USA > Georgia > The story of Georgia and the Georgia people, 1732 to 1860 > Part 36
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The State treasury was empty. The State bonds were protested, and its credit was worthless. The Central Bank, which the State had fathered, was hopelessly involved; the
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Bank of Darien, in which it had much invested, went into bankruptcy; the Monroe Railroad and Banking Company was insolvent; there was a general crash in every direction.
In 1841 the exhibit of the banks showed : Planters, cap- ital $535,000, circulation $70,000; Planters and Mechanics, capital $270,000, circulation $178,000; Commercial, capital $347,000, circulation $7,000; Georgia Railroad, capital $600,000, circulation $428,000; Central Railroad, capital $406,840, circulation $370,000; Monroe, capital $400,000, circulation $90,000; Augusta Insurance, capital $500,000, circulation $41,000; Hawkinsville, capital $160,000; circu- lation $77,000; Columbus Insurance, capital $600,000, cir- culation $4,669; Darien, capital $419,000, circulation $194,000; Ocmulgee, capital $337,000, circulation $ 10,000; Western, capital $163,000, circulation $127,000; State of Georgia, capital $1,500,000, circulation $288,000; Bruns- wick, capital $200,000, circulation $54,000. This exhibit shows the extent of the contraction. There was for seven years no permanent improvement in the price of cotton. Thousands of solvent farmers had indorsed for their neigh- bors and were now forced to sell everything to pay their debts.
During this period, after Governor Gilmer's term had expired, Charles J. McDonald was chosen as governor. He was a South Carolinian of Highland Scotch parentage. He was educated in Columbia, S. C .; came to Macon and began the practice of law, and was at one time mayor of the city. He was living in Macon when he was elected governor. He was a man of fine person, sound sense and invincible courage. He found financial matters in a terrible condition, and had a Legislature afraid to confront the difficulties by taxing people who were almost driven to desperation by the State of affairs. The staunch governor did not approve of any dodging. It was absolutely necessary to increase the tax assessment or go to the wall. The Legislature refused to levy a higher tax. The governor promptly sus-
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pended all orders on the treasurer and forbade him to pay any new appropriations until funds were furnished to pay the old ones. He finally carried his point, but matters were still in a chaotic state when Governor Crawford was elected in IS43.
Governor Crawford found the panic had about exhausted its fury. It had continued for near six years, and had left behind it ruin and desolation; but the time for reaction had come. As will be seen, he restored the credit of the State. The depression may be said to have ended when he came into office. A number of banks had failed; many wealthy men were paupers, and not a few who were poor at the beginning of the troubles came out of the ruins enriched with spoils. It was the second great panic Georgia had passed through, and in its results the most injurious of any until the crash of 1865.
George W. Crawford, the Whig who succeeded Governor McDonald, was a native Georgian, the son of Peter Craw- ford, long a famous politician of Columbia county. He was born in Columbia county and was educated at Prince- ton College. He was a man of great practical sense and of fine business capacity. He entered. on his office when the financial tide had reached its lowest ebb and was just about to turn. He redeemed the credit of the State, and by pledging his private fortune and using his personal influence he gained the consent of the banks to receive the State's obligations at their face value. Mr. Crawford was after- ward in General Taylor's cabinet. When his term had ended he returned to his home near Bel Air in Richmond county. He came into office when the railroads were un- finished, the banks suspended, business depressed, and lived to see a line of railway from Savannah to Chattanooga and a general revival of prosperity.
In order to protect the note-holders of the Central Bank the State issued bonds payable in five years and ordered
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the stock it had in the various banks sold and the Central Bank bills taken in payment, and finally, ir 1842, the bank was put in process of liquidation, but remained nominally in existence till after 1850, when its charter was again ex- tended that it might wind up its affairs.
