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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Freedom is a place: Black self-determination in the Low Country & Sea Islands, 1865-1900

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Freedom is a place: Black self-determination in the Low Country & Sea Islands, 1865-1900

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Content Freedom is a Place: Black Self-Determination in the Low Country & Sea Islands, 1865-1900
By Tasneem Siddiqui

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES & ETHNICITY)

December 2015

Committee:
Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley (Chair)
Dr. Sarah Gualtieri
Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Dr. Shana Redmond
Dr. Sherman Jackson

© Copyright 2015 Tasneem Siddiqui

2

Table of Contents

Abstract 3

Introduction 4

Chapter 1: The Uneven Development of the Low Country and Sea Islands 25

Chapter 2: The Promise of Land and the Freedmen’s Bureau 48

Chapter 3: As Goes the South, So Goes the Nation 98

Chapter 4: Racial Capitalism and the Struggle for Black Self-Determination 129

Conclusion 166

Appendices 174

Bibliography 186

3

Abstract

Freedom is a Place refers to the post-Reconstruction, revolutionary, spatial struggle for
land waged by rural emancipated Black labor in the Low Country and Sea Islands off the
coast of South Carolina, and in particular, Georgia. Freedom is a Place covers the failure
of radical Reconstruction up to the turn of the twentieth century. Faced with what
W.E.B. Du Bois termed “the Counterrevolution of Property” and the ways in which
political governance, economy, and social organization, along with extralegal, and state-
sanctioned structural violence, played in the defeat of this revolutionary struggle,
Freedom is a Place addresses how rural Black communities addressed racial violence,
expropriation, and the shifting use and exchange values of property. The queries guiding
this dissertation are: how does a place that was deeply embedded in the global economy,
and that was at the center of Georgia’s Black radical tradition and, thus, central to
political struggles and revolution, affect, and be affected by, the emergence of the post-
1865 American state? How is Black radical agrarian political activity at the center of this
formation? I trace this dialectic historically within the context of: the failure of federal
land policies during Reconstruction; the Darien Insurrection of 1899; and the expansion
of federal, state, economic, and judiciary capacities throughout the 1890s, specifically
examining the effects of increased commerce, natural disasters, and the rise of Populist
movements in Georgia. In each of these contexts, dominant regional blocs marshaled
public resources to produce conditions of geographic dispossession, legitimized
principally through historically-specific racial logics.

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Introduction
There is a place where shackled Igbo people revolted against their captivity and
flew home;
1
a place where “peculiar people” pray to Allah,
2
Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito
Man;
3
a place where “if you surrendered to the air, you could ride it” (Morrison 1977,
337). There is a place called Ibo Landing, on an unnamed Carolina Sea Island, where
Julie Dash's 1991 film, Daughters of the Dust, opens a geographic story of a Gullah
community, set around the turn of the twentieth century. Her film powerfully engages
time and place in apposition with Black women’s multigenerational narratives to
interrogate themes of: Black interiority, sociality, identity, diasporic consciousness,
4
and
alternative conceptions of property and possession. Through voiceovers and visual
images, Daughters calls into question the unmalleability of existing geographies, and
elicits “a terrain through which different geographic stories” of Ibo Landing (and Black

1
Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel The Song of Solomon uses the story of the flying Africans (a retelling of the
Igbo Rebellion on St. Simons Island where women, men, and children walked into the ocean to return to
Africa), as a narrative device, depicting the everyday lives of Black Americans in the industrialized North
through processes of racism, exploitation, and displacement. The Song of Solomon follows Macon
“Milkman” Dead III journey south; imagining home, uncovering his family’s histories, liberation, and
learning how to fly. Toni Morrison’s The Song of Solomon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977)
2
“The Gullah called themselves ‘a peculiar people,’” a phrase taken directly from the New Testament:
“But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people that ye should shew
forth the praise of him who had called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (I Peter 2:9). See
Margaret Washington Creel’s A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the
Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988). Additionally, historian Michael Gomez points to
the islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia specifically the “coastal islands […of] Sapelo, St.
Simons, St. Helena, and their environs […] [as] the collective site of the largest gathering of African
Muslims in early North America” (Gomez 2005,143). Michael Gomez’s Black Crescent: The Experience
and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
3
Dr. Buzzard refers to a root doctor and the Bolito Man is a colorful way of talking about luck or playing
the numbers. See Cornelia Walker Bailey’s God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: A Saltwater Geechee
Talks About Life on Sapelo Island, Georgia (New York: Anchor Books, 2001).
4
Manthia Diawara, “Black American Cinema: The New Realism,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia
Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3-25. Ntongela Masilela, “The Los Angeles School of Black
Filmmakers,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 107-117.

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diasporic populations) “can be and are told”(McKittrick 2006, x).

Through narrative acts, images of landscape, and representations of Black social
life, Julie Dash cinematically reclaims a place with “terms that we may be familiar with”
(McKittrick 2006, ix). She elicits what Caribbean intellectual Edouard Glissant refers to
as “the poetics of landscape;” that is, the ways in which Black diasporic communities say,
theorize, feel, know, write, and imagine space and place (Glissant 1989; McKittrick
2006). As a feature of this process—both written and unwritten—the naming of
landscape delineates a relationship to the land; it gives expression to a claim to place that
does not necessarily rely on the material possession of land (McKittrick 2006). In Black
geographic imaginations, the centrality of land gives meaning—and is inextricable—to
the locations of Black history, selfhood, identity, and resistance (McKittrick 2006;
Glissant 1983). Land is, then, a set of relationships and a system of knowledge; a way of
knowing, understanding, and naming the external world. Land sustains, articulates, and
enriches the material life of a people. This dissertation is similarly concerned with the
ways Black geographic thought and practice, through communal land use, asserts a
“claim to place, not naturally followed by material ownership and Black repossession but,
rather, by a grammar of liberation” (McKittrick 2006, xxiii).

Research Focus
Freedom is a Place
5
refers to the post-Reconstruction, revolutionary, spatial
struggle for land waged by rural emancipated Black labor in Low Country and Sea

5
I cannot begin to express my sincerest gratitude to Ruth Wilson Gilmore for her brilliant
conceptualization of “freedom is a place.” The title of this dissertation was influenced and inspired by her
articulation, she asks “[h]ow do we find the place of freedom? More precisely how do we make such a
place over and over again?” This dissertation seeks to examine these questions. See Alexander Murphy,

6

Islands off the coast of South Carolina, and in particular, Georgia. Covering the defeat of
radical Reconstruction up to the turn of the twentieth century, Freedom is a Place focuses
on the ways in which rural Black communities in Low Country and Sea Islands used
everyday tactics and spatial practices to create permanent and relentless, although, at
times, sporadic and spontaneous, possibilities for contestation of racial capitalist forms of
spatial regulation of daily life. This dissertation explores how formerly enslaved peoples
and their descendents, in a particular geographic region, with a particular articulation of
their diasporic identities as Gullah-Geechee people, remade their lives; specifically, how
the social spaces they produced to make a communal life interpenetrated the shifting
political grounds of emancipation, Reconstruction, Bourbon redemption, and Jim Crow
segregation. This is a study of the cultural, political, economic, and social processes and
factors that these rural Black communities used to ensure their basic human rights—the
ways in which they articulated their hard-fought and won freedom. This dissertation
asks: how did rural Black communities in Low Country and Sea Islands socially organize
themselves? How did their cultural milieu and geographic positioning shape these modes
of social organization? When it came to ensuring rights, these communities knew that
land, and the access to land, was the material basis for what their freedom would mean.
Land offered the capacity to live a life of their own choosing, to be self-determining, to
inhabit the spaces and places they desired to inhabit, to recreate and reconstitute their
families and communities, to own their labor, and provide for one another. Freedom is a
Place asks: How did these Black coastal communities articulate this shared sense of self-
interest? What did it look like culturally, socially, and politically? What kind of social

H.J. deBlij, B.L. Turner II, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Derek Gregory, “The Role of Geography in Public
Debate,” Progress in Human Geography 29 (2005): 178.

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and political formations occurred? What is the mode and method of their social and
political activity? What types of political alliances did they form?
This study provides a historical and geographical materialist analysis of the
spatial practices and social processes during and after Reconstruction in Georgia’s Low
Country, to critically consider how Southern Black communities in the US syncretized,
and responded to, the material realities of racial capitalism. The half-decade following
the end of the Civil War witnessed the fermentation of resistance and strategic action, as
Black Americans struggled for autonomy, land redistribution, self-protection, the right to
vote, access to education, and fair settlement of wages, all of which spurred collective
solidarity. The formation of direct collective action, designed to secure land, to receive
fair wages, and to obfuscate adverse federal policies, provides the context for examining
modes of social organization and social action in Low Country and Sea Islands. These
modes of social organization were most evident in the triad counties of Chatham, Glynn,
and McIntosh, where failed federal land policies served as the catalyst that sharpened the
perception of Black Americans who developed oppositional strategies to counter adverse
federal policies.
The political tradition in Low Country and the coastal islands is diasporic in that it
encapsulates the vast differences in gender, class, religious practice, ethnicity, language,
and location -- which inhabits and shapes the place, culture, politics, and region of Low
Country and Sea Islands. Conceptualizing the Black political tradition, this project
interrogates and particularizes the diversity of lived experiences of Black Georgians in
this place, as well as attending to the ways that differences in the Black coastal
communities in Georgia were used to mobilize individual and collective political power.

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During chattel slavery, enslaved Africans were bought and sold throughout the Americas,
the Caribbean, and Europe, and they experienced natal alienation from the vast expanses
of West and Central Africa upon being relocated to the Sea Island region as late as 1858.
These Africans brought with them knowledge of various African cosmologies,
epistemologies, religions, languages, and cultural traditions. The Civil War and
emancipation brought together Black Northerners from different economic classes (with
sometimes-opposing religious traditions), abolitionists, missionaries, newly emancipated
freed people from black belt plantations, and people who had escaped bondage and went
North, only to return to their places of birth to renew kinship ties. It brought back others,
such as the men and women from Sapelo Island, who were enslaved by Thomas
Spalding’s heirs and were marched 163 miles to the interior of Georgia, where Spalding’s
descendants believed they could hold them, and believed that they would be out of the
way of Union forces.
6
Upon finding that they were in the direct path of Sherman’s 1864
march to the sea, many of them walked back to Sapelo on their own, or followed
Sherman’s army. This amalgam of Black peoples, having experienced dispersion from
all parts of the world and nation, when brought together in Low Country and the coastal
region, enlivened a rich diasporic political tradition and culture drawn from their different
lived experiences. In these moments, when the cultures and traditions of these dispersed
people coalesced into communities where they were as deeply connected to the places
that they ended up being in, as they were to the places that they left or were taken from, is
the moment when diaspora began to happen.

6
Thomas Spalding’s plantation “ranked among the largest in productive acreage and in number of slaves in
Georgia,” see William McFeely Sapelo’s People: A Long Walk to Freedom (New York: WW Norton &
Company, 1994), 15.

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Modes of Inquiry & Analysis
This study provides a historical and geographic analysis that explores how rural
Southern Black communities articulated and practiced modes of social organization to
create or preserve their collective lives as they responded to the territorial strategies and
imposed forms of spatiality of the post-1865 American state. It provides an ethnographic
analysis of processes, practices, functions, and effects of the post-1865 state institutions,
in the context of everyday routines, social interactions, and lived experiences of Black
coastal communities. This dissertation is grounded in the historical methodology of
archival research at the following: Avery Research Center in Charleston, South Carolina;
the Penn School at St. Helena’s Island, South Carolina; the Georgia Historical Society in
Savannah, Georgia; State Archives, Morrow, Georgia; Emory University’s Manuscript,
Archives, Rare Book Library (MARBL), Atlanta, Georgia; the National Archives,
Washington D.C.; the Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; and the Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture, New York, New York. Freedom is a Place draws from
plantation diaries and documents; memoirs and diaries of white abolitionists, soldiers,
planters, and Freedmen’s Bureau agents; missionary tracts; newspapers; government
documents; travel writing; agricultural journals; and interviews gathered by the Works
Progress Administration. While this scholarship and its primary sources offer an account
of the lives of Black Americans during slavery and the postbellum period, these archival
materials have to be read against the grain, to read the silences of the interior Black
American experiences, and the violent ways they are implicated in the production of this
“nation-space.” Due to the hostile environment created by white supremacy, as well as
extralegal and state sanctioned violence, the strategies and tactics of Black coastal

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community formation remain somewhat cloaked in mystery despite a vast range of
literature on Reconstruction. Primary sources of information regarding Black coastal
communities -- such as correspondences, diaries, inner community activities (save for
public events) and relationships (except those identified on census reports,
birth/marriage/death certificates, and county jail records), records of community
members outside leadership positions and official cooperative roles, -- are scarce. Black
coastal communities have developed a highly regimented mode of protecting and
concealing Black interiority. The experiences of slavery, white surveillance, and intense
scrutiny required vigilant protection of such spaces, as the survival of Black coastal
communities was dependent upon it.

Literature Review
Freedom is a Place draws on Black geographies to analyze archival materials and
to delineate the ways in which Low Country and Sea Island communities produced
specific systems of social organization that articulated a distinct paradigm of collective
political governance and economic development. Informed by an intellectual and
political investment in the continued struggle for liberation, Freedom is a Place examines
people’s collective resistance to racial capitalism as a totalizing system of being and
knowing. In keeping with other examples from what Cedric Robinson identified as “the
Black Radical Tradition,” the people in postbellum Low Country and Sea Island
communities produce and reproduce knowledges, social practices, and social action “to
preserve the collective being.” Cedric Robinson describes this as, “the ontological

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totality”
7
(Robinson 1983, 168). The Black Radical Tradition—as a field of knowledge,
knowledge production, and revolutionary social imagination—centers, as its object of
critical study, the logic of mass dehumanization that underwrites the universal,
emancipatory conceit of modern, Western (white, bourgeois) notions of social
organization and sociality.
8
Radical intellectuals comprehend and reveal this tradition by
analyzing the collective struggles for liberation in “the historical consciousness of the
Black masses” (Robinson 1983, 316). There, “the struggle was more than words or ideas
but life itself” (Robinson 1983, 184). The emerging field of Black Geographies extends
this tradition of work to engage and locate what Caribbean intellectual Sylvia Wynter
describes as “the terrain of political struggle itself...or where the imperative of a
perspective of struggle takes place” (McKittrick 2006, 6). Wynter frames the logics of
mass dehumanization and the universal, emancipatory conceits of Western modernity as
always already geographic. The struggle for liberation is, then, a multiscalar
9
geographic
struggle; that is, place is a site of political struggle.

