Georgia

By: Paul Finkelman, Alan Gallay

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Georgia

The only colony to bar slavery, Georgia was founded as a utopian experiment in 1733 by a group of British philanthropists, the Trustees of Georgia, who intended to redeem poor white Protestants, especially debtors and those persecuted in Catholic countries. The Trustees hoped to create a near-classless society. Settlers were given small plots of land, but no one could own more than five hundred acres. Alcohol was prohibited. Through hard work the Trustees expected their colonists to become productive citizens and good Christians. They prohibited slavery because they believed that the exploitation of slave labor would prevent settlers from developing a proper work ethic and would lead to their own debasement. (Some Trustees were concerned with slavery's negative impact on slaves, but for political reasons they did not publicize their views.) The neighboring slaveholding colony of South Carolina provided a model of what they wished to avoid: a society of rich planters, many poor white settlers, and thousands of abused slaves, a colony, by their own estimation, where virtue was in short supply.

Although many settlers approved of the prohibition on slavery (and the barring of free Africans from the colony), a group quickly formed that opposed the restrictions. The so-called Malcontents lobbied Parliament to take the colony away from the Trustees and permit slavery. The Malcontents argued that Georgia farmers could not compete with slaveholding planters in South Carolina, who could undercut them through cheaper labor costs. They believed that Georgia could not develop without the use of slave labor.

The Anglo-Spanish War (1739–1744), also known as the War of Jenkins' Ear, led to severe population loss in Georgia, as colonists fled the Spanish threat on their Florida border, and the Trustees had difficulty attracting new settlers. Losing interest in the colony by the late 1740s and dispirited by Malcontent pressure, the Trustees permitted limited slaveholding in 1750. (Shortly thereafter, they made preparations to turn the colony over to the king in 1755.) As soon as slavery was legalized and the restrictions removed on landholdings, planters with large numbers of bondpeople flocked to Georgia from South Carolina and the British West Indies. They were enticed by the fertile lands and the reward of fifty acres for every slave they brought with them.

The Georgia Lowcountry was conducive to rice production using the tidal-flow method, as slaves could be employed to build the sluices necessary for periodic flooding of the crop with freshwater. South Carolina's rice crop was a main food source for slaves of other British colonies, especially the West Indies. Few areas could produce rice profitably, and Georgia thus had a valuable staple to cultivate and sell, which quickly led to the growth of a rich and powerful slaveholding class that politically dominated Georgia.

Even before the arrival of the first slaves, the Trustees enacted a slave code in 1750 that sought to protect bondpeople from the worst abuses of the British colonial slave system. For instance, masters could be fined for mistreatment of their slaves. But the code was short lived. Upon becoming a royal colony in 1755, Georgia replaced its code with a draconian set of laws modeled on the South Carolina slave code of 1740. Designed to strictly control slave behavior, the white community was empowered both on and off the plantation to maintain physical authority over the slaves. Masters could be fined for not providing sufficient clothing, food, and housing, but the laws did not define “sufficient,” leaving masters to do as they pleased. On the other hand, although slaves could not testify against their masters (or any white person) in cases of excessive cruelty, masters had to prove that they did not sadistically harm their bondpeople. Murder, castration, and burning of slaves were prohibited, though the government could invoke these punishments for capital crimes. Much of the code was concerned with preventing conspiracies and insurrections and creating a ticket-and-patrol system to regulate slave behavior off the plantation. It also instituted a hefty fifteen-pound fine upon any white person who taught a slave how to write.

The slave population in Georgia grew quickly as a result of the needs of rice production. In 1756 there were fewer than two thousand slaves in Georgia. By 1766 that number had quadrupled. It nearly doubled again within seven years, so that by 1773 there were fifteen thousand Africans and African Americans in the colony, which had a total population of thirty-three thousand. Most of the arrivals in the mid-1760s came via the African slave trade. The African immigrants tended to be younger than thirty and were taken from Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Angola. The majority performed the difficult labor associated with rice production, but a substantial number were employed in Savannah and other towns in craft positions and as unskilled laborers.

The American Revolution was a period of chaos in Georgia, where large areas lacked civil authority and where governments—one British and sometimes two American—competed for control. Roving bands of Loyalists and rebels, often only loosely aligned with any government, captured and appropriated slaves. Many slaves took advantage of the upheaval to run away, as thousands fled to British lines hoping for freedom. When the British evacuated Savannah in 1782, they took four thousand to six thousand slaves with them, and thousands more were carried by their masters to eastern Florida and other colonies. All told, by the end of the war, two-thirds of the slave population had left the state. Of those carried away by the British, most were denied their freedom, kept enslaved, and sent to other parts of the British Empire, notably to the West Indies. Some received freedom and resettlement in Canada, and many of them were later transported to Sierra Leone.

