USA > Georgia > The story of Georgia and the Georgia people, 1732 to 1860 > Part 33
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In the mines there was a shameless disregard of all moral requirements. Men were a law unto themselves, and even in so old a county as Murray the courts were often broken up by a lawless mob.
At the great gatherings on court days and muster days there were in nearly all the county towns scenes of wild rev- elry. In all these there was a grog-shop and a country fiddler, and the drinking crowd had a shake-down dance, a fight or a horse-race, and sometimes all of them.
"In Cobb," White says, "Judge Warner, being greatly annoyed by a drunken man, as there was no jail, ordered the sheriff to put the head of the culprit between the fence- rails of a horse-lot near the cabin in which the court was held. The sheriff did not return to the court-room, and when sent for was found sitting on the fence to keep his prisoner from escaping." Another judge, who had no jail but an old stable, was annoyed by a drunken man who boasted loudly that he was a " hoss." "Mr. Sheriff," said the judge, "put that horse in the stable."
The curse of the land was the cross-roads groggery, which was found in every neighborhood.
The old field school, which had ceased to exist in the older parts of the State, had been transferred to the newer counties in the north and west of the State; and schools
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were found only in a few places and for a few month in the year.
The roads were still execrable in winter time in all Georgia, and the heavy stage and great wagon in the cotton region made their way over rough causeways and plowed through oceans of mud.
During this period the State made its first benevolent movement by making an appropriation for the relief of the deaf and dumb and for lunatics.
John Jacobus Flournoy,* a wealthy man, was deaf and dumb, and his sympathy for those who were suffering like himself led him to his active work to secure some help for them. The legislature made a liberal appropriation for their education, and they were sent to New Haven, Conn., until an asylum for their relief was established at Cave Spring.
A Mr. Bevan, who unhappily died before he began his work, received an appropriation of four hundred and fifty dollars to enable him to collect materials for a history of Georgia, in which there was to be an account of (1) the original settlement, (2) trade, manufactures and natural history, (3) peculiar settlements, (4) academies, (5) various religious sects, and (6) manners and customs.
An effort was made to provide a State library, but the bill failed.
By Governor Schley's suggestion ten thousand dollars were appropriated to a geological survey, and Dr. Cotting, to whom White is so largely indebted for his mineralogical and geological information, made a careful survey of the various counties in the State, and gave the first full account of its large mineral resources.
There was great excitement in gold-mining. Now and then a rich pocket would be opened, and thousands of pen- nyweights would be taken in a few days; and then it would
* See sketch Jackson county.
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be emptied, and all that had been made would be lost in a vain search for another. There were, of course, great frauds perpetrated on the inexperienced prospector. Mines were salted and sold; brass filings, and even gold dust itself, was used to mislead. The most innocent looking rustic was wise in the art of deceiving the unwary. A prospector heard of a discovery of gold in an obscure part of one of the counties. He and his associates rode out to see about it. They met the rough farmer who was the owner of the reputed mine on his way to mill. He said he did not know much about it; but "thar mout be gold in the branch bot- tom; he had seed what they told him was signs. He was obleedged to go to mill; but they would find his leetle boy at the cabin, and he would show 'em whar to dig." They went to the cabin, and the little tow-headed boy led them to the branch bottom. They began to wash the dirt, and sure enough they found some grains of gold. They were delighted at the prospect, when the little fellow said : "You uns had better dig over thar. Dad put most of it in that ar place." That mine was not sold to those prospectors.
The mines were scattered all through the country-in Gilmer, in Union, in Lumpkin, in Habersham, in Hall, in Cherokee, in Pickens, in Cobb, in what is now White, and Towns and Rabun. No one could tell where the rich find might be; so the prospectors were scattered over the hills and in the valleys in every direction. There was but little produced in the way of food crops, and the wagons from Tennessee and North Carolina came laden with supplies for the miners.