7
Cedric J. Robinson describes a feature in “the preservation of the ontological totality” as “granted by a
metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal,
legal, social, or psychic senses” (Robinson, 1983: 168).
8
These Western (white, bourgeois) notions of social organization and sociality are based on the logics of
white supremacy, which Dylan Rodriguez defines as a “logics of social organization”. For Rodriguez
“white supremacy may be understood as a logic of social organization that produces regimented,
institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized ‘human’ difference, enforced through
coercions and violences that are structured by genocidal possibility (including physical extermination and
curtailment of people's collective capacities to socially, culturally, or biologically reproduce). As a
historical vernacular and philosophical apparatus of domination, white supremacy is both based on, and
constantly resurfacing, notions of the white (European and Euro-American) "human" vis-à-vis the rigorous
production, penal discipline, and frequent social, political, and biological neutralization or extermination of
the (non-white) sub- or non-human.” See Dylan Rodríguez, "Introduction: American Apocalypse," in
Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2006).
9
Working from Neil Smith’s conceptualization of scale, Ruth Wilson Gilmore asserts, “[s]cale suggests the
actual and imaginative boundaries in which political geographies are made and undone” (Gilmore 2005,
181).

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Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods recently theorized this field of study in
their edited anthology Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. McKittrick and
Woods carefully examine Black expressive culture (e.g. music, literature, poetry,
religious practices) and everyday life to understand the ways Black diasporic
communities respond to institutionalized violence by creating, preserving, and
reproducing social action and social explanations, intellectual and aesthetic traditions,
with potential to articulate a praxis for realizing global social justice. A project of Black
geographies specifically considers the “philosophical complexity of various ethnic
ontologies” and the “traditions of geographical thought implicit within them” to uncover
the links between daily life and social movements, which can provide crucial knowledge
and practices for our historical conjuncture.
10

Clyde Woods’s (1998) Development Arrested: the Blues and Plantation Power in
the Mississippi Delta goes deeper in to uncovering the links between everyday social
practices and explanations, with social movements. Development Arrested elicits
systems of knowledge indigenous to the United States, and excavates the ways Southern
Black communities transmitted these local knowledges, establishing a “seemingly
invisible link between older African American development traditions, such as
cooperatives, town building, and land reform, [with] more recent social movements”
(Woods 1998, 21). Woods accomplishes this by threading an extensive history of the
regional development and political economic geography in the Mississippi Delta, through
the development of the Blues epistemology and its tradition of explanation as responses

10
Clyde Woods, “Life After Death,” The Professional Geographer 54, no.1 (2002): 62-66.

13

and resistances to plantation
11
domination. Embedded within the Blues epistemology and
tradition are highly developed and institutionalized discourses on philosophy, political
economy, social theory, daily life, social justice, and geographic knowledge.
Woods’s approach to geography, alongside numerous contemporary scholars,
12
is
engaged in the intellectual fields of the Black Radical Tradition. Grounded in an
epistemological inheritance that grew in the diaspora that was shaped by the processes of
modernity,
13
he asserts that the production of race and racism are geographic projects and
processes. Working from the foundational premise that all human activity is spatial, the
production of racism and race as geographic means that these social processes and
practices are given spatial expression in the ways space is produced, organized, and
represented through them. Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds: Black Women and
the Cartographies of Struggle, enumerates how the production of racism and race —the
privileged and epistemologically persuasive modern discourse of human difference and
differentiation (in addition to sex/gender categories) that situates it at the level of bodies
and bodily appearances—interarticulate with the geographic production of

11
Woods explicates the restructuring and reconfiguring of the plantation in the Mississippi Delta, as an
economic institution and system of governance. For more see Development Arrested The Blues and
Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (New York: Verso, 1998).
12
See Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing
California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 2007); Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom
Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2003); Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe:
Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1990); Fred
Moten, In the break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,
2003); Woods, Development Arrested.

13
Modernity is considered here not as a thing but more as a description of the historical formation of
particular political-economic relationships and social arrangements among people and across varying
geospatial scales. See Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, eds., Modernity: An
Introduction to Modern Societies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).

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“uninhabitable-inhabitable” geographies, and, subsequently, with “unproductive-
productive” land. Quoting McKittrick at length:
The now profitable and workable lands of the uninhabitable are not so much
unlivable and unimaginable as they are grids of racial-sexual management and
geographic growth (which ‘grew’ due to free slave labor). That is, the
uninhabitable creates an opening for a geographic transformation that is
underscored by racial and sexual differences. To transform the uninhabitable into
inhabitable, and make this transformation profitable, the land must become a site
of racial-sexual [and class] regulation, a geography that maps ‘a normal way of
life’ through measuring different degrees of inhabitability. This geographic
transformation, then does not fully erase the category of ‘uninhabitable,’ but
rather re-presents it through spatial processes as a sign of social difference. This
is expressed through uneven geographies: spatial arrangements that map and
measure populations according to ‘normal,’ ‘a normal way of life,’ or the
normally inhabitable (131).

An all too familiar instance of this “cartographic effort” can be found in Ruth Wilson
Gilmore’s (2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing
California. Gilmore’s study of California’s prison growth, and opposition to it, reveals
the spatial management of race, class, and gender; it reveals the ways in which new
geographic formulations are produced according to “normative views of how people fit
into and make places in the world” through the exponential growth of California’s prison
system (Gilmore 2002, 16). For Gilmore, the prison becomes “the perfect site for the
simultaneous production and concealment of racism” (Davis 1998, 271). Organizing the
“fatal coupling of power and difference” in place, the prison is one of many “racially
defined zones of destruction.”
14
These places are (re)newed iterations of the “unlivable-
uninhabitable” from the perception of what is “normal” and “inhabitable” (McKittrick
2006, 131). Woods, McKittrick, and Gilmore elucidate this production of space at

14
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography,”
Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002): 15-24.

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particular historical conjunctures during particular modes of crisis. Each work reveals
the geographic transformation of space through the spatial management, regulation, and
arrangement of social processes according to racial, sexual, and class differences,
animated by the logics of mass dehumanization and the universal, emancipatory conceits
of Western modernity.
To this end, John R. Short’s An Introduction to Political Geography, proves
useful, in tandem with Marxist social theorist, Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space,
in working through spatial arrangements such as the post-1865 American state and the
spatial management of emancipated Black laborers, who, through their exploitation as
enslaved labor, made possible formerly “unproductive” and “uninhabitable” lands into
“productive” and “inhabitable” regions. Steve Pile reminds us that geography is
“produced out of the relationships between people” (Pile 2000, 273). That is “locations,
territories, colonies, nations, the world, are not natural scales” but produced through
relationships of power “between individuals, groups, and peoples” (Pile 2000, 273). By
shifting focus to the production of space in its uneven development, which is the
geographic expression of the structure and constitution of capitalism, Pile emphasizes and
exposes the ways space is used as a social structure in the ordering of societal relations.
Therefore, as Pile contends “Political struggles are not fought on the surface of
geography, but through its fabric/ation. In yearning for new ways of relating to one
another, in searching for new forms of subjectivity,” the post-emancipation struggles for
land as an articulation of freedom by rural Black communities in Sea Islands and Low

16

Country, articulate the ways these communities fought to realize a revolutionary
transformation of the very society that formerly enslaved them.
15

Black Americans -- in this instance Black coastal communities -- geographically
imagined different ways geography could be remade through their struggle for land. The
situatedness of these communities after emancipation, and their different conceptions of
land, ran up against productions of space that was in the process of being territorially
produced. Returning to Lefebvre, he maintains, that, though territory is a distinguishing
feature of the state and state power, territory is not naturally occurring. Territory is an
effect produced by state strategies that radically reshape how space is perceived,
organized, and produced. Lefebvre argues that space is produced by hegemonic forces
that organize, categorize, and produce space in a particular way, according to a particular
logic, and with the deployment of particular technologies. The post-emancipation state
that was in the process of being produced, an effect of Black radical political activity that
was also creating the fertile conditions into which an agrarian democracy was to take
root, after what Du Bois describes as the “largest and most successful slave revolt,” was
arrested by the counterrevolution of property and a reconstituted plantocracy allied with
Northern industrial capitalism.
John Short notes that the nation-state “By its very nature […] is a spatial
phenomenon. It has: frontiers with other states, a plethora of administrative subdivisions,
sometimes marked regional differences, and, occasionally, marked divergence between
the boundaries of the state and the extent of the nation” (Short 1982, 123). Of importance

15
Steve Pile, “The Troubled Spaces of Frantz Fanon,” in Thinking Space, ed. Michael Craig and Nigel
Thrift (London: Routledge, 2000), 273.

17

to this project is Short’s discussion of the nation-state as a spatial entity. He outlines the
connections between the state, space, and economy, and, in doing so, Short considers two
aspects of these relationships—“the nature of the links between uneven development and
nationalism, and the connections between political units and spatial differentiation”
(Short 1982, 124). Uneven development can be defined as the relationship between the
unevenness of economic growth and development, and nationalism, created within the
context of capitalism. Rather, as geographer Neil Smith elaborates in his important
edition Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, “uneven
development is the hallmark of capitalism” (Smith 2008, xiii). Uneven development is
structural; it is “the systematic geographic expression of the contradictions inherent in the
very constitution and structure of capitalism” (Smith 2008, xiii). In that, the uneven
development of capitalism is the geographic expression of the “more fundamental
contradiction between use-value and exchange-value” (Smith 2008, 6). As a dynamic
process, uneven development “continually shapes the economic and political landscape,”
according to Short, and “the pattern of uneven development closely corresponds to
differences in culture” (Short 1984,127, 129). Culture can then be defined here as the
practices, traditions, or symbolic systems of meaning-making that mediate the imagined
relationships of people to their material conditions of existence. Unevenness, then, is not
incidental to development, and, specifically for the purposes of this project, it is endemic
to it. Uneven development, and its relationship, or links to, culture in Low Country and
coastal islands, is articulated in the ways in which regional development, as an unequal
process, occurred over time and space. Regional development occurs within the context
of chattel slavery and its aftermath, as does the conditions of Black Low Country and Sea

18

Island culture and political traditions; these processes are inextricably linked, and they
are inherently geographical processes. The struggle to imagine new possibilities for
Black communal life in postbellum America contended with the small minority of
planters and industrialist capitalists and European markets and free people who wanted to
determine their own destinies.
In Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of the Faith of the Fathers, V.P.
Franklin asserts, “Oftentimes, resistance and education were valued as strategies to obtain
the larger goal of self-determination” among Black Americans particularly “at the core of
the racial consciousness that developed among [Black Americans] in the United States
(Franklin 1984, 6). This was “the cultural objective of [B]lack self-determination, which
operated in a dialectical relationship with white supremacy” (Franklin 1984, 6).
Freedom, which, during and after antebellum, was the most important objective among
Black Americans, became the primary means for “obtaining collective self-determination
or [B]lack control over [B]lack life and destiny” (Franklin 1984, 6).
Black self-determination was also a “cultural value” among the masses of Black
Americans in the United States; “in the antebellum South, enslaved [Black Americans]
did not merely sing and talk about freedom, they plotted to gain it for themselves and
members of their family” (Franklin 1984, 8).
When one examines the testimony and narratives of slaves and former slaves and
the statements and opinions expressed by [B]lack tenant farmers, sharecroppers,
and average [B]lack agricultural and industrial workers of the nineteenth century,
one finds that freedom, resistance, education, as well as self-determination were
defined over and over again as ‘good’ and things to be valued (Franklin 1984, 8).
The ways these communities articulated a sense of community and solidarity was through
freedom, resistance, education, and what Franklin describes, a “religious self-

19

determination”. While experiencing conditions of bondage, enslaved people “resisted
the oppression of the slaveholders by running away, sabotage, poisonings, and physical
violence, and worked together to create a sense of community and solidarity on the basis
of their shared experiences” (Franklin 1984, 8). There is a tradition of “religious self-
determination” in black-belt and Low Country and coastal island antebellum Black
communities. When slaveholders refused to allow Black Americans “to hold separate
religious services, they stole away into the woods at night to hold religious services and
praise God amongst themselves” (Franklin 1984, 8). This was frequently the case in
black-belt communities, and on several plantations in the Low Country and coastal
islands. However, overseers, who in many cases handled the day-to-day plantation
operations for absentee planters, ran the plantations in Low Country regions. Low
Country and coastal island plantation labor functioned on a task-system. Under the task
system, a slave’s daily work on an antebellum rice plantation (which was the major cash
crop produced in Low Country and Sea Islands) was divided into tasks. Each field hand
was usually given nine to ten hours of hard labor, or a fraction of a task, to complete each
day according to her or his ability. A driver, who was a slave appointed to supervise the
daily work of the field hands, organized the tasks. Black Americans held captive in the
region experienced different modes of social organization based on an economy fueled by
Low Country rice production. Under the task system, and further benefitted by absentee
planters, Black communities had the ability to till and sustain small plots of land for
vegetable gardens, maintain livestock, and “create a sense of community and solidarity
based on their shared experiences” (Franklin 1984, 8). Praise houses were established by
Black communities, which were physical meeting places in the woods or near swamps

20

where they could meet in secret and worship God in the way they saw fit. These places
were sites of transference, continuation, and reconfigurations of diverse, multiformed,
African cultural practices and sacred rituals. The Praise house had multiple purposes for
Black women and men; the communal bonds formed by praise families functioned like
the secret religious societies in Africa. Members were initiated into the community after
months of reporting their dreams and going into the woods at night to seek God. The
bonds that developed were as strong as one’s birth family. Black women and men
worked from “can see to can’t,” from sun up to sundown, toiling side by side in grueling
labor conditions, and spent their time well into the late hours of the night communing in
Praise houses. Praise houses were a place of release, a time and place for community, for
being with people who knew each other’s everyday burdens and struggles, a place where
people understood their condition and the need to change it. After emancipation, Praise
houses were established in small, wood-framed houses or other buildings. They
continued as places to meet, and served an important spiritual and social role in the
communities; they were the courthouse, the legislator, judge, and jury.
16

When slavery ended, the masses of [Black Americans] remained in separate
[B]lack institutions, not merely because they were often unwelcome in
predominantly white public and private schools, churches, and other social
organizations, but because they believed that it was ‘good’ for [Black
communities] to control their own lives and affairs in this country now that they
were ‘free’ (Franklin 1984, 8).
Faith gave motivation to an oppressed people; the belief in Black “religious self-
determination” finds its roots among the masses of Black Americans that were shaped by
the material conditions they faced in the slave South.