The general disturbance in financial matters, the constant contraction of the circulating medium, the painful fall in the prices of real estate and negroes affected most seriously middle Georgia and the cities, but it had little effect upon upper Georgia and the grain-growing portions of the State. These independent farmers had but little concern about banks, for they had but little to do with them. They made all their supplies and lived contentedly at home. Therc was a constant influx of the best people into this newly settled part of Georgia. The gold product had reached its highest point and was declining; for the old methods of placer-mining had not as yet been replaced by the great flumes and stamp-mills. The Cherokee country, from which the Indians had now been finally removed, was rap- idly peopled, and crowds of immigrants were on the roads from the eastern counties and from South and North Caro- lina to open farms in Cobb, Cass, Cherokee, Floyd, and others of the new counties. There was no railway commu- nication, no telegraph, few mails; and while the older parts of the State and the black belt, as it was called, were in such financial distress, there was little of it known in these sections, and the tide of advancement rolled on.
The railroad mania which seized the State between 1833 and 1836 had resulted in beginning and abandoning sundry wild schemes. The ideas entertained of the expense and difficulty of railroad-making were very crude, and it is almost Judicrous to see with what confidence men embarked in the wildest schemes. There was a fearful collapse in many of them and in many other schemes. Insurance com- panies, mining companies and manufacturing companies
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failed. But perhaps the wildest scheme of all these wild times was the Mora multicaulis speculation. The Mora mul- ticaulis was the mulberry which fed the silkworm, and for- tunes were to be made in rearing trees of this kind. Many went wildly into it. Orchards were planted, silkworms were bought, cocoons were imported and silk was spun. The State offered a bonus, and Georgia, which had failed a hundred years before in raising silk, was now to succeed. It was, however, but the delusion of an hour. Georgia repealed the law offering a prize for raw silk, mulberry orchards were cut down, and in a little time the wild Mora multicaulis mania was relegated, like that of the tulip mania in Holland, to almost oblivion.
From the opening of the new purchase in 1825 to 1837 there had been a marvelous growth in the two new cities of Macon and Columbus. There was a line of steamers from Macon to Darien, and they towed down barges laden with cotton. Magnificent mansions crowned the hilltops in Macon. The new Georgia female college was erected. Vineville had been settled and handsome homes built in it, and there were great enterprises projected by the young city. Columbus, too, had grown with great rapidity and there was, as always is in new towns, a boom in both cities, and then came the crash. The calamity did not come at once and disappear in a short time, but was a succession of disasters until the whole community was involved. In these new cities there was not an important cotton house that did not suspend, and many of them were hopelessly bankrupt. The country, however, was fresh and productive and the large planters were in the habit of making all their supplies, and the smaller farmers were compelled to do so or suffer, and so, despite the scarcity of money, the country people who were not in debt lived in comfort.
Political excitement in Georgia was very high during this period. Mr. Calhoun had many followers and Mr. Van
FULGER-CIN.
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Gov. WILSON . LUMPKIN.
PULASKI MONUMENT.
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Buren was bitterly hated. The States' rights men and the old party lines of Crawford and Clarke were still drawn. There were no Federalists and no protectionists in Georgia, but there were Troup men and Clarke men, bank men and anti-bank men, and Jackson men and Calhoun men. These parties were known as Whigs and Democrats after 1840.
Then came the unique campaign of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," of "hard cider and log cabins," and the elec- tion of General Harrison and Mr. Tyler. The Troup States' rights, anti-Jackson men were generally Whigs, the old Clarke men Jackson Democrats.
There had been a steady advance in the interest of edu- cation. As incorporated academies received some aid from the State, all the schools of any size established in any of the counties were academies.
Three new colleges, Mercer University at Penfield, es- tablished by the Baptists, first as a manual labor school; Emory College, at Oxford, which had sprung from the manual labor school at Covington, and the Georgia Female College at Macon, the first institution in the world to grant diplomas to women, had opened. Despite the pressure in the financial world and the bankruptcy of many who had promised large subscriptions, all these schools were opened during these depressing times and had from the first an encouraging patronage. The depression was so long-con -. tinued that the country gradually adjusted itself to it, and in spite of its existence and its effect on the cities, there was steady advance in all directions in the newer parts of Georgia. This advance had been at the expense of the older counties. The eastern counties, now nearly one hun- dred years settled, sent off large colonies to the western counties, where land was fresher.