At the end of the war in 1783, Georgia slaveholders hungrily sought to restore their labor supply and rebuild their plantations by importing so-called New Africans. By 1787 the slave population numbered 20,000, and in three more years another 9,000 were brought in, mostly from Africa and the West Indies. The discovery of a new cash crop, cotton, spurred by the Industrial Revolution and Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin on a Georgia plantation, led to slavery's expansion in the Upcountry. The phenomenal development of cotton prompted massive importation of slaves from Africa and from colonies to the north, especially Virginia. The slave population of Georgia jumped from little more than 29,000 in 1790 to over 105,000 in 1810, with approximately half living in the Upcountry.

Upcountry slave life differed from that in the Lowcountry in several ways. Gang labor to produce cotton replaced the task system of rice production. There was also a decline in specialization and in the percentage of slaves employed in skilled trades, as most Upcountry slaves performed fieldwork. Upcountry bondpeople had fewer opportunities to engage in trade off the plantation, since cotton planters tended to purchase the slaves' privately produced goods in order to retain greater control over them. Still, even Upcountry slaves participated in the underground economy that characterized many slave colonies and states.

Producing vegetables in garden plots, keeping or stealing chickens, and making and selling craft items were just a few of the ways African Americans earned money, usually on Sundays, when they were reprieved from forced labor. The economic activities of this informal economy were so pervasive that some whites believed their slaves controlled the supply of many foodstuffs in Savannah, particularly fresh vegetables, fruits, and eggs. Slaves spent their earnings to supplement their diet, obtain items of clothing, and purchase accoutrements for their housing. These economic activities were one of the many ways bondpeople made their existence as slaves bearable, giving them a degree of control over their lives and over those who oppressed them.

Slaves also used their income to build and support their own churches, as Christianity became central in the African American community. The former slave Andrew Bryan led the way, opening the First African Baptist Church in 1788. Hostile whites responded with violence to African American religiosity, particularly when it meant independent congregations. But with the support of influential whites and through their own determination, African Americans secured the right to create and maintain their own religious institutions. Although laws provided that at least one white person had to be in attendance during meetings, this rule was rarely enforced, and the churches operated their own affairs.

The two chief denominations among African Americans in Georgia were Methodist and Baptist. Andrew Bryan was the first ordained Baptist minister in Savannah, and his ministry reached out to whites and blacks alike. When Bryan died in 1812, more than five thousand people—black and white—attended his funeral. In the Baptist Association, to which the Georgia African American Baptist churches belonged before the Civil War, African Americans held full voting rights.

Slaves also attended some white churches. In Savannah these churches were largely segregated, except for the Independent Presbyterian Church. Before 1830, in Georgia's rural areas, most slaves did not belong to individual churches but were exposed to Christianity through itinerant preachers, white and black. Religious gatherings in the slave quarters, with or without a master's approval, took place at night and on Sundays.

By 1820 Georgia's African American population had increased to 151,419, and it grew by nearly 50 percent in the following decade. (Less than 1 percent of blacks were free.) In 1820 the Lowcountry African American population represented more than 70 percent of the total population in most areas, while making up 30 to 50 percent of the Upcountry districts. Some planters began to migrate with their slaves to the new cotton areas of Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, but Georgia's migration was not as large as South Carolina's and Virginia's, particularly because there was still much good cotton land to be had in the 1820s in western Georgia.

What began as a utopian experiment to bar slavery—and had as its impulse the belief that slavery was detrimental to slaves, slaveholders, and society as a whole—ended with the creation of a white society totally devoted to slavery's maintenance, keeping its underclass fettered and laboring. Georgia had not merely become another slave state—by the late 1820s it was one of the cornerstones of the South, and it would actively assert a proslavery position in the coming decades.

In the four decades leading to the Civil War Georgia gradually emerged as a major force in Southern society and national politics. Population figures illustrate the growing importance of the state. In 1790 the state had only 82,500 residents (excluding Indians), of whom 29,000 (35 percent) were slaves. By 1820 there were just over 340,000 people in the state, with 150,000 slaves making up 43 percent of the population. Slaves were not evenly distributed; some counties along the coast, as well as in the fertile southwest, were more than 70 percent slave. By 1860 the state's 462,198 slaves constituted almost 44 percent of the entire population of 1,057,286. More importantly the state now had the second largest slave population in the nation and was threatening so surpass Virginia as the state with the most slaves.