16
V.P. Franklin, Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of the Faith of the Fathers (Westport:
Lawrence Hill & Company, 1984).

21

There is a physical form to Black coastal communities that is articulated through
the ways communal compounds are organized in the physical landscape. This form of
organization strengthens the bonds of extended family units living in close proximity to
each other. It is common to find as many as “eight to ten buildings centrally located on a
piece of land, in organic arrangement, with little to obvious distinctions of property
boundaries.” Elizabeth Brabec and Sharon Richardson argue that Black coastal
communities “categorize its place in the physical landscape through a hierarchy of space
that descends in scale from a specific island, to plantation boundaries, family compound,
and then the home of each household” (Brabec and Richardson 2007, 159). A Black
coastal community’s sense of place, as Georgia sociologist Thomas Jackson Woofter Jr.
described in his 1930’s study of Black Yeomanry on St. Helena Island, carried:
[…] a definite persistence of the old plantation boundaries as local geographic
divisions. Although the ante-bellum Plantations [sic] have long ceased to be units
of ownership, they still constitute units of local community division. […] In
describing their place of residence, the inhabitants do not say St. Helena Island,
but “Tom Fripp Plantation” (Woofter 1930, 8).
The sense of place for a family living in a Black coastal community evolved from their
human experience in the landscape, and the ways in which they were implicated in the
production of these places. It is a sense of place that also grows from identifying oneself,
and one’s actual and fictive kin, in relation to a particular place, with particular histories,
local knowledges, culture, and language.
At the close of the nineteenth century, Cedric Robinson’s Black Movements in
America reminds us that, “The systems of reconstitut[ing] […] Black communities were
[…] assaulted by forms of forced labor: peonage, share-cropping, and less-than-
subsistence farming” (Robinson 1983, 312). Whereby, Black workers “were subject to

22

displacement from productive land and to publicly and privately organized campaigns of
terror and intimidation” (Robinson 1983, 312). The economic subordination of Black
Americans in the postwar South engendered copious studies, which elucidate the nexus
of free labor, capital, and race. In this context, political economy, market analysis, racial
exploitation, and, more recently, property ownership, predominate as instructive
categories of analysis in Low Country. With respect to market analysis, Stephen
DeCanio’s Agriculture in the Postbellum South (1974) and Robert Higgs’ Competition
and Coercion (1977) contend that, despite extralegal and state-sanctioned violence and
intimidation from white southerners, Black Americans made strident economic gains.
Their initial per capita income rose by 2.7 percent, and their diet, living standards, and
material wealth rose significantly. Moreover, their ownership of real property also
increased.
17
Comparatively, Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, in their study One
Kind of Freedom (1977), argue that the gains Black Americans achieved should be
measured against the reality that they were “under constant attack by the dominant white
society determined to preserve racial inequalities.” They argue further “the economic
institutions established in the postwar south effectively operated to keep [Black]
Americans as a landless agricultural labor force.”
18

17
Robert Higgs, The Transformation of the American Economy, 1865-1914: An Essay in Interpretation
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1971); Robert Higgs, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the
American Economy, 1865-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) 61, 134; Stephen J.
DeCanio, Agriculture in the Postbellum South: The Economics of Production and Supply (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1974); Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss, The Facts of Reconstruction:
Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 172.
18
Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of
Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 198; Anderson and Moss, The Facts of
Reconstruction, 173.

23

Marxist scholars Jonathan Weiner and Jay R. Mandle expand upon the issues of
racial exploitation. Labor historian William Cohen also discusses the era of post-
emancipation in terms of racial exploitation, in that it created a system of peonage akin to
slavery through the sharecropping system, the institutionalization of the crop-lien system,
and the monopoly held by planters.
19
While there are valid interpretations by each of
these scholars, they do not represent the full spectrum of the “lived experiences” of Black
Americans during the postbellum period. Loren Schweninger has argued that
understanding Black economic reconstruction requires a systematic analysis of Black
property ownership in the South, before, during, and after, the Civil War. In his study,
Black Property Owners in the South (1990), Schweninger demonstrates, through a state
by state analysis, the divergence in the Black American experience and the diversity of
regional growth and development in the Lower and Upper South. A study that placed
economic interests of enslaved Black Americans above community and cultural interests,
and diminished the impact of slavery and U.S. structural marginalization and oppression
on post-war economic and political advancement, is Dylan Penningroth’s The Claims of
Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth Century (2003),
which argues that Black American economic interests undergirded social claims to
property and social relationships.
20

19
Jonathan Weiner, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1978) 72-73; William Cohen, “Negro Involuntary Servitude in the South, 1865-1940: A
Preliminary Analysis,” Journal of Social History, XLII (1976): 31-60; Jay R. Mandle, The Roots of Black
Poverty: The Southern Plantation Economy After the Civil War (Durham: Duke University Press, 1978) 23-
27; Anderson and Moss, The Facts of Reconstruction, 174.
20
Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1990), 371-79; Anderson and Moss, The Facts of Reconstruction, 176-188; Dylan Penningroth, The
Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

24

Yet, the relationship between geography, power, and culture during
Reconstruction has yet to be developed in tandem with the conditions of race and the
concept of place. This is the intervention of Freedom is a Place; centering place as a
typology of space and an analytic. Chapter One covers the uneven development of Low
Country and Sea Islands, providing a historical materialist and geographical analysis of
how the region became Georgia’s rice kingdom. This chapter focuses on the ways Black
coastal communities, on a geographical scale and as a kind of place, evolved from
different types of social activity in relation to the production of space. Thus, Black
coastal communities were constituted through chattel slavery, which resulted in the
establishment of Georgia’s Low Country as a rice-growing region. Chapter Two
discusses the overturning of General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15,
and the establishment of the Belle Ville self-governing cooperative and community by
Black anti-slavery, anti-colonization, activist and politician, Rev. Tunis G. Campbell.
Chapter Three addresses the expansion of federal, state, economic, and judiciary
capacities through the 1890s, and the rise of Populist movements in Georgia. Chapter
Four re-examines the events represented as the Darien Insurrection, to better understand
the modalities of Black communal tactics against a Jim Crow racial regime that brutally
repressed and undermined their collective strategies for Black self-determination. Within
the context of the Populist movements in Georgia, chapter Four specifically considers the
effects of increased commerce, natural disasters, and state-sponsored violence, on the
viability of Black coastal communities during a period of several decades following
emancipation.

25

Chapter 1 The Uneven Development of the Low Country and Sea Islands
Everyone come together, let us struggle; the grave
is not yet finished; let his heart be perfectly at
peace.
Everyone come together; let us struggle; the grave
is not yet finished; let his heart be very much at
peace.
Sudden death commands everyone's attention like a
firing gun. Sudden death commands everyone's
attention, oh elders, oh heads of the family. Sudden
death commands everyone's attention, like a distant
drum beat.
-Mende Dirge

The Contours of Regional Development in the South’s “Empire” State

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Darien, Georgia, located in the southeast
region of the South’s “Empire” state, flanked by the Altamaha River, and with Nile like
proportions, was a bustling port for the timber industry and rice kingdom. Throughout
the nineteenth century, the Altamaha River (whose name comes from the late 17
th
century
Yamassee chief “Aratomahan” or Altamaha) was used as a route for commerce between
central Georgia and the coast.
21
The largest river in coastal Georgia and the second
largest basin in the eastern United States, Altamaha’s headwaters arise in the foothills of
the Appalachians in North Georgia, and its flow is dominated by silt-laden water from the
Piedmont and Upper Coastal Plain. The Altamaha River watershed spans fifty-three of
Georgia’s counties; the river winds through bottomland hardwood and longleaf pine
forests, rice plantations and cypress-tupelo swamps, feeding into one of the highest
quality and most expansive estuarine and salt marsh system in the world. The Altamaha

21
John E. Worth, The Struggle for the Georgia Coast (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), 43.

26

River basin drains nearly one quarter of the state of Georgia, with its 14,000 square mile
watershed, connecting the upper Piedmont to the Lower Coastal Plain, and encompassing
Athens, Macon, Milledgeville, and parts of Atlanta. Formed by the confluence of the
Ocmulgee and Oconee rivers near Lumber City and joined farther downstream by the
Ohoopee River, the mainstream of the Altamaha River – or the lower Altamaha River
system – flows freely for 137 miles before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean north of
Brunswick and account for 18 percent of the freshwater inputs to the South Atlantic
continental shelf. The Altamaha carries nutrients, sediments, and millions of gallons of
freshwater to the estuary and coastal region every day, occupying approximately twenty-
six miles in Glynn and McIntosh counties.
As one of Georgia’s oldest cities, “Darien grew up on the site of Fort King
George, a military outpost erected in 1721 to protect England’s territorial claims against
Spanish incursions” (Duncan 1986, 3). Darien, formerly named New Inverness, is
referred to as the "Plymouth Rock" of Scottish heritage in the Southeastern United States.
Scottish settlers established New Inverness in 1736, three years after General James
Oglethorpe established Savannah and the colony of Georgia.
22
In Oglethorpe’s
calculation, a successful defense of England’s territorial claims against the Spanish-
threatened coast below Savannah necessitated settling the region with soldiers “whose
fierceness in battle was legendary.”
23
Oglethorpe sent recruiters to Scotland to choose
"the Freemen of Gentlemen's families...industrious, laborious and brave; speaking the

22
Russell Duncan, Freedom’s Shore: Tunis Campbell and the Georgia Freedmen (Athens: The University
of Georgia Press, 1986), 3.
23
Ann R. Davis, “The Settlement of Darien,” GlynnGen.com Coastal Georgia Genealogy and History, last
modified 2012, http://www.glynngen.com/history/mcintosh/settle_darien.htm

27

Highland language."
24
Stipulations for migration: only married men
25
who were between
17 and 45 years of age and willing to take up arms would be allowed passage; the settler
must agree to remain for at least three years; each Highlander was provided with passage,
provisions for one year, and granted fifty acres for himself and each member of his
family; those who could afford to pay their own freight received 500 acres.
26
On January
19, 1736, one hundred and seventy-seven Highlanders, mostly MacKays from the
Strathnaver region under Hugh Mackay; and members of Clan Chattan, mostly
MacIntoshes from Inverness under John ‘Mohr’ MacIntosh; arrived aboard the Prince of
Wales.
27
They disembarked on the northern bank of the Altamaha River, where they
founded New Inverness. Their primary mission after settling the land was to secure the
colony against the French to the west, the Spanish to the south, and Appalachicola and
the Yemassee from Florida, who were supported by the Spanish, albeit displaced from
the region around 150 years prior.
28
Later settlers changed the settlement’s name to
Darien in memoriam of the Scottish Highlanders who had attempted a settlement on the
Isthmus of Panama in 1697.
29
In its nascent stages, settlers of Darien differentiated
themselves primarily by their antislavery petition crafted in 1739.
30
This petition served

24
Ibid.
25
Oglethorpe endeavored to recruit only married men, so that they might bring their wives and when
discharged from the regiment, the men and their families would stay in Georgia.
26
George Gilman Smith, The Story of Georgia and the Georgia People, 1732-1860 (Macon: George G.
Smith Publisher, 1900).
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
29
Russell Duncan, Freedom’s Shores, 3.
30
Ibid.

28

to counter requests made by Savannah colonists sent to Darien’s Trustees
31
for
permission to import and enslave Africans:
It is shocking to human nature that any race of mankind and their Posterity,
should be sentenced to perpetual slavery, nor in justice can we think otherwise of
it, than that they are throw amongst us to be our Scourge one day or another for
our Sins [sic]: and as Freedome [sic] to them must be as dear to us, what a scene
of Horrour [sic] must it bring about!
32

The petition remained until 1749, when that clause in their Charter was removed despite
the strong protests of the Scots. The Scots of Darien made a re-statement of this anti-
slavery position on the eve of the American Revolution in 1775.
33
This petition, together
with that of the Salzburghers (German immigrants at the colonial Georgia settlement of
Ebenezer) was the earliest anti-slavery petition in the South.
34
By the mid-1740s
soldiering employed more men than any other occupation in Georgia. Darien was the
only Gaelic speaking community in the Georgia Colony. The Scottish women had rights
under the law and were allowed to own property. Women in the Darien community were
trained in the "Manual of Arms" for muskets and were capable of serving the battery of
cannon at Fort Darien when the men were on patrol or fighting the Spanish.
35

Early to mid-eighteenth promoters of what would become Georgia, touted the
region’s natural beauty and perfect climate, “withal the promise of economic gain,” the

31
The Darien Trustees are the eighteen freeholders who held their land free and clear in Darien, and were
chosen for membership in the town’s governing body.
32
Petition quoted in Spencer B. King, Darien: The Death and Rebirth of a Southern Town (Macon: Mercer
University Press, 1981), 6-7.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid.

29

promoters were interested in the profits from what investment of the land could yield.
36

After the Trustees relinquished their charter, due in part to the restrictions limiting the
size of land grants and Georgia becoming a British colony, the doors of slavery were
opened and many Carolina planters migrated to the young colony to establish plantations
in the Altamaha Delta. Shortly after the American Revolution, Georgia’s coastal area
experienced another wave of migration of former soldiers from the Northeast who sought
fortune in Georgia’s lush environment.
By 1835, the economic life of Darien depended upon shipping cargoes of lumber,
cotton, and rice. In 1849, the 550 rice planters of Low Country, Georgia were profiting
from 25 million pounds of clean rice each year; that figure doubled over the following ten
years.
37
Rice lands, in Low Country, Georgia rice kingdom, “were amongst the most
valuable kinds of real estate in the antebellum south, for they were the result of the
arduous labors and considerable engineering skills of enslaved workers. And by 1850,
planters on the lower Savannah River had developed a form of rice cultivation that
proved extraordinarily profitable” (Jones 2008, 15). Historian Jacqueline Jones asserts
that between 1850-1860, in Chatham County, Savannah experienced explosive growth
and subsequently intensive development of the region’s built landscape. The completion
of three railroad lines that linked the port city to the state’s interior and diverted
trainloads of upcountry cotton away from its competitors in Charleston, alongside the

36

King, Darien: The Death and Rebirth of a Southern Town, 4. Verna Crane, The Promotion Literature of
Georgia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925).

