the production of rice and were devoted at their first
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settlement to indigo culture and stock-raising. They were congenial homes for the Africans who were imported in large numbers and who, when they were placed on the islands, rapidly increased. Before the Revolution there was much wealth and much luxurious living on these islands. The planters, after they gave up indigo culture, began to raise sea-island cotton, and as this staple was very high in price, they had large returns from their crops and increased in wealth very rapidly. The sea island planter in Chatham and along the Georgia coast presented much the same features as is pictured elsewhere in people of the wealthy class of planters. Their situation was an exposed one, and they suffered during the Revolution and the war of 1812. They rallied from these losses at those times, but from the disasters of the war between the States there was no recovery, and the islands are now largely peopled by negro tenants who make their living by fishing and oyster- ing.
EFFINGHAM.
As we have seen elsewhere this county, which took the place of St. Matthew's parish, was settled mainly by Ger- mans, and in the account of the German settlement we have already had a picture of the natural features of the county and of the people. In common with all the parts of the tide-water country this county suffered greatly during the Revolution. The bulk of the people, speaking only the German tongue and concerned only about their small farms and domestic interests, knew little and cared less about the issue between the colonists and England. Most of them desired to hold a neutral place. Some of them, however, were loyal to the king, and some of them were sympa- thizers with the colonies, and one of them, John Adam Treutlen, was a Georgia governor, and pronounced a rebel by Governor Wright. They were thus sadly divided and
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suffered on all sides. Their villages were occupied at dif- ferent times by both armies, and their church was desecrated and defaced, for though their pastor took the side of the British and invited the English troops to Ebenezer, the rude soldiers turned their revered church into a stable. The whole country was desolated by the repeated raids of the soldiers on both sides, but the people were industrious and thrifty, and after peace came the herds of cattle on which they largely relied were soon replenished. The church was at once repaired, their schools were reopened, and the fields of the farmer put once more into cultivation, and though for the two years after the close of the war they had no pastor, they then secured a pious man from Ger- many to take the place. In 1790 there were 2,420 people in the county, of which only seven hundred and fifty were slaves, and in 1830, forty years afterward, there were only five hundred more inhabitants. The proximity of the county to Savannah, and its want of any commercial ad- vantages, prevented its having towns of any considerable size, and yet gave it a fine position as a place for gardens and dairies. Its climate was excellent, and when the Cen- tral railroad traversed it some residence villages sprang up, and Guyton and Marlow have become favorite places for the country homes of Savannah merchants.
Springfield is the county site, and while it is a small vil- lage, it has been famous in days gone by for its excellent schools and the high character of its people.
Ebenezer, of which we have so often spoken, which was at one time a thrifty village, has long since ceased to be a place of any importance, and is now unpeopled. The old Lutheran church, famous as the first church in Georgia, still stands and has a congregation and a pastor.
The county, being originally peopled by Germans, has many of their descendants still in it. They are good people, honest, thrifty and religious. There are Luther-
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ans and Baptists and Methodists in the county, and good churches and good schools are found in all parts of it.
There are few sections in Georgia where there is a better type of plain, good, contented, pious people than in Effingham, and their descendants are found in all sections of the low-country of Georgia, and wherever found are recognized as among the worthiest of the people .*
RICHMOND.
Richmond was named in honor of the Duke of Rich- mond. It was originally St. Paul's parish, and when it was made in 1777 it included all of Columbia and parts of McDuffie, Warren and Jefferson counties. As these counties will come under our survey in the proper time, it will only be necessary now to give attention to Rich- mond as it stands.
In the early parts of this history and in the ST. PAUL'S CHURCH. chapter on Augusta nearly everything of interest connected with this county, up to the Revolution, has been narrated, and in the history of Augusta much of the after revolutionary history is given. Richmond is in the main a county of rather sterile pine woods, save on some of the creeks and on the river, where the land is a rich alluvial which at one time was very productive. Before
* In the first chapter of this History, in the account of the German settle- ment, the early history of these people is to be found.
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the lands on the river above Augusta were cleared of their forests the river-bed was deeper and the stream more rapid than it is at this day, and the freshets which come now almost annually were infrequent a hundred and twenty years ago. Then these lands were considered very valua- ble, and wealthy planters had large plantations in the swamps which brought a rich return. They are now turned largely into hay farms and are still valuable. The pine lands were for a long time esteemed only for their timber and as a range for cattle. There was some of this land, however, which had a good subsoil of clay which was, when manured, quite productive, and while it was not esteemed as first-class land, it repaid the tiller's toil, and even much of the land which was very sterile when well fertilized produced fine crops of melons and vegetables.
The rural population of Richmond, save on the river and on Rae's creek, were plain, poor people who ran small farms. There was quite a settlement of well-to-do Vir- ginians some distance north of Augusta which was called Bedford, probably after the Virginia county from which they emigrated, and quite a settlement of Burke county planters in the healthy pine woods near what is now Heph- zibah. A college was projected in the early part of the cen- tury, called Mt. Enon, which was to be located in the southern part of this county and opened as a Baptist col- lege; but a charter was refused and it became the first Baptist high school in Georgia.
There was a fine water-power on the creeks, which, rising in the pine hills, ran into the river; and one of the most successful country factories was built on Spirit creek long before the war, and another known as Schley's, at Bellevue, where the shrewd old governor had his country home.
The building of the railway from Augusta to Sanders- ville opened up the lower part of the county, and there is
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a considerable village known as Hephzibah, where the Baptists have a school.
The county had been well supplied with Methodist and Baptist churches, and the school facilities had been mod- erately good; but the establishment of the public school system after the war provided all classes with excellent educational advantages.
Among the oldest Methodist and Baptist churches in upper Georgia are the Baptist church at Hephzibah, formerly Mt. Enon, and the Methodist church at Liberty, which an- tedate the beginning of this century.
Among the industries which have made the county famous the celebrated nurseries of the Berckmans are very notable.
Dr. Berckmans, an intelligent German, was struck with the great advantages of the climate and soil near Augusta for the raising of fruit trees and flowers, and he began his nurseries on a very extensive scale over forty years ago, and from them the most beautiful flowers and the finest fruits have been distributed throughout the land.
The fine climate of the Sand Hills, which stretch through the northwest part of the county, has invited sum- mer residents, who have beautiful homes, chiefly at Grove- town, sixteen miles from the city.
The county is so linked with the city that it is not pos- sible to separate them, and I shall in a future chapter de- vote a considerable space to Augusta, and as Columbia county includes much of what was historic Richmond, it is- not needful to say more of the county as it is at present ..
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