There was not always failure in mining. The first mine was found in the garden of a local Methodist preacher near Nacoochee, the Rev. Mr. Richardson. It was very rich, and the owner reaped a large return from it. When Dr. Mitchell, the agent of Emory College, visited him, to ask a subscription to the college, he gave him an astonishingly
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large one. The agent proposed to take his note for the amount. "No," said the old miner; "I had as well pay it now." And he counted out the amount in gold eagles.
An Englishman by the name of Hockenhull had been digging gold with some success in the mines. His York- shire sweetheart had crossed the sea to meet her lover and had joined him in the mountains of Georgia, where they were wedded. The thrifty little Englishman and his fair bride prospered, and they had laid by a snug sum when he ventured to open a new mine. The shaft was sunk at large expense and weary days went by, but the gold was not found. At last the savings were all gone and the miner was out of heart.
" Mary dear," he said, "we are ruined. I have spent every dollar we had and we have not a color yet."
" Be of good heart, Johnny dear," she said, "dig on a little while longer and by God's blessing you'll come out." And so he did. She said:
"The very next day he struck it 'rich,' and that mine made his fortune."
The placer miners were a wild race.
" Oh yez! oh yez!" one said, "Brother Jackson will preach at Bill Jones's shack to-night at early candle-light."
"Oh yez! oh yez!" said another voice, "I will run my faro bank to-night, beginning at early candle-light."
There was but little to attract men to the farms when the land was so poor and the prospect for a fortune in mining was so bright, and so most of the people were gold diggers. There was much gold dug, but it was a question whether each gold nugget had not cost more than it was worth.
This Cherokee country now opened to the whites em- braced in its boundary the only body of blue limestone land in the State. In the area in which is now Murray, Whitfield, Walker, Dade, Chattooga, Gordon, Cass (now
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1 Bartow), Floyd and Polk counties, there was a magnificent body of limestone land along the banks of the Coosa- wattee, the Oostanaula, the Connesauga, the Etowah rivers, the Euharlee and Cedar creeks, and there were some beau- tiful valleys in which the Cherokees had their town. These lands had been cultivated by them in corn almost exclu- sively. When the whites occupied them their great value as wheat and cotton lands was recognized. Some of the improvements which the Indians had made on them were of a superior kind, and when the country was opened to white settlers they found fields already cleared and houses already built, and these were bought by men of means, and large plantations were at once secured. The country was a mag- nificent wheat and corn country, and this part of the State soon became the granary of Georgia.
It was not long after the opening of this country and the removal of the Indians before the Western and Atlantic railroad began to make its way towards Ross Landing on the Tennessee river.
The prospect of rapid transit to the Atlantic and the fact that there was a certainty that steamers would be put on the Coosa at Rome, opening up a fine country in Ala- bama, led enterprising men to make large ventures in this. section.
During the days before 1840 there was a steady influx of wealthy settlers from middle Georgia and from South Carolina, and this section became populated at a very early date with a body of most enterprising and thrifty people. Its rich mineral resources had been even then discovered, but were not developed. No part of the State was settled. more rapidly and by a worthier people.
There had been a period of great inflation in every part of America, and nowhere to a greater extent than in Geor- gia, but the time of liquidation had come. The banks had issued millions of notes, and had but little specie with which.
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to redeem them. They had loaned their notes freely to planters and taken personal security for them. The State had gone largely into the banking business. The Great Central Bank of Georgia was resorted to by all who needed discounts and who were in political favor, until it had mil- lions of notes in circulation, which were protected by the credit of the State.
When President Jackson removed the government de- posits from the United States bank and placed them in the State banks the panic of 1834 followed. This panic did not affect Georgia perceptibly. The price of cotton kept up, the local banks furnished money freely, and, while in the North and West there was a time of great financial dis- tress, in the South money was easy.
It has been the rule with all writers on this great panic of 1837 to attribute it to General Jackson's arbitrary order and to the failure to recharter the United States bank. This Mr. Benton denies, and seemingly with good reason. Mr. Mccullough, however, holds to that position, but gives as a reason for it that the banks were led by the holding of United States deposits to encourage wild trading and pre- pare the way for disaster.