37
Jacqueline Jones, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 15-
16.

30

economic prosperity of the Georgia Rice Kingdom yielded a high demand for skilled
construction workers.
38

Coastal Georgia planters, such as Jacob Waldburg, developed extensive
landholdings on St. Catherine’s Island, which at its peak in 1853 included 255 enslaved
Africans and African Americans; Waldburg also owned property in Savannah. Similarly,
Thomas Spaulding owned extensive rice, cotton, wheat, and sugar cane plantations on
Sapelo Island where 300 enslaved Africans and African Americans labored in 1853.
According to the 1860 census, 41,084 Georgia slaveholders had an average of 11.2 slaves
each, with Liberty and McIntosh counties having twice the state’s average number of
slaves. By 1850, the largest planters in Midway District with more than 200 slaves also
included Pierce Butler, with 505 bondsmen and women on Butler’s Island, and Randolph
Spaulding with 252 enslaved persons.
McIntosh County, in 1860, was at the geographic center of the state’s rice coast; it
was bounded on the south by Glynn County and Wayne County, on the north by Liberty
County, and on the east by the Atlantic Ocean.
39
An archipelago of richly fertile, heavily
timbered barrier islands protected the mainland and provided the lowlands needed to
grow rice. Consequently, as late as 1860, 12 of the 17 largest slave owners in the United
States were rice planters.
40
Moreover, rice plantations were larger than other staple crop
plantations in the South and in several respects resembled Caribbean estates.
Simultaneously, by 1860, three principal watershed rice districts had emerged:

38
Ibid., 16-17.
39
Russell Duncan, Freedom’s Shores, 2.

40
Ibid.

31

Savannah-Ogeechee District, located between the Savannah and Ogeechee rivers;
Midway District, located between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers; and Altamaha
District, which stretched from the Atlantic between the Altamaha and St. Mary’s rivers.
41

This, for Jones, indicated that the lower Savannah River, together with the six coastal
counties (Chatham, Bryan, Liberty, McIntosh, Glynn, and Camden)—which included the
Georgia Sea Islands—made up a unified regional economy fueled by the production and
distribution of cotton, rice, and lumber.
42

Gullah-Geechee Cultural Formation
As stated in the previous section, the Sea Islands in the Low Country of South
Carolina and Georgia contain a culturally and ecologically distinct landscape.
Descendants of enslaved Africans, brought to the United States between 1640 to the mid
1850s, forced to labor on the rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia, created
cultural identities and made places, reflected in landscape patterns often opposed to the
dominant development practices of an emerging racial capitalist state and its attendant
culture, manifested in the production and distribution of cotton, rice, and lumber.
Through an analysis of the history of the development of Gullah-Geechee cultural

41
A watershed is the land area, which contributes surface water to a river or other body of water. The
boundaries of a watershed are formed by a high point and all water flows down to the lowest point or
watershed outlet. Consequently, settlement in the watershed areas is characterized by a complex system
involving social, ecological, and physical factors. The water, then, served as “a powerful unifying force in
watershed districts” (Bell 2008, 50).

42
Jacqueline Jones, Saving Savannah, 17.

32

formation, the genesis, contemporary meanings, and significance of Gullah-Geechee
place making practices can be read.
The Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia span an area approximately 250
miles long and 40 miles wide along the southeastern coast of United States. Several
factors played a role in reinforcing distinctive regional characteristics in the physical
environment and in influencing the cultural formation among enslaved Africans: the
processes in which the lands in this region were settled, the cultures of absentee
landowners, and a slave economy on large agricultural plantations that operated on a task
system. Gullah-Geechee communities were created by descendents of enslaved Africans
who were brought to South Carolina and Georgia, from the west coast of Africa and the
Caribbean, as rice production became the dominant cash crop in Low Country and Sea
Island areas in the 1740s. Africans from rice producing regions on the coast of West
Africa, such as present-day Sierra Leone, were stolen in droves because of their extensive
mathematical knowledge of rice production. Gullah-Geechee communities were the
numerical majority in the Sea Islands for more than three centuries, from the pre-
Revolutionary war era, and continue to maintain a culturally dominant presence to date,
remaining one of the most studied populations in the United States.
43

For three centuries, Gullah-Geechee communities created a distinctive regional
culture and epistemological tradition, such as language, religious systems and practices,
social structures, landscapes, and settlement practices, music, folklore, traditional cuisine,
medicinal and healing practices, and political traditions. Anthropologists and social

43
Margaret Washington Creel, A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the
Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988).

33

scientists have focused on Gullah-Geechee communities for more than a century, in part
because the culture reveals:
[m]ore African influences in their self-expression, behavior, beliefs than any other
long-established, large American population group […] until a generation ago,
theirs was the largest overwhelmingly African American area in the United
States; and Sullivan’s Island off Charleston, South Carolina, is often called the
Ellis Island of Black America (Pollizer 1999, xiii).
Early linguists, such as Lorenzo Dow Turner, who conducted seminal research on
Gullah-Geechee language and culture in South Carolina and Georgia, spent twenty years
researching the continuity of African languages, cultures, folklore, and social structures
in the coastal communities of Low Country. Turner catalogued over 3,000 names and
words of African origin along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia. His Africanisms
in the Gullah Dialect, published in 1949, studied the origin, development, and structure
of Gullah-Geechee communities locating them within the broader complexities of the
African diaspora. Turner’s work was a departure from earlier studies on Gullah-Geechee
communities, as articulated by sociologist Guy B. Johnson when he declared, “This
strange dialect turns out to be little more than a peasant English of two centuries ago”.
44

Turner was the first to prove the presence of African languages and epistemological
traditions “that the slaves brought from Africa”.
45
Turner’s work on Gullah-Geechee
communities is quite significant, and should not be understated. His study of these
coastal communities yielded new fields of academic study. Turner created an African
Studies program at Fisk University in 1929, and later developed an African Studies

44
Jason Kelly, “Lorenzo Dow Turner PhD’26: A Linguist Who Identified the African Influences in the
Gullah Dialect,” University of Chicago Magazine, Nov-Dec. 2010,
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/1012/features/legacy.shtml (accessed February 9, 2015).
45
Ibid.

34

curriculum at Chicago’s Roosevelt College in 1946. It is through Turner’s extensive
study of Gullah-Geechee communities that witnessed the nascent stages of a new field,
African American Studies. Prior to that, in academic fields and dominant culture, the
paradigm insisted that all epistemological systems from Africa were erased by the
conditions of chattel slavery. Turner exposed the falsity of this paradigm and for almost
two decades he painstakingly stitched together word for word what he called “specimens
of a dialect”.
46
To establish that the Gullah-Geechee language was borrowed from
African languages, Turner tirelessly researched them. In 1936 he studied at the
University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, there he found stronger
connections between Gullah and African languages. In 1938, he studied Arabic at Yale,
uncovering sources of other Gullah phrases, including the origins of the religious
tradition and practice called the “ring shout”. He determined the “shout” derived from
sha’wt, the circumambulation of Kaaba, the most sacred site in Islam during the Hajj
pilgrimage to Mecca. The word came from enslaved African Muslims held captive in the
Sea Islands. There it syncretized with call and response singing and dancing to form the
practice of the “ring shout”.
Folklorists have studied the verbal arts of folksong, folktale, and riddle, and
historians, anthropologists, and archeologists have studied agricultural and agrarian
history, social organization, folk architecture, and arts and crafts throughout Gullah-
Geechee communities.
47
Yet, as Elizabeth Brabec and Sharon Richardson argue, these

46
Ibid.
47
Charles Joyner, Down By the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of
Illnois Press, 1985). John M. Vlach, By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife (Ann
Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1991). Leland Ferguson, Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African

35

various studies failed to develop a comprehensive analysis of the meaning and
importance of Gullah-Geechee landscape patterns, more clearly, they failed to grasp how
the Gullah-Geechee “make place.” Place-making practices, as Brabec and Richardson
contend, “Landscape form and pattern are one of many expressions of culture. As the
physical space within which a cultural group lives, landscape has the ability to thwart
social interactions that are predicated on cultural spatial values of proxemics” (Brabec
and Richardson 2007, 151).
48
The historical development of Gullah-Geeche communities
and culture, their ancestral sacred links to place and land, hinges on several factors and
marks a departure from other Black communities in the United States.
The illegal importation of African slaves until 1858 after the ban of the slave trade
in 1810, created the conditions for the preservation of African cultures and systems of
knowledge as a majority of the coastal islands’ remained geographically isolated.
49
As
several scholars across disciplines suggest this was a primary component for the
continuity of Gullah-Geechee culture and place-making practices. However, the theory
that Gullah-Geechee communities, culture, knowledge systems, and place-making
practices developed in relative isolation is a contentious issue.
In terms of the physical geography of Low Country and Sea Islands, well into the
twentieth century, many islands were only accessible by boat. While this relative

America, 1650-1800 (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992). John M. Vlach, Back of the
Big House (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
48
Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966).
49
William S. Pollitzer, The Gullah People and Their African Heritage (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1999). B.A. Demerson, “Family Life on Wadmalaw Island,” in Sea Island Roots: African Presence
in the Carolinas and Georgia, eds. Mary Arnold Twining and Keith E. Baird (Trenton: Africa World Press,
Inc., 1991), 57-87.

36

physical isolation played a role in the retention of African knowledge systems and
cultural practices and delimited significant white influences. The steady importation of
African captives until 1858 served to revive and renew Gullah-Geechee communal bonds
and collective consciousness of West African social organization, alongside the Low-
Country and Sea Island region’s central role in global capitalist markets.
The intense bondage of women and men from Africa in the Low Country and Sea
Islands was in direct contrast with the Chesapeake region and the Black Belt regions of
the Deep South, where slaves were purchased and sold within or between states.
50
In
effect, communities on Sea Island plantations were continuously being remade and
reinforced by Africans and African knowledge systems and culture. Unintended results
of the constant forced importation of Africans served to renew African epistemologies
and place-making practices. To show how this bears out, the children of Africans
enslaved between 1800 and 1810 would have been alive and active during the Civil War.
Antebellum slave communities and culture were strongly influenced if not predominated
by first- and second-generation Africans with direct knowledge of diverse African
culture, knowledge, and ways of being.
51
In simultaneity, women, men, and children
held captive continued to be illegally imported directly from Africa to Low Country and
Sea Islands until 1858, renewing African bonds and connections among the region’s
slave communities.
52

50
Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and
Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
51
Lawrence S. Rowland, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers, Jr., The History of Beaufort County,
South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996).
52
Demerson, “Family Life on Wadmalaw Island,” 57-87.

37

The Task System
A significant factor defining the geographic place-making practices of Gullah-
Geechee communities was the task system of agriculture and as a system of organizing
enslaved labor coupled with the purchase and allotment of land after emancipation for
women and men held captive in the Sea Islands, as Brabec and Richardson point out,
these factors “had specific impacts on the cultural importance of land, the physical
expression of community in the landscape, and [later] the genesis of the continuing
mistrust of government by the Gullah community” (Brabec and Richardson 2007, 152).
The purchase and allotment of land after emancipation will be discussed in greater detail
in chapter two. The task system, however, was brought to the region from the Caribbean
by planters and quickly used as the primary system throughout the Sea Islands. Slaves
were assigned specific tasks for the day’s work, once the task was completed, the slave
was in control of her or his time.
53
This system is distinctly different from the gang
system, the primary mode of organizing labor in Black Belt regions and other regions of
the Deep South. In the gang system slaves worked in groups under the control of a driver
and were forced to work the entire day.
54
Historians Lawrence Rowland, Alexander
Moore, and George Rogers suggest, “The task system allowed the slaves the free time to
form their own communities, develop and practice their religion, devise their own
amusement, provide extra sustenance for their own families and even acquire wealth,
through the production and barter of wares” (Rowland, Moore, and Rogers 1996, 353).

53
Randall M. Miller, ed., The Afro-American Slaves: Community or Chaos? (Malabar: Robert E. Krieger
Publishing Company, 1981). Rowland, Moore, and Rogers, The History of Beaufort County, South
Carolina.
54
Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Washington, D.C.:
Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1933).

38

While the particular mode of organizing forced labor in Low Country and Sea Islands
afforded a modicum of autonomy, it’s important to emphasize as Clyde Woods’
Development Arrested elucidates, slaves in other regions of the Deep South created their
own communities, however tenuous and short-lived hinged upon the character of chattel
slavery and the ease at which planters disrupted and dismantled those communities
through their trade in flesh. Black Belt slave communities experienced distinct modes of
social organization, developed and practiced systems of knowledge, formed religious and
spiritual communities, created deep communal bonds, and practiced custodianship of the
lands they labored on. However their modus operandi was necessarily more concealed
and secreted due to the types of white surveillance they were subjected to, which diverges
from Low Country and Sea Islands.
The task system of agriculture shaped the metrics of the plantation. Due to the
process of rice cultivation, periodic requirements for flooding rice fields, the physical
landscape was divided in roughly rectangular areas, circumscribed at their boundaries by
ditches and canals. Brabec and Richardson explain:
Within these larger boundaries, each field was divided into smaller sections of
about a quarter acre in size. These smaller areas of land came to be called ‘tasks,’
since they served as the unit of definition for the amount of work a slave was
required to complete (hoeing, weeding, planting, harvesting). Outside these
fields, in the irregular margins, lay plots of land termed ‘slave fields’ or ‘negro
fields’ (Brabec and Richardson 2007, 154).
Families cultivated these fields in their “off time” and most families cultivated four to
five acres of land in corn, potatoes and other crops.
55
Along with the cultivation of

55
Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue, &
Co., 1853). R. Collins, “Management of Slaves,” DeBow’s Review, Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial
Progress and Resources 17, (1854): 421-426. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave
States in the Years 1853-1854: With Remarks on Their Economy (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904).

39

vegetables and field crops, many families raised their own livestock, trading within and
without the confines of the plantation, often selling to the owner of the plantation. As a
result of the task system, slave communities in Low Country and Sea Islands developed a
strong economy on the production and barter of crafts, growing and selling produce from
their own gardens, and through the cultivation of artisanal skills slaves sold their own
labor. The development of their economy bolstered a degree of self-determination and
families and communities, could to a certain extent, work together as an economic unit,
strengthening bonds of family and community. Human need determined the structures of
value in the economy produced by slaves. This economy functioned in the shadows of a
plantation economy, an economy organized by a structure of value where a product is
made in response to its profitability on the market. Therein lies the paradigmatic
difference between the structures of values, and worldviews of enslaved Gullah-Geechee
communities and the largely white plantocracy.
In contrast to other regions in the Deep South, Low Country plantation owners
maintained a common practice of leaving slave communities without a white presence,
neither a white planter nor white overseer, for extended periods of time. Slave
communities were under the supervision of a senior member of the slave community,
termed a “driver”. This created distinct slave hierarchies among enslaved people
laboring on plantations. For instance, Bilali Muhammad, a famous enslaved Muslim on
Sapelo Island, who left a handwritten Arabic manuscript, a risala. In Arabic risala
means “message,” in this instance it is the writing of a trained Islamic scholar and is

Guion Griffis Johnson, A Social History of the Sea Islands: With Special Reference to St. Helena Island,
South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1930). Mart A. Stewart, “What Nature
Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1868-1920 (Athens: The University of
Georgia Press, 1996).