The rich planters, who had estates in Twiggs, Laurens, Wilkinson and other middle Georgia counties, opened large cotton plantations in Thomas, Decatur, Early, Lee and
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Baker. The planters of Greene removed to Troup, Meri- wether and Harris. The towns of Greensboro, Warrenton, Washington and Madison had begun to wane, and the towns in the western part of the State, Lagrange, Newnan, and Greenville, to grow. As the plantations in the older counties were sold they were generally purchased by planters who already had large holdings near them, and, if not absorbed, were put in charge of overseers; and so the white proprietors diminished in number, and the country commu- nities, once thickly peopled, became merely large cotton plantations. Where there were at one time farms of often a dozen separate and independent landholders, there was now but one plantation. All those features which had be- longed to the life of forty years before had disappeared from the heart of middle Georgia. The white people who held their places in these old counties were of the finest type of sturdy, pushing, intelligent planters, and there was now a transfer of old middle Georgia to the cotton belt of the western counties, and the life we have portrayed as being found in Wilkes and Greene in 1820 was reproduced in the new counties in 1840. Lagrange, Greenville, New- nan, Hamilton and Thomaston had all the freshness and vigor of youth. The flush times had been times of great improvement in architecture everywhere, and the large man- sion with its beautiful Corinthian columns, its broad veran- das, its wide galleries, its large rooms and green Venetian blinds, was found alike in city and in town, and at some places in the country neighborhoods. There were among the wealthier classes of middle Georgia the same features of life found in the older counties in Virginia and which had come by direct descent from the English country gen- tleman.
The railroads had but now been built, and there was still a necessity to use private conveyances very largely. The old gig and chair now gave way to the new covered
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buggy and the comfortable traveling carriage and ba- rouche or Jersey wagon. The equipages found in the county assemblages were sometimes very handsome and the dressing was extravagant. Wealth had wonderfully in- creased and luxury came in its wake.
The low-country people lived among themselves, and social life on the coast had undergone little change for fifty years. The political influence of the coast people, which had once been controlling, had now to a large degree lost its power, although Senator Berrien, a Savannah man, held his own against all comers.
The up-country presented at this time some very dif- ferent features of social life. In Cass, Floyd, Murray and Chattooga there was quite a large number of middle Geor- gia and South Carolina slaveholders, who were cotton- raisers, and there were among them the same features of society which were still found in the older counties; but in the mountains proper, in Lumpkin, Union, Gilmer and Rabun, there was an entirely different type of people, The fearful illiteracy of the Georgia people, as shown by the cen- sus of those days, was mainly found in the mountains, and in what was known as the pine-barren or wire-grass country.
In the sketches of the various mountain counties I have endeavored to picture as accurately as I could the features of rural life in the Georgia highlands. Life in the moun- tains was very hard, and the drinking habits of the people were like those pictured by Ramsey as in Scotland eighty years ago. The farmers made only corn, and much of that they had distilled into whisky and drank the whisky.
The amount of taxes paid by some of these mountain counties was not equal to the receipts from the poor school fund, small as it was at that time. There were, however, in every mountain county some good bodies of land which were settled by those who valued education and sought it for their children.
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At this period, however, nearly sixty years ago, the country was almost entirely new and the settlements of the people few and far apart. They were a kindly, hospitable and honest people, and the traveler who came to the cabin in which they made their homes shared their simple fare of corn bread and bacon and rested securely on a bed of straw in a home on which there had never been a lock. Robbery and murder were almost unknown, although when the people met on muster and court days and drank freely of corn whisky, there was much rough-and-tumble fighting. The features of middle Georgia life of 1800 were found in the mountain country in 1840.
The wire-grass country in some of the southwestern coun- ties had much less of uniformity and many more striking contrasts than were to be found in middle or upper Georgia. In this section some habitable land sold for less than $50 for 490 acres; other lands were sold at $500 for 250 acres. The cotton-planter with one hundred negroes lived not far from the poor ranchman who had never owned a negro. Men who had graduated at the best colleges and whose libraries were filled with choice books, and men who could not write their names and who had not even a Bible in their cabins, were members of the same grand jury.