The financial crash of 1837 began in England, and caused the suspension of scores of banks and the downfall of hun- dreds of factories in that kingdom. The banks in the east- ern American cities were forced to the wall, and as the tidal wave swept on it reached Georgia and all the banks except two suspended. Up to this time, although there had been all the commotion excited by the Jackson panic of 1834, although there had been some few failures in Macon and Columbus, there had been no distrust of the soundness of the State banks generally; but now they nearly all sus- pended. Cotton had been very high, running in 1836 as high as 17 cents a pound. Money was easy. Speculation was wild. The banks were engaged in a bitter war with
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each other, and there was not the slightest indication of the coming storm; but it burst suddenly and swept England, desolated the cities of North America, and for ten years raged with fury in Georgia.
The character of the calamity it brought and a fuller his- tory of it will be given in the next chapter.
At no time, perhaps, in Georgia history was there a fiercer political strife than at this time. The long and bitter war between the Clarke and Crawford parties, which only ended in the death of W. H. Crawford and the retirement of John Clarke from Georgia, had been almost entirely personal. There was no political principle involved, and it was merely a strife between leaders. The tariff question of 1828 found all parties in full agreement, all opposed to protection; but when the nullification measure in South Carolina was pro- posed parties became fiercely antagonistic and were divided by plain lines. The Troup party was an anti-Jackson nulli- fication party in the main. The Clarke party was generally for Jackson and the Union. The celebrations of the fourth of July were still observed, and a great dinner or barbecue always attended them. The political banqueters found these occasions a good time to toast the nullifiers or roast Andrew Jackson or Martin Van Buren, or vice versa. As is well known, the compromise measure of Mr. Clay averted a strife which at one time seemed inevitable. The blue cockade had been worn by defiant nullifiers, and the Jack- son men cried "Treason!" vociferously. The scales were evenly balanced in Georgia.
The congressional delegation was about evenly divided. Mr. Berrien and Mr. Forsyth were pronounced Jackson men; Governor Gilmer was opposed to nullification but not an adherent of Jackson.
It was during this time that young Robert Toombs, hearty, genial, fearless and gifted, first made his power as a young
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orator felt, and "Little Aleck," as Mr. Stephens was called, first caught the admiring ear of the Georgia people. They were anti-Jackson, States' rights men. Out of these two parties, known as States' rights men and Union men, sprang, during the next decade, the Whigs and Democrats.
The newspapers had now increased in number and influ- ence, and they were intensely partizan. There were now leading papers in Savannah, Augusta, Milledgeville, Macon and Columbus. The list, as given by the Macon Telegraph, in 1832 was :
The Athenian, Athens; the Chronicle, the Constitutionalist, the Courier, Augusta; the Enquirer, Columbus; the Georgia Messenger, the Advertiser, Macon; the Recorder, the Journal, Milledgeville; the Advertiser, Mt. Zion; the Republican, the Georgian, Savannah; the Cabinet, the News, the Christian Index, Washington; the Christian Repertory, Macon; the Miners' Journal, Dahlonega; and papers in Cassville, Coving- ton, Darien, Brunswick and Bainbridge.
The Georgian and Republican, Savannah, and the Chronicle and Constitutionalist, Augusta, were the dailies.
The strict construction views of the majority of Georgians had made any movement toward establishing a common school system of education abortive. There had been, how- ever, some provision to advance the cause of education. There had been appropriated $500,000 to poor schools and academies, the interest of the sum to be equally divided between them. No academy could get a share of the fund unless it was chartered, and this led to their being very nu- merous. They had the names of academies and a large board of trustees and a charter, but had few other features of a school of high grade. In 1834 there were forty-seven counties in which there were academies, in some several. The number increased annually until there were few coun- ties in which there was not at least one. In many of these only the English branches were taught, and but few of
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them had a hundred pupils. The amount granted to them was divided according to the number of pupils. The poor school fund was very small, and was carefully dispensed.