40

related to matters of fiqh, which is the human understanding of Islamic jurisprudence, the
rules and regulations on how to live in the world as a person who strives to actualize the
teachings of the Qur’an in her/his daily life. Muhammad’s manuscript draws from Al-
Risala of Abu Muhammad Abdullah bin Zaid al Qairawani, dated before 1101 CE.
56
Al
Qairawani’s popular legal commentary of the Maliki School was predominant from
Morocco to the Gulf of Guinea.
57
Bilali Muhammad was a master cultivator of rice, and
unbeknownst to his captors was in the midst of his studies as a legal scholar in Islamic
jurisprudence; he could speak Arabic, and had extensive knowledge of the Qur’an from
memory. Due to Muhammad’s leadership qualities and literacy, he was appointed slave
driver by Thomas Spalding on Spalding’s Sapelo plantation and oversaw more than five
hundred slaves. During the war of 1812 (in 1815) Muhammad, told Spalding he could
“defend his charges” which prompted Spalding to give Muhammad eighty muskets to
defend the property on Sapelo Island while Spalding was elsewhere. In preparing his
defenses, Muhammad pronounced to Spalding, “I will answer for every Negro of the true
faith [Islam] but not for these Christian dogs you own” (emphasis in original)
commenting on the inferior position of Christian slaves who suffered the same condition
of bondage.
58
In another account of Muhammad’s lengthy captivity on Sapelo, and in his
role as driver, he saved “hundreds of slaves” during the hurricane of September 1824 by
directing them into cotton and sugar tabby houses composed by West African practice of
making a type of concrete using sand, lime, and oyster shells. Given Muhammad’s

56
Allan Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles
(New York: Routledge, 1997), 90.
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid., 87.

41

position in Sapelo’s slave hierarchy coupled with his spiritual way of life, Muhammad,
his children, and grandchildren lived and kept a relative distant from other slaves on the
plantation. Muhammad’s legacy lives on through his descendents who continue to live
on their ancestral land and serve as the bearers of Gullah-Geechee knowledge, culture,
and community. Several early diary entries and travel account descriptions of Sea Islands
plantations remark on the fact that plantation owners were rarely present between March
and November.
59
These periods of rice cultivation coincide with malaria season and
stifling humidity during the summer months. The absenteeism of white planters and
white overseers is attributable, in large part, to their desire to avoid unfavorable
environmental conditions and disease, during the 1800s. Although the practice of leaving
plantations without a white presence was illegal, the law was amended in 1800 to allow
for plantations to be without a white presence for a six month period, reflecting the
extreme peril white civil society perceived from mosquito-borne diseases during the
summer months.
60
The effect of planter and overseer absenteeism was that it afforded
slave communities a measure of autonomy, and it reduced Euro-American influences and
plantation epistemologies, which is in stark contrast to typical Black-Belt plantations
throughout the South. This measure of autonomy, gave slave communities in Low
Country and Sea Islands the ability to develop a strong collective identity, culture, and
communal place-making practices as well as an increased sense of communal
custodianship and connection to the land. This communal custodianship, and in a sense

59
John Davis, Travels of Four Years and Half in the United States of America during 1798, 1799, 1800,
1801, and 1802 (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1803). E.W. Pearson, ed. Letters from Port Royal:
Written at the Time of the Civil War (Boston: W.B. Clarke Company, 1906). Alexander S. Salley, Jr., ed.,
Narratives of Early Carolina 1650-1708 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911).
60
Morgan, Slave Counterpoint. Vlach, Back of the Big House.

42

ownership, is underscored in a review of accounts recorded during Emancipation and
Reconstruction. In these numerous accounts, freed people frequently stated a sense of
ownership in the plantations they toiled in, that exceeds conceptions of legal property
rights. This sense of ownership is seen through the ways the freed people labored the
lands, the extreme loss of life and loss of kinship networks they suffered. This is
evidenced in the epigraph opening chapter two Bayley Wyat’s statement perfectly
articulates this relationship to the land:
I may state to all our friends, and to all our enemies, that we has a right to the land
where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our
husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates
upon; for that the reason we have a divine right to the land…And then didn’t we
clear the lands, and raise the crops of corn, of tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of
everything? And then didn’t (them) large cities in the North grow up on the
cotton and the sugars and the rice that we made? Yes! I appeal to the South and
the North if I hasn’t spoke the words of truth. I say they have grown rich and my
people is poor
61
.
Since Black communities had lived and worked the land for generations, suffered the loss
of mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, brothers, husbands, fathers, and friends, they held a
moral, legal, and, more importantly, sacred claim to the land.
62
Nowhere is this more
evident than in burial practices and relationships to sacred burial grounds in Low Country
and Coastal Islands.

61
Jaynes, Gerald. Branches without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South,
1862-1882 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 283.

62
Charles Nordhoff, The Freedmen of South Carolina: Some Account of Their Appearance, Character,
Condition, and Peculiar Customs (New York: Charles T. Evans, 1863). Pearson, Letters from Port Royal:
Written at the Time of the Civil War.

43

Sacred Grounds
Sacred ancestral burial grounds are a reflection of relationships, social activity,
social institutions, and the cultural legacies of Gullah-Geechee communities. Ancestral
graveyards are sites of memory linking the past to present life-affirming practices; they
are sites of cultural continuity; they are “sacred places for ritually accessing African
ancestral spirits for assistance and spiritual support,” and serve as physical manifestations
of loss through death and absence.
63
For Gullah-Geechee communities their sacred
ancestral burial grounds function as significant repositories of history, memory, and
culture. The retention and influence of West African knowledge systems regarding the
continuous social relationships between the living and the dead is an important factor in
the establishment of the individual, the community, and the culture. Through a
continuous connection and access to these sites, each generation passes on knowledge to
the following generation, and knowledge of complex historical forces that affected the
development of Gullah-Geechee communities and social life. The social acts of burial,
the physical and cultural landscape of the ancestral burying grounds, and African
retention in Gullah-Geechee burial practices is significant in understanding these
communities place-making practices, relationships to land, and knowledge systems
relating to life, death, and burial. “The social acts of burial—including preparation of the
body for interment, wakes, and rites performed in the graveyard and the burial,” the
physical and cultural landscape of cemeteries and burying places—“their natural
topography, artifacts, and human associations,” and the graveyard itself reveals a
complex set of social relations and social activity, knowledge systems, and historical

63
Deborah Lafayette Henderson, “What Lies Beneath: Reading the Cultural Landscape of Graveyards and
Burial Grounds in African-American History and Literature” (PhD diss., Clark Atlanta University, 2008).

44

processes which reinforces sacred relationships to place and land. Deborah Lafayette
Henderson contends, through place-making practices, the development of cultural and
physical landscapes, Low Country and Sea Islands functions as an actual and symbolic
cultural manifestation of the connection between natally alienated Africans and their
American descendants. Henderson explains:
The Sea Islanders developed a strong sense of place that grew out of their intimate
knowledge of the American landscape in which they were forced to labor. They
planted and harvested crops and became skilled at reading the coastal weather and
the seasons; they hunted and trapped game, acquiring knowledge of the
movements and habitats of the island wildlife; they fished the shores of the ocean
and the inlets of the sound and learned the rhythms of the moon and tides. Their
communal lifestyle strengthened their sense of place and developed “strong kin
networks” within their geographic communities (Henderson 2008, 40-41).
For Gullah-Geechee communities the graveyard, in its physical and symbolic
manifestations, in addition to topographies throughout Low Country and Sea Islands,
become a living site of memory for the inhabitants’ sense of belonging, history, culture,
and identity. “Reading the [physical and] cultural landscapes of graveyards and burial
grounds is a complex cultural process—one that requires not only the knowledge of
cultural beliefs regarding death and burial, but also the willingness to accept alternative
cultural perspectives,” particularly with respect to maintaining an ongoing relationship
and connection to one’s ancestors (Henderson 2008, 43).
The impact of Gullah-Geechee ancestors on the coastal landscape --the blood,
sweat, and backbreaking labor of these Africans-- left an indelible mark on the Low
Country. Rice production in South Carolina and Georgia caused the most extensive
environmental changes of the antebellum era along the eastern seaboard. In addition to
clearing forests and constructing the rice fields, slaves built boats and canals to carry rice

45

through the salt marshes to the rivers. Archaeologist Leland Ferguson described a rice
plantation to make clear the magnitude of the physically demanding labor rice production
entailed for enslaved Africans:
These fields are surrounded by more than a mile of earthen dikes or ‘banks’ as
they were called. Built by slaves, these banks […] were taller than a person and
up to 15 feet wide. By [1800], rice banks on the 12 ½ mile stretch of the East
Branch of the Cooper River measured more than 55 miles long and contained
more than 6.4 million feet of earth […] This means that […] working in the water
and muck with no more than shovels, hoes, and baskets […] by 1850 Carolina
slaves […] on tidal plantations like Middleburg throughout the rice growing
district had built a system of banks and canals […] nearly three times the volume
of Cheops, the world’s largest pyramid.
64

The grueling conditions of rice cultivation left a macabre record of deaths for enslaved
Africans and their descendants. Malaria and general exhaustion from rice cultivation,
especially during pregnancy, were two of the primary factors that led to premature death.
Funerals were all too frequent occurrences, deaths happened by the thousands, especially
among children. Historians estimate that almost 90% of African children died before
they reached the age of 16.
65
Funerals were generally held at night when people were not
toiling in the fields. Margaret Washington Creel relates the story of a 19
th
century funeral
of Mary, a beautiful and beloved young woman who died after a lingering illness:
The coffin, a rough home-made affair, was placed upon a cart, which was drawn
by an old Gray, and the multitudes formed in a line in the rear, marching two
deep. The procession was something like a quarter of a mile long. Perhaps every
fifteenth person down the line carried an uplifted torch. As the procession moved
slowly toward the “lonesome graveyard” down by the side of the swamp, they
sung the well-known hymn of Dr. Issac Watts:
When I can read my title clear

64
Quoted in National Park Service, Low Country Gullah Culture Special Resource Study and Final
Environmental Impact Statement (Atlanta: NPS Southeast Regional Office, 2005), 42.
65
Ibid.

46

To mansions in the skies,
I bid farewell to every fear
And wipe my weeping eyes.
Mary’s baby was taken to the graveyard by its grandmother, and before the corpse
was deposited in the earth, the baby was passed from one person to another across
the coffin. The slaves believed that if this was not done, it would be impossible to
raise the infant. The mother’s spirit would come back for her baby and take it to
herself. […] [T]he corpse was lowered into the grave as a last farewell act of
kindness to the dead […]. A prayer was offered […]. This concluded the
services at the grave (Creel 1988, 314-315).
The burial grounds carried the legacy of the plantation, tethering a Black sense of place to
the experience of chattel slavery and the conditions that necessitated the formation of
new familial and communal bonds. Though most of the graves were unmarked, many of
the deceased were remembered, “the cemeteries provide[d] a focal reality that in many
ways symbolizes the social meaning of belonging” and places of Black coastal history
(Guthrie 1996, 23).
Access to ancestral burial grounds remains an integral component of Black
coastal communities. The locations of burial grounds were determined by the
plantation’s spatial organizing logics, which held slave quarters of the field hands at some
distance from the main house, roads, fences, and vegetation increased the physical
separation. The distance between the main house and the slave quarters was at least one
quarter of a mile and the quarters were almost never located close to the river or the
shoreline.
66
Even though, as local people often said “their ancestors preferred sites that
were beside the water so that their souls might easily return to Africa”.
67
Before

66
Pearson, Letters from Port Royal: Written at the Time of the Civil War.
67
National Park Service, Low Country Gullah Culture Special Resource Study and Final Environmental
Impact Statement, 76.

47

Emancipation, the pattern of spatial order reflected the plantation’s mode of social
organization, the social relations of Gullah-Geechee communities was obfuscated by the
dictates of the plantocracy. After Emancipation, Gullah-Geechee spatial organization
was indicative of the mode of social organization. Compounds were formed, as the
center of family and societal relations. Each compound, loosely arranged in a cluster,
was formed by a group of household structures, where the extended family of people,
both actual and fictive kin, lived in close proximity and association in the compound. For
these subsistence-living agrarian communities, cleared farmland was usually located not
far from the compound. Often, one or more members of the compound maintained a
garden adjacent to one of the households.
68
The compound functioned as a unit, although
each household functions separately, the close association and relationship of the
members, as well as family groups purchasing land together, strengthened communal
bonds. Therefore, land-use practices, (with land ownership in common and
multigenerational extended families), consisted of closely spaced settlements diverged
with conceptions of land-use propelled by economic growth and rural development. The
most significant historical factor in the development of the Gullah-Geechee communities
and their place-making practices was the purchase and allotment of land during the Port
Royal Experiment and then again, during and after Reconstruction. Any study attempting
to establish the significance of land and land ownership in Gullah-Geechee communities
must fully understand how the Reconstruction impacted that relationship.

68
Demerson, “Family Life on Wadmalaw Island,” 57-87.

48

Chapter 2 The Promise of Land and the Freedmen’s Bureau
I may state to all our friends, and to all our enemies, that
we has a right to the land where we are located. For why?
I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been
sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now
locates upon; for that the reason we have a divine right to
the land…And then didn’t we clear the lands, and raise the
crops of corn, of tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of everything?
And then didn’t (them) large cities in the North grow up on
the cotton and the sugars and the rice that we made? Yes!
I appeal to the South and the North if I hasn’t spoke the
words of truth. I say they have grown rich and my people
is poor.
-Bayley Wyat, of Yorktown,
Virginia, during a public
meeting in 1866
69

Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all
independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and
equality.
-Malcolm X, Message To The Grass Roots

The Promise of Land
On the evening of January 12
th
1865, twenty members of the local Black
communities
70
in Savannah, Georgia, were summoned for a conference with General
William T. Sherman, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and Assistant Adjutant E.D.

69
Jaynes, Gerald. Branches without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South,
1862-1882 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 283.