The cultivated and wealthy classes were but few. In examining a large number of wills and appraisements in Thomas, I find in its early day, in the careful enumeration of everything owned by the settler, no mention of any books at all save in two or three instances, and then the books were very few. The mountain people lived in settle- ments close together, but the ranchmen and large planters lived at great distances apart. So good schools were almost impossible.
There was still much game in the woods, and hunting was a source of profit as well as a pastime, and the children grew up keen woodsmen though poor scholars. In the
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pine woods the people were of great shrewdness, as many a trafficker found to his sorrow; and while the settler was in the main an honest fellow, he was a trifle careless as to whose calf he put the branding-iron on, and, like his Scotch ancestor, he was careful of the "siller " and a little too fond of a "wee drop." The prevalence of the prefix "Mac" or "Mc " in all this wire-grass country will show the High- land origin of most of these people.
The religious condition of Georgia was never the same after the revival which began in 1827. The camp-meeting had become the great revival agency, and camp-meetings were held by the Methodists and Baptists and Presbyte- rians. In middle Georgia there were great lavishness and almost extravagance displayed at these meetings. For weeks before arrangements were made for tenting. The tent was a large sheathing house, with a dirt floor and a board-covered roof. The floor was covered with wheat straw, and the beds placed either on scaffolding or on the straw. The great log fire behind the tent served for a cooking place. Pigs and lambs were barbecued, and chick- ens by the score were prepared for the hosts of guests who received free entertainment. Every one was welcomed, and for all an abundant feast was provided. The tabernacle was generally a large shed covered with boards. There was preaching four times every day, and the preacher had full swing. These open-air meetings were the field services of this century. The negroes had their place reserved and came in great numbers to the meetings. These meetings were of all grades, from the humblest in the mountains to the elegant encampments in Burke or Warren or Greene. But the regular protracted meeting, or four days' meeting, as it was called, was becoming an institution among Meth- odists and Baptists. Each of these churches was energet- ically pressing its work as the tide rolled westward, and was winning large numbers of adherents, native Georgians.
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Pierce, Mitchell, Dawson, Bacon, Few, Key, Longstreet and Warren, who had liberal educations, were in the pulpit, while George W. Crawford, Toombs, Stephens, Herschel V. Johnson and Colquitt, all native Georgians, were among the great stump-speakers of the day.
The notable men of the first era, Baldwin, Few, Jackson, Glascock and Walton, had all passed away, and those of the second, David B. Mitchell, Clayton, L. Q. C. Lamar and Oliver H. Prince, had now given way to a group of brilliant young men who were on opposite sides of local issues and who were to win fame in the future. During this era ap- peared that phenomenal book "Georgia Scenes." No American before Longstreet attempted a realistic and accu- rate story of American life. The "Sam Slick" of Hali- burton was a caricature, and the stories of Cooper were romances; but the "Georgia Scenes" told of Georgia life as it really was. It has had many imitators but no succes- sors, and is worth more as a true history of a class of Geor- gia people than any record of the time.
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CHAPTER XI.
1847 TO 1860.
Governor Towns-Howell Cobb-Herschel V. Johnson-Joseph E. Brown- The Completion of the Main Railroad Lines-A Picture of the Georgia Peo- ple in the Middle of the Century-The Sea Island People-The Middle: Georgia Planters-The Georgia Yeomanry-Introduction of Commercial Fertilizers-Manufacturing in the Rural Districts-Educational Facilities- The Middle Georgia Negroes-The Middle Georgia Towns and Villages- Religious Improvement-The Blue Limestone Country Developed-The Piedmont Country-Wonderful Development of Southwest Georgia-The Wire-grass Country again-M. & B. and A. & G. R. R .- Features of Every- day Life-Days of Prosperity-Banks-The Panic of 1857-Suspension of the Banks-Passage of the Stay Law-Illiteracy of the People-Measure of Thomas R. R. Cobb to Dispel It-The Daily Press-The Southern Cultiva- tor-The Agricultural Society-The First Agricultural Fair in Georgia-The End of the Current History-General Account of the Origin of the Georgians- Coming of the Catholic Irish and of the Jewish Traders-The New Counties Glanced at : Banks, Hart, White, Milton, Dawson, Towns, Pickens, Fannin, Spalding, Clayton, Fulton, Whitfield, Polk, Gordon, Dougherty, Terrell, Clay, Chattahoochee, Schley, Clinch, Coffee, Echols, Dodge, Johnson, Pierce, Worth, Brooks, Glascock, Charlton, Haralson, McDuffie, Rockdale, Oconee. Authorities as before. Acts of the Legislature for period under survey, news- paper files, personal recollections and personal investigations into county records.