With its growth in size Georgia also grew in importance for the emerging slave South. Georgia's Howell Cobb would serve as governor and in antebellum cabinets, while his brother, Thomas R. R. Cobb, became one of the most important southern legal theorists to write about slave law. His Inquiry Into the Law of Negro Slavery, published in 1858, was the only significant treatise on the law of slavery written by a southerner. Cobb also helped found the Lumpkin School of Law, which later became the University of Georgia Law School. The goal of the school was in part to provide a southern, proslavery education for southern lawyers. Georgia moved early toward secession with the Cobb brothers leading the charge. Less enthusiastic about secession was Congressman Alexander Stephens, but his support was critical to the Confederacy, and he became Vice President of the putative nation. In an early speech Stephens proclaimed to the whole world that slavery was the “Cornerstone” of the Confederacy. It was also the cornerstone of Georgia, where cotton and rice made white planters fabulously wealthy, while their slaves toiled under the state's brutal sun.

Some Georgia slaves sought freedom, but escape to the North was difficult. Thomas Sims managed to get to Boston by boat, but was returned under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. William and Ellen Craft were more successful. The light-skinned Ellen disguised herself as a young white man headed for the North for medical treatment with William acting as a loyal slave. They reached Boston and then went on to England to avoid capture. Slaves escaping by boat also reached New York and Maine, from where a series of Georgia governors attempted to have the white sailors who helped them extradited for prosecution. These interstate controversies inflamed relations between the states and illustrated the instability of slavery existing side-by-side with freedom in the antebellum period.

The Civil War undermined and then destroyed Georgia's slave regime. In early 1863 black soldiers stationed on the South Carolina Sea Islands invaded south Georgia and at least one owner was introduced to her former slave, who had escaped and now returned in a blue uniform, carrying a rifle. General Sherman's march to the sea destroyed much of Georgia's agricultural capacity as well as its railroads. While remembered by many whites as a moment of horror, the march can also be seen as one of the greatest moments of liberation in human history. General Sherman's army brought freedom to hundreds of thousands of slaves in the state. At least 3,500 of these slaves joined the army, helping to liberate their own kinfolk. Tens of thousands of other ex-slaves served in noncombat roles.

At the end of the war Georgia, like most other slave states, attempted to re-impose a form of bondage on the freedmen and freedwomen of the state. These laws were repealed when an integrated government came into power. Even before this took place the Freedmen's Bureau began to open schools for blacks. Blacks in Georgia also had access to higher education when Atlanta University was founded in 1865, Atlanta Baptist College for Men (later Morehouse College) began operations in 1867, and Clark University opened in 1870. Morris Brown opened in 1881 as did Spelman College, which began to offer black women higher education.

As in the rest of the South, blacks held public office during Reconstruction. In Georgia at least 135 blacks held some office during this period. A number were elected to the Georgia legislature in 1868 but were expelled by the white majority, and then reinstated by an act of Congress in 1870. No blacks held statewide office or a position of leadership in the state legislature during this period. Only one, Jefferson F. Long, served in Congress, and then just for a few weeks in 1871. He did however have the honor of being the first black Congressman to speak on the floor of the House. Illustrative of conditions in Georgia, Long's house had to be kept under armed guard while he was at Congress to prevent an attack from the Ku Klux Klan. Reconstruction came to an end in Georgia in 1871, however, and with the return of white rule blacks lost what little political power they had acquired.

Although without political power, blacks in postReconstruction Georgia did have the advantage of access to relatively large cities—Atlanta and Savannah. The former had a number of black colleges by the 1880s, and in 1890 Georgia opened the first state supported college for blacks in Savannah—what would later become Savannah State College. These cities also offered blacks a refuge from the oppression of rural poverty and the violence of white terrorism that plagued most Georgia blacks in the late nineteenth century. In Atlanta blacks had some hope of economic success and even the chance to assert themselves in other ways. In the 1880s, for example, black workers occasionally organized strikes for higher wages. Although they failed, the strikes did illustrate the sense of freedom the city offered. In the 1890s blacks in Georgia attempted to ally with white populists, and this alliance was successful for a short time. But ultimately the populists, led by Tom Watson, would turn to race baiting and segregation in their efforts to gain political control of the state. Meanwhile the educational opportunities of Atlanta led to a rise of a black intelligentsia in Atlanta, spearheaded by W. E. B. Du Bois, who moved there at the end of the century.

By then Atlanta was a thoroughly segregated city in a thoroughly segregated state. Yet the sheer number of blacks—more than a million in 1900—gave them the opportunity to create some of their own institutions in the next century. One of the nation's most important black-owned businesses, the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, would be founded by a former slave in 1905, and other black businesses would follow. Blacks in Atlanta and the rest of the state would accomplish these things in the face of growing racism, repression, a bloody race riot in 1906, and almost complete disfranchisement by 1908.

See also American Revolution; Artisans; Baptists and African Americans; Black Church; Caribbean; Discrimination; Fugitive Slaves; Kidnapping; Laws and Legislation; Literacy in the Colonial Period; Methodist Church and African Americans; Occupations; Religion; Riots and Rebellions; Segregation; Slave Trade; and Work.

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