49

Townsend.
71
The “Colloquy” between Sherman, Stanton, and the Black leaders—a
combination of clergy and lay leaders—was an interview conducted in military style,
with the men receiving twelve prepared written questions, and their spokesmen, Garrison
Frazier, a Baptist minister, supplying written answers (See Appendix I).
72
The group that
met with Sherman and Stanton, mostly Baptist and Methodist ministers, included:
“Ulysses L. Houston, who had worked as a house servant and butcher” while in bondage,
and “had since 1861 been pastor of the city’s Third African Baptist Church,” and James
Porter, “an Episcopal vestryman, who, before the war, had operated a clandestine and
illegal school for [B]lack children” (Foner 2005, 4). Porter would later become one of
the organizers of the Georgia Equal Rights Association, and he (along with Houston and
James D. Lynch)
73
would go on to become one of the era’s lawmakers, appointed
“Missionary and Government Superintendent” at Beaufort, South Carolina.
74

James Porter, one of the main proponents for the Georgia Equal Rights and
Education Association, was originally a native of Charleston, South Carolina. Born to
free parents, Porter’s parents dedicated him for missionary service, however due to an
accident that left him crippled and unable to carry out the duties of a missionary he

71
Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2005). Russell Duncan, Freedom’s Shore: Tunis Campbell and the Georgia Freedmen (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1986). Dorothy Sterling, ed., The Trouble They Seen: The Story of Reconstruction in the
Words of African Americans (New York: A De Capo Press, 1994).

72
Foner, Forever Free. Sterling, The Trouble They Seen.
73
In 1869 James D. Lynch, on the Republican ticket, became the Secretary of State for Mississippi, and
was subsequently reelected in 1871.
74
Foner, Forever Free. Duncan, Freedom’s Shore.

50

concentrated on receiving the best education possible.
75
Porter devoted his time to his
studies, which included a rigorous study of ancient and modern languages.
76
Porter’s
course of study also included vocal and instrumental music under the tutelage of George
O. Robinson, of Charleston.
77
The exceptional talents Porter exhibited in music
eventually served as the catalyst for his migration to Savannah, Georgia.
78
In 1856, he
was commissioned to become the choir director and musician for St. Stephen’s, an urban
Episcopal mission in Savannah.
79
It was his role as senior warden of St. Stephen’s that
called Porter to attend the “Colloquy”.
80
However, due to, Bishop Elliot’s (a white
clergyman), blatant rejection of Porter’s application for ordination to Diaconate Porter
felt compelled to distance himself from the mission of the church.
81

With his experience as a music teacher, during and after the Civil War Porter
started an eighth grade private school to educate young Black males in Savannah.
82
The
school, located in the Bryan’s Trade office (formerly Joseph Bryan’s Slave Mart,
Savannah’s largest and most notorious slave-dealer), boasted a daily attendance of 450
students.
83
One of two schools opened; the other at the Oglethorpe Hospital, started

75
Adrianne Yvette Baker, James Porter, vol.22 of Savannah Biographies (Savannah: Armstrong Atlantic
State University, 1997).
76
Ibid.
77
Charles L. Hoskins, Black Episcopalians in Savannah, Georgia: Strife, Struggle, and Salvation
(Savannah: Private Printing, 1980), 54.
78
Baker, James Porter.
79
Ibid.
80
Ibid.
81
Ibid.
82
Hoskins, Black Episcopalians in Savannah, 54.
83
Ibid.

51

within three weeks of Sherman’s occupation of the city.
84
Preceding the close of 1865,
Black communities in Georgia organized fifty schools. The following three years
witnessed the extension of this network into seventy counties throughout Georgia where
over two hundred Black teachers (some of whom had taught clandestine schools before
and during the Civil War) conducted 191 day schools and 45 night schools.
85
By 1878,
the Savannah Board of Education opened the first Black public school where Porter was
appointed principal.
An antecedent to this, and advertised to the friends of equal justice in Georgia as
the Freedmen’s Convention, public calls were made and newspaper advertisements were
printed to bring together in mutual consultation the freedmen throughout Georgia to draw
attention to and “carefully consider the state of affairs” in which freed people found
themselves.
86
On January 10, 1866, one- hundred Black delegates from eighteen counties
convened in Augusta at the Springfield Baptist Church
87
to “discuss and increase” the
political and civic rights of Black Americans. Organizers and participants of the
association included James Porter, William Jefferson White, Ulysses L. Houston, Henry
M. Turner, and Tunis G. Campbell, Sr., with the addition of some agents from the
Freedmen’s Bureau, and an invitation was extended to General Davis Tillson, assistant
commissioner of the bureau and the mayor of Augusta.
88
James Porter was nominated as

84
Donald L. Grant, The Way it Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia (New York: Carol
Publishing Group, 1993), 223.
85
Ibid.
86
The Colored American, (Augusta, GA), December 30, 1865.
87
Ibid, 97.
88
Ethel Maude Christler, Participation of Negroes in the Government of Georgia 1867-1870 (master’s
dissertation, Atlanta University, 1932), 4-5.

52

the temporary chairman of the convention. The delegates of the Freedmen’s Convention
called for: equal pay, voting rights, jury duty, equality in public accommodations, and
universal education. However, this convention opposed universal suffrage, advocated the
ownership property and imposed educational tests as a qualification to vote. They also
excluded people whom they deemed “ignorant Negroes” from the franchise on the
grounds that their votes were harmful.
89
The delegates appointed a board and elected a
superintendent to supervise the establishment of schools for Black Americans in Georgia.
To spread its policy, the Georgia Convention, incorporated into the Equals Rights
Association of Georgia, nominated James Porter as president, and the vice presidents
were the chairmen from each county delegation. The association’s platform sought “to
inculcate principles of honesty, industry, and sobriety” in Black Georgians.
90

Additionally, the association advised Black residents to work hard, to learn to read and
write, and to buy property.
91

Remarks from the Georgia Convention participants addressed their principal aims
for the organization:
we had not come to hold a Secession convention, nor throw off their loyalty to the
general Government [sic], or to their native State [sic], neither was it their
intention to kill or hurt any one, but as free men, we have met to ask for free laws,
we mean to seek justice for all men irrespective of color, or condition. The laws
which now govern us, were oppressive and cruel, we want them changed.
92

89
Ibid.
90
“The Colored Convention in Augusta,” Southern Recorder (Milledgeville, GA), January 30, 1866.
91
Ibid.
92
Proceedings of the Freedmen’s Convention of Georgia (Augusta, GA: Order of the Convention, 1866), 4.

53

Three important resolutions were passed by the convention. The first resolution stated
that the coastal lands held by Black residents in the area were not to be taken away except
by an act of Congress. The second declared that the southern states were not territories
and lands to be taken, and the third resolution appealed to the Georgia legislature for
equal rights for Black residents before the courts, because the courts subjected Black
Georgians to equal taxes and equal charges on public conveyance, but did not provide
equal treatment/protection in the court system. Despite the aforementioned remarks
convention participants addressed in respect to “oppressive and cruel” laws to which
Black residents were subjected, the tenor of the convention remained conciliatory. The
conservative influence was so strong that southern newspapers and liberal minded white
residents spoke favorably of the convention.
The Georgia Equal Rights Association (GERA) established branches in several
cities to advance the human rights of Black Americans and draw public attention to,
especially for the Northern populace, the reign of terror against Black communities. By
September 1866, as Black Georgians became active members in the state’s Republican
Party, branches of the GERA merged with the Union Leagues across the state. In
Georgia the Union leagues were strongest among the poor whites in the hill country. The
Republican Party was a tense coalition of diverse groups with divergent vested interests;
a majority of the poor whites never supported Black land ownership, Black voting, or
Black office holding.
Like Porter, Black leaders saw a strong link between education and political
power. Freed people wanted to maintain authority over their education. Historian
Donald Grant argued, “The main institution that struggled to keep education of [B]lack

54

children under [Black communities’] control grew out of the Georgia Equal Rights
Association” (Grant, 1993, 226). The Equal Rights Association developed into a
statewide organization in 1866 to fight for civil rights of Black Americans. In the fall of
1866, The Equal Rights Association changed its name to the Georgia Education
Association (GEA). By late 1867, 120 schools had been established in 53 of the state’s
131 counties affiliated with the 3,500-member GEA (Grant, 1993, 226).
Subsequent accomplishments made by Black communities in Savannah, propelled
convention participants, such as James Porter, to run for election as a Georgia state
legislator. As a proponent of public schools and education for the people of African
descent during Reconstruction, Porter accomplished much of his goals while in office.
Aptly, Black Georgians were not dissuaded in their pursuit of political freedom by the
efforts of their conservative brethren or their white allies. They held meetings all over
the state. On March 26, 1867, a meeting was held in Macon, where the people organized
temporarily and adopted a preamble, a series of resolutions, Constitutional amendments,
and Military and Supplementary bills.
93
The Macon Telegraph published a descriptive
account of the proceedings. Initially, the people were originally supposed to meet at the
Second Colored Baptist Church, but as space was limited, they adjourned to meet at a
grove near Rose Hill Cemetery.
94
A platform was erected to accommodate speakers; the
noteworthy Rev. Henry M. Turner was among the speakers at the meeting. The meeting
opened by singing “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand” and the people in the procession

93
Atlanta Daily New Era (Atlanta, GA), March 28, 1867.
94
Ibid.

55

carried various banners, one banner notably praised, “As we have got to live and vote
together in one State [sic], let us be friends.”
95

A similar meeting held in Savannah with speakers on the platform included the
Reverends Tunis G. Campbell, James Simms, and James Porter along with former
governor Herschel V. Johnson, and Colonel Lorenzo Madison Wilson, among others.
96

Several resolutions were passed, four were as follows: 1) recognized Congress as having
supreme legislative power of the nation; 2) recognized enfranchisement of Black
residents; 3) recognized education of the whole people as of highest importance; and 4)
asked General Pope to order early registration and election as early as possible.
97

A few convention delegates to what later became known as the Georgia Equal
Rights Association were members of the Georgia Constitutional Convention, namely
Aaron Bradley, Tunis G. Campbell, Henry McNeal Turner, and James T. Costin. The
convention was called to meet in Atlanta on December 5, 1867 with about 170 members
of whom twenty-nine were Black Americans, and the convention as a whole counted
more Republicans present than Democrats. Particularly interested in suffrage,
qualification for office holding, relief work, and formation of a liberal constitution, Black
members took an active role in attempting to solidify Black political privileges,
especially Black enfranchisement. Reflecting on this moment of political activity, W. E.
B. Du Bois argues, “[Black suffrage] was without a doubt a tremendous experiment but
with all its manifest failure it succeeded to an astonishing degree; […] it made the

95
Ibid.
96
Atlanta Daily New Era (Atlanta, GA), April 4, 1867.
97
Ibid.

56

immediate re-establishment of the old slavery impossible.”
98
For all the manifest failures
of the Constitutional Convention, Black delegates involved in it ensured Black suffrage
was a method to accomplish freedom from enslavement, and “it gave Freedmen’s sons a
chance to begin their education.”
99

Returning to the “Colloquy” where some of Georgia’s active Black political and
religious figures, articulated the significance of land for the future Black communities
they had envisioned after emancipation. The creation of the Georgia Equal Rights
Association worked in tandem with securing land. For Black Americans to fully achieve
their rights as free people after centuries of bondage, and for them to realize their
autonomy as a people, equal rights as full citizens and access to land for themselves and
their families were required. With the benefit of an April 1
st
, 1865 edition of The
National Freedmen, the particularities of this epistolary conversation between Frazier,
Sherman, and Stanton, are as follows: when asked to “State in what manner you think
you can take care of yourselves,” Frazier responded, “The way we can best take care of
ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor. We can soon maintain
ourselves and have something to spare. We want to be placed on land until we are able to
buy it and make it our own”.
100
Asked to “State in what manner you would rather live;
whether scattered among the whites or in colonies by yourselves?” Frazier answered, “I
would prefer to live by ourselves. There is a prejudice against us in the South that will
take many years to get over, but I do not know that I can answer for my brethren. (Mr.

98
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (Garden City Park:
Square One Publishers, 2009), 97.
99
Ibid., 219.
100
Sterling, The Trouble They Seen, 30.

57

Lynch says he thinks they should not be separated, but live together. All the other
persons present, being questioned one by one, answered that they agree with Bro.
Frazier).”
101
And when finally questioned, “Do you think that there is intelligence
enough among the slaves to maintain themselves under the Government [sic] and
maintain good and peaceable relations among yourselves and with your neighbors?”
Frazier replied, “I think there is sufficient intelligence among us to do so.”
102
Henry
Ward Beecher, who later read from his pulpit the detailed report of the meeting, quoted
Stanton as saying “This was the first time in the history of the nation that government
officials had gone to the Negroes [sic] and asked them what they wanted for
themselves.”
103

The “Colloquy,” prompted by Stanton’s visit to Savannah, was Sherman’s
practical attempt to relieve Union authorities of “contrabands,” the tens of thousands of
men, women, and children who abandoned Georgia and South Carolina plantations and
followed Sherman’s army into Savannah.
104
At the behest of Stanton, and his meeting
with Savannah’s Black delegation, four days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order
No. 15, providing the settlement of “contrabands” on a reservation of abandoned and
confiscated land made up of “the islands from Charleston south,” the abandoned rice
plantations along the Atlantic coast, including the inland rivers “from thirty miles back

101
Ibid.
102
Ibid.
103
Beecher’s account and the minutes were published in the New York Daily Tribune, February 13 1865.
See LaWanda Cox and John H. Cox, eds. Reconstruction, the Negro, and the New South. (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1973), 53.
104
Foner, Forever Free.

58

from the sea, and the country southward to the St. John’s River in Northern Florida.”
Order No. 15 stated in part:
Whenever three respectable Negroes, heads of families shall desire to settle on
land and shall have selected for that purpose an island or locality, the Inspector of
Settlements and Plantations will afford them such assistance as he can. The three
parties named will subdivide the land so that each family shall have a plot of not
more than forty acres of tillable ground.
In the settlement to be established, no white person whatever, unless soldiers
detailed for duty will be permitted to reside and the sole and exclusive
management of affairs will be left to the free people themselves, subject only to
the United States military authority and the acts of Congress.
105

Paul Cimbala draws attention to a few of the pertinent details of Sherman’s promise of
homesteads, in that they were intentionally limited—Black men and women could not
claim their land fee simple, in that they did not have complete ownership of the land
without any limitations or conditions, the land was leased to them. Sherman gave orders
to his officer in charge “to give to the claimants ‘possessory titles,’ titles that
acknowledged their right to work the land and to enjoy the products of their labor but fell
short of conveying ownership.”
106
Accordingly, Sherman’s order “made no stipulations
about how long the freedmen would be able to stay on the land or how much they would
have to pay in order to purchase it.”
107
Disentangling the specifications of Sherman’s
Field Order was left for Congress to mete out.
Following the issuance of Sherman’s Field Order and after the decisive February
18
th
fall of Charleston on March 3, 1865, Congress had created a new bureau within the

105
Special Field Orders, No. 15, Headquarters Military Division of the Mississippi, 16 Jan. 1865, Orders &
Circulars, ser. 44, RG 94 [DD-38].
106
Paul Cimbala, “The Freedmen’s Bureau, the Freedmen, and Sherman’s Grant in Reconstruction
Georgia, 1865-1867,” The Journal of Southern History 55 (1989): 599.
107
Ibid.