Governor Crawford, after four years of efficient service, left the executive mansion to Governor Geo. W. Towns, who had been chosen to succeed him.
Governor Towns was born in Wilkes county and admitted to the bar in Alabama. He removed to Talbot county, and while living there began his political career. He was elected to Congress for three terms and then elected governor. He was a man of great suavity and exceedingly popular with his party. During his administration peace with Mexico came, and the complications which followed brought about strife between the fire-eaters, as the secessionists were called,
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and the Union men. This strife was very bitter, and ulti- mated in a division of the Democrats into Southern rights and Union parties; and when Governor Towns's term was ended Howell Cobb was nominated by the Union party, and was elected by a large majority. Mr. Cobb was born in Jefferson county. He was a man of fine native gifts, and had had the best advantages for education that the State afforded. He was genial and popular, and had been elected to Congress when quite young and had served four terms, and had served as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
On the election of Mr. Buchanan in 1856 he was given a seat in his cabinet, and was occupying that position when Georgia seceded. He then resigned from the cabinet and returned to Georgia, and was elected a member of the Con- vention which formed the constitution of the Confederate States. When the war began he entered the army as colonel, and was made a brigadier-general, and then placed in com- mand of a department.
After the war was over he again entered upon the prac- tice of law with his kinsman Judge Jackson and removed to Macon. While on a visit to New York he died very sud- denly.
Herschel V. Johnson, who succeeded him as governor, was a native of Burke, was graduated at Athens, and was admitted to the bar when quite young. His advancement was very rapid; and while Governor Towns was in office he was appointed by him to a vacancy in the office of senator of the United States. After his term in the Senate expired he was elected a judge of the superior court. He was then nominated a candidate for governor; and after a very hotly contested election, by the narrow majority of 500 he was chosen governor over Chas. J. Jenkins.
He served as governor two terms. He was an intense Southern rights man. But when the Democratic party re- pudiated Stephen A. Douglas and nominated Breckinridge,
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he took the side of the Douglas party, and was placed as second man on the ticket. He doubted the wisdom of se- cession, and took no active part in affairs during the war. He returned to his estate in Jefferson county and died there while judge of the superior court. He was famous for his great power as a platform speaker, for his deep devotion to his friends and intense hatred of his foes.
He was succeeded by Joseph E. Brown, to whom we have alluded in our sketch of Cherokee county. Mr. Brown was born in South Carolina, but his father, soon after his birth, removed to Georgia and settled near Gaddistown in Union county. He was a worthy man and, while in hum- ble circumstances, was an independent farmer. Joseph his son resolved to secure an education, and went over to Pickens county in South Carolina and spent a few years in a good country school. He then studied law; and attract- ing the attention of Dr. Lewis, a man of means and of broad views, he was provided by him with money to go to the law school of Yale College. He was successful from his beginning as a lawyer in Canton, was elected to the senate of the State when a young man, was then a judge, and now he was chosen governor.
He was governor for three terms, and was regarded as one of the most astute men in the land. He had many bitter enemies and many ardent friends. His life has been written by his friend Colonel Fielder, and the story of the events and times in which he bore so large a part has been well told by another warm friend, Colonel Isaac W. Avery.
I have now given a short sketch of every governor of Georgia from 1732 to 1860, and a rapid recital of the main events in Georgia history up to 1847, and it now remains for me to put in one chapter the story of those last years which marked the close of an epoch such as can never be 31
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