An application was made to the comptroller setting forth the number of children who attended school and the teachers were paid five cents a day for each pupil. Often the teachers did not render any account, and in 1834 there were forty-two counties who received nothing from the fund. Schools were established mainly by private effort, and in. every neighborhood where there were well-to-do people there was a good grammar-school or an academy. In several of the counties there were female academies. There was no general system of education and there was much illiteracy in the State, and $2,000 was appropriated by the Legislature to pay the cost of a commission, who should look closely into the common school system of New England and see if it might not wisely be introduced into Georgia.
The plan of manual labor schools came before the Leg- islature and received its indorsement.
While the State did something for academies and poor schools, it did nothing for the university, which depended on its tuition fees and the rental of the lands which had been given long before.
The religious history of this period has no such story of great advance as had that of the decade which preceded it. There was too much political strife and too much eagerness after money to favor religious movements, but the great revival of the last years of the twenties had left its effect upon all the churches. The Baptists and Methodists had mainly profited by the great awakening, though the Pres- byterians had shared with them in the ingathering. The Georgia Conference of the Methodists had now been cut off from the South Carolina and was making an earnest and to some degree successful effort to send the gospel to
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all parts of Georgia and Florida. The war in Florida with the Seminoles had to some degree disturbed things in the newer counties in southern Georgia; but in the up-country among the Indians there had been a good work done and circuits already laid, and so when the Indians were removed the itinerant preachers were on the ground. The circuits were very large, but the preachers preached nearly every day, and the people attended a week-day service almost as well as they attended one on the Sabbath. The camp- meetings were still a great influence for good, and were found in all the counties, new and old. We will get a more satisfactory account by glancing at each county in detail.
It was during this period that the great railroad system which has grown to such proportions in Georgia had its beginning. Railway building was in its infancy in the United States, but a line of road had been built out from Charleston reaching towards Augusta, and now, as we have seen elsewhere, plans were made to reach the interior of Georgia by railways. Many of these were chartered but never built, others chartered were never begun, but some were successfully carried through.
The first of these was the Central, which was to run from Savannah to Macon. It was chartered as the Central Railway and Canal Company, and an experimental survey was made under Colonel Cruger in 1834. There were two routes under consideration, one going through the hill country and making an air-line from Savannah to Macon; the other following the rivers and keeping near the water- courses. The last route was the one selected. The country through which the road made its way was very flat and swampy, and while heavy grading was not necessary, much bridging was demanded. There was an abundance of yel- low pine along the way, and railroad building in those days demanded much timber. The iron was a flat bar
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which was laid on a stringer and the stringers laid on cross- ties. Railroad building was in its infancy and the con- struction was very difficult and slow. There were no labor- saving machines and all the excavation and fillings were made with the shovel, the hand-barrow and dumping-cart. There was no town on the entire line of two hundred miles between Savannah and Macon, and all hope of a revenue depended upon the completion of the line. A bank was chartered to furnish funds, and the bills issued by it were used to pay the expense of construction.
The panic of 1837 came, with its desolations, soon after the road was begun, and the road was just completed when the depression ended. The first president of the road was W. W. Gordon, and its first chief engineer L. O. Rey- nolds, Esq.
The Georgia Railroad and Turnpike Company was char- tered in 1833, but the work was not begun until 1835. It was to run from Augusta to some undesignated point in middle Georgia. It had the same difficulties to encounter that had been met by its associate the Central, except that as it went westward it entered the hill country sooner and heavy grading was. necessary. The laborers were im- ported Irishmen, and the engineer corps came from Penn- sylvania. The Georgia Railroad Bank was chartered to give help to the construction, and in ten years from the time the work was begun in Augusta the road reached the village of Marthasville, in Dekalb county, where is now the city of Atlanta.
There was a decided objection on the part of the villages and towns along the line to having the road pass directly through them, and while the Georgia passed near the towns it left some of them a mile or more on one side.