59

War Department, the “Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands”
(commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau).
108
Congress made the Freedmen’s
Bureau responsible for “all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen from rebel states,
or from any district of country within the territory embraced in the operations of the
army”.
109
That capacious mandate charged the bureau “with stabilizing three sectors of
southern life: the white refugees (both poor whites and displaced property owners), the
former slaves, and the land confiscated from rebels (approximately 850,000 acres)”.
110

Under this new congressional mandate the bureau was given broad authority over
virtually every aspect affecting southern life, including labor, relief, health, education,
and the administration of justice.
111
This also authorized the Freedmen’s Bureau to rent,
and eventually sell, abandoned and confiscated land that had come under federal control
during and immediately after the war, to freedmen, and, authorization was later expanded
to include the right to sell to white unionist refugees, in plots up to forty acres.
112

108
Steven Hahn, Steven F. Miller, Susan E. O’Donovan, John C. Rodrigue, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds.,
Freedom A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, Series 3: Volume 1: Land and Labor, 1865
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 17.
109
United States, Statutes at Large, Treaties, and Proclamations of the United States of America, vol. 13
(Boston, 1866), 507–509.
110
Cedric Robinson, Black Movements in America. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 85.
111
Hahn et al, Freedom A Documentary History of Emancipation, 19.
112
Ibid., 17-18. “Bureau-controlled land fell into two main legal categories. A small part of it was
confiscated property, forfeited by disloyal owners in accordance with legal proceedings mandated by the
confiscation act of 1862” (Hahn et. al 2013, 17-18). The most extensive acreage under Freedmen’s Bureau
control was “‘abandoned’ land—defined by a July 1864 law as that whose owner was voluntarily absent
‘and engaged, either in arms or otherwise, in aiding or encouraging the rebellion’” (Hahn et al 2013,18).
Officials of the Treasury Department had leased out sizable tracts of such land during the war, and the army
had used some of it for military purposes, including contraband camps, other relief establishments, and
land experiments, such as the Port Royal experiment (Hahn et al 18). Most abandoned land, however, was
not under any official supervision at all when it was placed under the jurisdiction of the Freedmen’s
Bureau. Moreover, the government’s hold over abandoned land rested on a precarious foundation: “[T]he
law provided no mechanism by which title could be wrested from its owners, and federal authorities were
expected to exercise only temporary custody” (Hahn et al 2013,18).

60

Initially, the bureau had no authorized budget, therefore the resulting revenues, the
lawmakers assumed, would finance the Freedmen’s Bureau’s other activities.
113
The
bureau was designed as a temporary agency, authorizing it to continue for only one year
after the end of the war, expecting it to draw its personnel from the army.
114

The Freedmen’s Bureau
The largest contiguous expanse of abandoned land had come under federal control
by way of Sherman’s reserve.
115
The legal basis of the government’s control over this
land was one of the many issues confronted by General Oliver Otis Howard, who, on
May 12, 1865, became the first appointed commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau. To
staff the bureau, Howard was dependent on a dwindling Union army—down to 152,000
by the end of 1865, and 38,000 the following year—in order to supervise bureau
operations in the former slave states.
116
Bureau agents were therefore thinly scattered,
and their tours of duty were generally brief; in some large expanses of the South, none
were to be found at all. Even by the end of the year, “barely 470 Freedmen’s Bureau
officials were on duty in the field: ten assistant commissioners and their seventy staff
officers, approximately 310 men in district and local field offices, and seventy-seven
physicians and other medical personnel”
117
. In several areas throughout the South,

113
Ibid., 17-18, Robinson, Black Movements, 85.
114
Hahn et al, Freedom A Documentary History of Emancipation, 17.
115
Ibid., 18-19.

116
Ibid., 19.
117
Ibid., 19-20.

61

military commanders and provost marshals, rather than Freedmen’s Bureau agents,
supervised matters pertaining to freed people.
118
Sometimes they did so only
temporarily, pending the assignment of a bureau agent, but often they were the only
representatives of the federal government on hand.
119

At the time of his appointment to Inspector of Settlements and Plantations for
Sherman’s reserve, General Rufus Saxton
120
, “a thorough going abolitionist of the radical
sort” from Connecticut, and “an ardent supporter of [B]lack land acquisition,”
121
was, in
charge of the Port Royal experiment on the lower coast of South Carolina. The Port
Royal experiment was “an effort” begun under the auspices of the Treasury Department
“to help ex-slaves in their transition to freedom” that brought together philanthropists,
educators, capitalists, missionaries, and army men, described by historian Willie Lee
Rose as “a rehearsal for postwar Reconstruction”
122
. Saxton initiated a preemption
system that was clearly documented for land divisions and sales during the Civil War.
He encouraged freed people to build houses on land in order to retain squatters’ rights,
“[t]o prevent exploitation by northern speculators, the preemption program included an

118
Ibid., 20.
119
Ibid.
120
Saxton first came to Port Royal in November of 1861 as Chief Quartermaster to General Sherman’s
forces (Rose 1976, 153). On April 29, 1862, Saxton received instructions from Stanton to “take possession
of all the plantations heretofore occupied by rebels, and take charge of the inhabitants remaining thereon
within the department, or which the fortunes of war may hereafter bring into it,” with full authority to make
“such rules and regulations for the cultivation of the land, and for the protection, employment and
government of the inhabitants as circumstances seem to require” (Rose 1976, 152). Saxton was responsible
only to the War Department and to General Hunter (Rose 1976, 153).
121
Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1976), 153.
122

Cimbala, “The Freedmen’s Bureau, the Freedmen, and Sherman’s Grant in Reconstruction Georgia,
1865-1867,” 600.

62

eligibility requirement that potential buyers must reside in the area for at least six months
prior to purchase” (Brabec and Richardson 2007,155).
123
Public policies on access to
land and land ownership for potential Black owners were contradictory and changed
frequently as political power shifted. However, between 1862 and 1865, in South
Carolina coastal areas, such as St. Helena, Port Royal, and Lady’s Islands, freed people
came into land ownership through a combination of auction sales, preemption settlement
and rent-to-own programs.
124
By January 1864, freed people in the Port Royal Island
area had filed preemption claims for 6,000 acres, but most of this land was never
acquired.
As the Freedmen’s Bureau assistant commissioner for South Carolina, Georgia,
and, briefly, Florida, Saxton set about organizing his own staff and appointing
subordinates—variously denominated superintendents, agents, subassistant
commissioners, and subcommissioners, among other positions—to fill offices in the
field.
125
Before the summer of 1865, he had placed agents in the Ogeechee District (an
area along the Ogeechee and the Little Ogeechee rivers in Chatham County near
Savannah), in Savannah, and on St. Catherine’s and St. Simon’s islands.
126
In June 1865,
when Saxton first reported to General Howard, he estimated that his efforts had settled
forty thousand people on four hundred thousand acres within the swath of land subject to

123
Pearson, Letters from Port Royal: Written at the Time of the Civil War.

124
Johnson, A Social History of the Sea Islands.
125
Hahn et al, Freedom A Documentary History of Emancipation, 19.
126

Cimbala, “The Freedmen’s Bureau, the Freedmen, and Sherman’s Grant in Reconstruction Georgia,
1865-1867,” 600.

63

Sherman’s order.
127
Saxton also hoped to secure abandoned property on mainland
Georgia for the freedman’s use.
128

Federal policy offered these officials only the most general of guidance, as
fundamental questions about freedom after conditions of bondage were not only yet to be
addressed, but found varied local articulations about what freedom would mean for Black
men and women, across subregions in the South. Hahn et al offer insight on federal
questions anticipated regarding freedom’s possibilities:
Would it be founded on [emancipated men and women’s] ownership of
productive property or merely in the sale of their labor? If the [emancipated]
were to be endowed with land, from whom would it come and how would it be
distributed? If freedom entailed nothing beyond work for wages, what would be
the obligations of employers and employees, and how would they be enforced?
The necessity of providing rations and other forms of relief to the destitute and the
displaced, both [B]lack and white, and to those who were unable to support
themselves posed additional questions. What was the extent of the federal
government’s responsibility for the needy? […] Military officers and the
Freedmen’s Bureau agents, like the Northern populace at large, were not of one
mind about these questions.
129

During the four years that followed the war, with much of the ex-Confederacy under
martial law, radicals in congress directed policies that disestablished President Andrew
Johnson’s state regimes and “provided sporadic judicial and law enforcement of
protections to Blacks and other southern Unionists; distributed millions of dollars of food
and clothing assistance to poor white and Black southerners (in the form of rations and
through sale in makeshift commissaries); facilitated the development of public schools;

127
Ibid; Sterling, The Trouble They Seen, 260.
128

Cimbala, “The Freedmen’s Bureau, the Freedmen, and Sherman’s Grant in Reconstruction Georgia,
1865-1867,” 600.

129
Hahn et al, Freedom A Documentary History of Emancipation, 20.

64

and attempted to create a stable economy”
130
. However, with respect to the bureau, it
could only “partially achieve its more radical objectives: the transformation of Black
labor from slave to free labor, the disenfranchisement of former rebels committed to
insurgency, land grants to the poor, and political equality”
131
. The bureau and the army
achieved mixed results when it tried to balance “the competing objectives of [a] securing
Black labor for the restoration of cash crop, plantation cultivation, and [b] the necessity
of protecting the freedmen and freedwomen from renewed oppression”
132
. Paul Cimbala
argues, “The freedmen abruptly learned that neither a special field order nor bureau
agents could provide anything but tenuous authority for land distribution in the face of
planter protest and capital politics”
133
. In several regions of the south the land was fully
restored to “its white claimants before the ex-slaves had even one full season to test their
new status”
134
. In the fall of 1865, President Andrew Johnson repealed Special Field
Order No. 15, and as a result the lands along the South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida
coasts were restored to former planters. U.S. army officials and soldiers dispossessed
Low Country Blacks from land granted to them by Sherman’s order. Consequently, in
the coastal islands and the low country of South Carolina and Georgia, the geographic
margins of the nation, freed men and women birthed a fervent site of struggle over a fight
for land. With the aide of, and at times in opposition to, white and Black abolitionists
serving as Freedmen’s Bureau agents, freed people organized and fought to attain and

130
Robinson, Black Movements, 84.
131
Ibid., 85.
132
Ibid.
133

Cimbala, “The Freedmen’s Bureau, the Freedmen, and Sherman’s Grant in Reconstruction Georgia,
1865-1867,”597.

134
Ibid., 597-598

65

ensure their rights as free people. It is in this context that Low Country and Sea Islands
become a central site for local expressions of freedom, articulated in their own terms by
Black men and women.

“Congo Senators and Carpetbaggers”
135
: Tunis Campbell and the Roots of a Populist
Black Separatism
Through the Port Royal Experiment, the South Carolina Sea Islands became a
recruiting ground for Black radicals, preacher-politicians, missionaries, teachers, and
abolitionists, to name a few: James Lynch, an African Methodist Episcopal missionary
from Baltimore; Henry Turner, born to free Black parents in South Carolina, and was a
minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the first Black U.S. army
chaplain attached to the First United States Colored Troops of 1863; Martin Delaney,
who joined the efforts of Harriet Tubman, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary
136
; and
emigrationist Henry Highland Garnet; and Tunis G. Campbell of New York City.
Historian Russell Duncan argued that anti-colonization abolitionist Reverend Tunis
Campbell played a significant role in Black settlement on Georgia Sea Islands;

135
Danielle Alexander, “Forty Acres and a Mule: The Ruined Hope of Reconstruction,” Humanities 25, no.
1 (2004).

136
Harriet Tubman had a massive presence in the Black liberation struggle, and during the Civil War, she
used her “mastery of the [southern] terrain to guide and lead Union Army companies: ‘Working in South
Carolina and other states, she organized slave intelligence networks behind enemy lines and led scouting
raids. She also became the first and possibly last woman to lead U.S. Army troops in battle’” (Robinson
1997, 31). Mary Ann Shadd Cary, an abolitionist, lawyer, and lecturer, was the editor of the Provincial
Freemen, who emigrated to Canada in the 1850s, and was the daughter of Abraham Shadd, an early
emigrationist. Mary Ann Shadd Cary later penned a literacy pamphlet on Black history for the Freedmen’s
Bureau. See Cedric Robinson’s Black Movements in America. New York: Routledge, 1997, 57, 89.

66

Campbell’s vision for the freedmen, rooted in a concept of “separatism for strength,”
guided development in the region. Cedric Robinson notes, “The most potent response to
the subversion and eventual ending of Reconstruction was populist Black separatism”
137
.
Its most palpable form was emigration, as articulated by Martin Delaney, along with
Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Henry Highland Garnet.
138
However, what took root in
Georgia Sea Islands and Low Country resembled the more “clandestine character of the
movement,” which, Robinson adds, began as “early as 1869 in some parts of the South,
and only publicly surfaced in 1877”
139
. A notable distinction in this movement was that
it “occurred outside the orbit of elite Black leaders, particularly those who had sought and
still hoped to mirror the class and social development of the ‘responsible’ strata of Euro-
America”
140
. Quoting from Cedric Robinson and Nell Painter, “Our immediate concern,
however, is that these ‘representative colored men’ were largely irrelevant to the Black
masses, as the latter took upon themselves the project of evolving a vital community
life”
141
. Nell Painter argues, “In actual fact, when uneducated Blacks needed to take
public community action, they invariably reached commonsense conclusions hammered
out in mass meetings”
142
. The basis of alternative worldviews of what emancipation
would mean, and the character of Black American politics, “germinated from radically

137
Ibid.
138
Ibid.

139
Ibid.
140
Ibid.
141
Ibid., 92.
142
Nell Irvin Painter, Southern History Across the Color Line. (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 2002), 22.