Perhaps the most daring venture at this period was the enterprise entered into by the young city of Macon and the surrounding country to help it reach the west by a line of
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railway built largely by its own capital. It was at first designed to connect Forsyth in Monroe county with Macon and give the cotton-planters an easier way of conveying their cotton to market. It, too, was to be built by a bank, and an elegant building, now occupied by the city authori- ties in Macon, was erected for a banking building and rail- road offices. The heaviest work on the line was at the beginning of the work near Macon in cutting through the river hills; but the undaunted president, Mr. Griffin, despite the heavy outlay, did the work and declared a dividend of ten per cent. as soon as the first few miles were completed. The road had great difficulties to overcome, and, as we will see in the next chapter, the bank upon whose support it rested was forced at last to suspend for an indefinite time. Then the bank failed, and the road was sold and completed to Atlanta under another name. The banking house was sold, and after having been a medical college and a ware- house, it became at last a city hall. When the road became involved the directors worked hard to save it. They issued bank notes of all denominations and even change bills as low as 614 cents. They made the loudest boasts of their progress, and called for new subscriptions to stock. In 1842 the road had an engine, the "Ocmulgee," and a pas- senger coach with three compartments capable of accom- modating sixty-seven passengers. It had a line of stages at its terminus, which was Barnesville, to convey passengers northward, and in 1842 one could ride in the handsome new car forty miles for $3.15; and the total receipts for six months were for freight $6, 162, and for passengers $12,451. For years the bills had been under suspicion, and were hard to circulate out of Macon; but the bank pluckily attempted to resume specie payment. It made a pathetic effort to furnish what it did not have, using all kinds of delaying artifices; but the inevitable came. The bank failed hope- lessly, and the railroad had to be sold. It had reached
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Griffin, and a part of the line was laid with wooden rails and the cars were drawn by mules. The brave Griffin had made a hard fight and gone down and carried his friends with him. The road was bought by a Northern company for a song and reorganized as the Macon and Western, and for years was the best railroad property in Georgia.
The Western and Atlantic railroad was to run from some undesignated point in DeKalb county to Ross Landing on the Tennessee river. It was one of the most difficult enter- prises ever ventured on in Georgia. The other two great lines had some connection by water with the outside world, and could secure material for building with but little diffi- culty; but this road was to begin in the wilderness, over one hundred miles from the nearest point to a navigable river. There were rivers to bridge, great hills of stone to be cut through and mountains to tunnel. Every pound of iron and every working tool had to be brought from Macon. The work had no financial backing but the credit of the State, and had but begun when the financial crash of 1837 came on. But, despite all these difficulties, ten years after the first dirt was broken the cars ran from Ross Landing to Marthasville, or, as they are now known, from Atlanta to Chattanooga.
When one considers that railroad building in the United States was just begun, and that these roads were built by money furnished by stockholders and not on money bor- rowed on bonds, the work of building them will appear to be, as it was, a remarkable achievement. The roads were long in process of construction, and all of them were built on the same plan, with long stringers and flat bars, and all had the same small wood-burning locomotives.
I have, in order not to break abruptly the continuity of the story, anticipated the events of the next decade.
We turn now to the study of the counties.
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HEARD.
Heard county was laid out in 1830 from Troup, Carroll and Coweta and named in honor of that brave patriot Stephen Heard.
The eastern part of the county was very rugged, a part of it near Coweta very red land, and a great deal of it gray land broken into many hills. There were some good plan- tations on the Chattahoochee river and on the creeks. The western part of the county was a great pine forest, and had in it one of the largest quarries of monumental granite in the State. There is some fine land in the county, but much of it is only moderately fertile.
It was settled in the main by men of small means and plain ways. They were of the best class of Georgia yeo- manry, and in no county is there less pauperism or a better standard of morals than in the larger part of the county. There are some sections of Heard, on the hills near Alabama, as in all these western counties, where there is a great deal of illicit distilling and a rude people.
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