67

different [B]lack experiences”
143
. As witnessed particularly in the Georgia and South
Carolina low country and coastal islands, a diasporic political tradition developed with its
constituent features derived, as Cedric Robinson explains, “[F]rom among the antebellum
free Blacks, [a] historical consciousness emerged that mirrored the liberal, aristocratic
American classes” and “[f]rom among the slaves, older African sensibilities were
preserved, fertilized in the New World by marronage and the work regimes of plantation
slavery”
144
.
Southern historians have largely neglected Reverend Tunis Campbell’s role in the
emergence of a formidable Black radical political power base in McIntosh County,
Georgia—save Russell Duncan’s Freedom’s Shore. Rev. Tunis G. Campbell was the
highest ranking, most influential Black politician in nineteenth century Georgia. He
served as a justice of the peace, a delegate to the state constitutional convention, and as a
Georgia State Senator. Campbell was a prominent leader in the struggle for Black land
ownership in coastal Georgia. Early Southern historiography depicts him as an
opportunistic carpetbagger from the North, whereas Southern revisionist historiography
fails to place Campbell in the helm of a much broader socio-political environment
through the development of an active diasporic political tradition. Like his Black
Northern compatriots, who came to the South with particular liberal ideas and
philosophies of how the formerly enslaved should conduct their lives and establish their
communities, Tunis Campbell’s life and work in South Carolina and Georgia provides a
unique perspective of the changing regional conditions, which shifted Campbell’s own

143
Robinson, Black Movements, 93.
144
Ibid.

68

political philosophies, a move from, as Gerald Jaynes argues, Jacobin ideals to a populist
Black separatism, evinced in his treatise, Sufferings of the Rev. Tunis G. Campbell and
His Family in Georgia. Campbell’s views were shaped by his experience in “the long,
violent, and increasingly oppressive era that followed the Civil War.” For Campbell,
witnessing the failure of Reconstruction, and the bitter disappointment about the
appropriation of land, “marred, thwarted, and maimed the promise of a democratic
American Social contract.”
145
However, through Campbell’s active participation one
can discern the types of organizing strategies and models the formerly enslaved populace
used in the Sea Islands and Low Country in response to this “increasingly oppressive
era”.

The Reverend Campbell
Born in Somerset County, New Jersey, in 1812, Tunis Campbell, a blacksmith’s
son, became a minister in the Zion Methodist Episcopal Church, after attending a
predominantly white school in Babylon
146
, in the Long Island area of New York. Trained
as a missionary, Campbell left the Methodist Church in opposition to African
colonization, and established an anti-colonization society in New Brunswick, New

145
Ibid., 95.
146
Originally Huntington south, the town of Babylon derives its name from the great-grandson of Captain
Jacob Conklin (who served under the infamous Scottish pirate Captain William Kidd). Conklin’s
grandson, Nathaniel Conklin moved his family from Dick’s Hill to the southern portion of Huntington
town. Upon learning their new home was next to a tavern, Conklin’s mother, Phebe Smith, lamented the
area another “Babylon” reflecting the sin and pride of Biblical characterizations of ancient Babylon. In
1803 Huntington south was henceforth Babylon, the official name of the town was changed in1830 when
the federal government officially changed the name of the town’s post office from Huntington south to
Babylon.

69

Jersey, in 1832. His early political work reflected his conviction that the deportation of
Black Americans to Africa could not and would not resolve the nation’s most pressing
issue. For Campbell, the only resolution was the abolition of America’s peculiar
institution, the “liberation” of “every slave […] on American soil”
147
. By this time,
Campbell had gained a considerable reputation in the New York City area as “ the first
moral reformer and temperance lecturer”; his work spread to Jersey City, Brooklyn,
Williamsburg, and included founding schools and churches for free Black northerners
148
.
Campbell sardonically reported, “except being mobbed many times while lecturing or
preaching, and nearly killed once, there was nothing of note that occurred.”
149

In addition to activities as a temperance crusader and an anti-colonization activist,
Campbell cut his political teeth on an iteration of abolitionist radicalism. In the 1850s,
Campbell appeared several times on the speaker’s platform with Frederick Douglass and
other luminaries in the abolitionist movement.
150
At a meeting of 114 delegates to the
Colored National Convention held in Rochester, New York, on July 6, 7, and 8, 1853,
Campbell played a key role, serving on the eight-man committee and the committee on
credentials. Convention organizers proposed the establishment of a national council of
colored people “for the purpose of improving the character, developing the intelligence,

147
T.G. Campbell, Sufferings of the Rev. T.G. Campbell and his family in Georgia (Washington D.C.:
Enterprise Publishing Company, 1877) 5-6.
148
Duncan, Freedom’s Shore, 14.
149
T.G. Campbell, Sufferings of the Rev. T.G. Campbell and his family in Georgia, 6.

150
On April 23 and 24 in 1849, public meetings were held in New York City to oppose Liberian
colonization. Frederick Douglass’ abolitionist newspaper The North Star, reported that more than twelve
hundred Black northerners were in attendance, among the seven speakers were Douglass and Campbell
(Duncan 1986, 14).

70

maintaining the rights, and organizing a Union of Colored People of the Free States.”
151

Philip Foner credits the convention in Rochester and similar conventions across the North
from the 1830s to 1850s, more than any other tactic, with “refuting the widespread theory
of Negro inferiority,” and the ideation undergirding opposition for securing rights for free
Blacks (Foner 1983, 117). The convention denounced colonization by resolving “that as
for the American Colonization Society, we have no sympathy with it, having long since
determined to plant our trees on American soil”
152
. A few years earlier, in 1849, a public
meeting in New York, with “no fewer than twelve hundred persons” in attendance, was
held “to expose and denounce the detestable and nefarious designs of the American
Colonization Society, and especially its present efforts to seduce the British public into its
recognition and support.”
153
Historian Greg Steven Wilder notes that the American
Colonization Society, an organization that advocated for racial cleansing movements of
the early to mid

–nineteenth century, expressed the tacit agreement between Northern and
Southern academics and intellectuals, explicitly tied to the interests of the Southern
plantocracy and Northern manufacturers. With the aim of removing free Blacks from the
United States to some place outside North America, the American Colonization Society
solidified a new vision of the United States as a white, Christian society—what they
considered to be a racially purified nation—premised on racial science. A nation, they
believed, where slavery could continue to exist as long as it was contained and as long as
it served the interests of the white Southern planter class. Leon Litwack reports a change
occurred for free Blacks in the abolitionist movement during this time:

151
Duncan, Freedom’s Shore, 14. See Frederick Douglass’ Paper, July 15, 1853 (3:2-5), 22, 1853 (1:2).
152
Ibid.; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, July 15, 1853 (3:2-5), 22, 1853 (1:2).
153
Ibid.

71

During the crucial decade of the 1850s, the Negro abolitionist grew ever more
restive and impatient. The Fugitive Slave Act, the resurgence of the American
Colonization Society, the unsuccessful attempts to win equal suffrage, and finally,
the Dred Scott decision, impressed many Negroes with the increasing
helplessness of their position in the face of the white man’s apparent
determination to maintain racial supremacy.
154

The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act marked a shift in lives of Black people, and
impressed upon Black leaders and activists to meet this violation of human rights with a
considerable amount of resistance. Frederick Douglass’ advice to Black communities,
faced with the ever-present threat of being seized on the streets and in their homes by
slave-catchers:
Every colored man should sleep with his revolver under his head, loaded and
ready for use. Fugitives should, on their arrival in any Northern city, be
immediately provided with arms, and taught at once that it is no harm to shoot any
man who would rob them of this liberty […]. Every slave-hunter who meets a
bloody death in this infernal business, is an argument in favor of the manhood of
our race. Resistance is, therefore, wise as well as just.
The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make a half a
dozen or more dead kidnappers […]. The man who takes the office of a
bloodhound should be treated as a bloodhound.
155

Douglass justified his position by boldly asserting that there never was nor ever could be
“more sacred rights to defend than were menaced by slave hunters […]. Life and liberty
are the most sacred of all rights. If these may be invaded with impunity, all others may
be, for they comprehend all others […]. The man who rushes out of the orbit of his own
rights, to strike down the rights of another, does, by that act, divest himself of the right to

154
Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. (New York: Alfred A Knopf,
1979),150.

155
"Black Reaction to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850: Terror in the Black Community." In History of
Black Americans: From the Compromise of 1850 to the End of the Civil War (Westport: Greenwood Press,
1983). The African American Experience. Greenwood Publishing Group.
http://testaae.greenwood.com/doc.aspx?fileID=GR7967&chapterID=GR7967-88&path=books/greenwood.
(accessed July 24, 2014).

72

live: If he be shot down, his punishment is just.”
156
Several moral and political
reformists became radicalized in this moment, and a militant political reformism matured,
as Cedric Robinson notes, “With this growing recognition of the deep current of racism
in American culture, abolitionism took on its third and revolutionary form: the pursuit of
Black self-governance, on the one hand, and an insurrection of the slaves on the other”
157
.
Nearly a decade later, this militant political reformism finds its wellspring in the
disruption of the slave economy—the Civil War.
When the Civil War began, Campbell, along with several other Black men,
“offered to aid the Government [sic] in putting down the rebellion, but [their] services
were refused—Secretary Seward [replied] that [they] were premature”
158
. However, in
1863, he received a commission as an aide to General Rufus Saxton, director of the land
redistribution and community-building efforts of the Port Royal experiment in South
Carolina. Departing prior to the New York City draft riots in July 1863, Campbell spent
the next two years in the Beaufort-Hilton Head coastal region of South Carolina.
Campbell remarked that he received the commission after sending Lincoln a personal
petition, wherein Campbell outlined the following:
The petition which I sent to President Lincoln set forth a plan by which the freed
people could be educated and made self-supporting, and prepared to exercise the
duties of citizens, and relieve the General Government [sic] from the guardianship
which, in my view, they would have to keep over them as a protection against bad
men from the North, and bad men from the South, who would use them for their
own purposes.
159

156
Ibid.
157
Cedric Robinson, Black Movements, 52.
158
T.G. Campbell, Sufferings of the Rev. T.G. Campbell and his family in Georgia, 7.

159
Ibid.

73

Lincoln failed to respond to Campbell’s petition, but, at the behest of a longtime friend,
Campbell wrote Lincoln once more. Presumably, as a result of the second letter written
at the intercession of Campbell’s intercession, a month later Campbell was ordered by
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, “to report forthwith” to Saxton.

Life on the Coast
Before the war, the chain of islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia
(between Charleston and Savannah) was the wealthiest and most beautiful agricultural
region in the South. Slaves toiled on plantations to raise Sea Island cotton, silky long-
staple cotton that brought premium prices in the markets of Liverpool and New York.
They also grew rice and, on some islands, indigo. The plantations operated a task system
and were managed by overseers, planters from South Carolina who lived in Beaufort on
Port Royal Island and spent summers in Charleston or in the mountains. Similarly, in
Georgia, planters spent summers away from the coast, to avoid malaria and the humid
climate. This region was made beautiful by: stretches of sandy beach and blue water;
profusion of birds and flowers; stiff palmettos growing at the water’s edge; and massive
live oaks, their branches dripped with Spanish moss, formed archways above the roads.
The ever-present beauty of the island was juxtaposed to army and navy encampments
using the islands as a staging area for assaults on Confederate strongholds along the
coast, while volunteers from the North managed the civilian “Port Royal Experiment.”
“In October 1861, seven months after the first shots were fired on Union troops in
Charleston,” the Union army occupied Hilton Head Island, St. Helena Island, Edisto

74

Island, Port Royal Island, and the smaller islands between; it was an occupation that
lasted until the end of the war (see Appendix II).
160
Sea Island planters evacuated their
plantations and the Union army “seized control and title to the plantations, under the
authority of government seizure for non-payment of a newly imposed tax.”
161
Under the
auspices of the Secretary of Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, the Union embarked on a social
experiment that was to last for the remainder of the war. The “Port Royal Experiment”
served as a prelude to, and a test of, policies for the later occupation of Southern states
during Reconstruction. The Treasury Department attempted to manage raising cotton on
abandoned plantations and hire freed people as wage-laborers to raise cotton for the
government. In the spring of 1862, freedmen’s aid societies in Boston and New York
dispatched their first boatload of missionaries to the coastal islands. Plantation
superintendents, schoolteachers, and ministers, had dedicated themselves to what
Dorothy Sterling describes as “bringing the civilization of New England” to the formerly
enslaved.
162
A number of politicians, philanthropists, military leaders, soldiers,
abolitionists, and missionaries descended on the coastal islands. Among them Harriet
Tubman, military strategist; James Montgomery, a staunch abolitionist and lieutenant of
John Brown; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, colonel of the First South Carolina
Volunteers, the first Black regiment; Robert Smalls, future Black congressman of South
Carolina; Robert Gould Shaw, colonel of the 54
th
Massachusetts Infantry Regiment; the
Gideonites, a band of reformers led by young Massachusetts lawyers Edward L. Pierce

160
Rowland, Moore, and Rogers, The History of Beaufort County,
161
L.W. Roper, “Frederick Law Olmstead and the Port Royal Experiment,” The Journal of Southern
History 31, no. 3. (1965): 272-284.
162
Dorothy Sterling, The Making of An Afro-American: Martin Robison Delany, 1812-1885. (Garden City:
Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971), 256.

75

and Mansfield French. Pierce was sent to Port Royal by one of the experiment’s
champions
163
, Salmon P. Chase, “as a special agent to look after the negroes [sic] and to
ensure another cotton crop for the ensuing year”
164
. Pierce reported to Chase that the
present plantation system, under strict army control, paid wages too low to enable
economic independence amongst Black workers, and, additionally, criticized the army’s
policy of shipping cotton North to be ginned
165
. Pierce noted that Black workers were
experts in cotton farming but required white managers “to enforce a paternal
discipline”
166
. He subsequently recommended the establishment of a Black farming
collective to prepare Black workers for the responsibilities of citizenship, and to serve as
a model for post-slavery labor relations in the South.
167
Pierce wrote, “The laborers
themselves no longer slaves of their former masters, or of the Government, but as yet in
large numbers unprepared for the full privileges of citizens, are to be treated with sole
reference to such preparation”
168
.
The Treasury Department, seeking to raise money, was in many cases already
leasing occupied territories to Northern capitalists for private management. As Willie
Lee Rose explains, “[the government undoubtedly took] steps to put the cotton lands

163
Other notable champions of the experiment was the chief Radical leader in the Senate Charles Sumner
and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. See Willie Lee Rose Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal
Experiment, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
164
Rupert Sargent Holland quoted in Laura M. Towne, The Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne: Written
from the Sea Islands of South Carolina 1862-1884 (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1912), xii.
165
Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 19.
166
Ibid., 24-25.
167
Ibid., 29.
168
Edward L. Pierce, The Negroes at Port Royal: Report of E.L. Pierce, Government Agent, to the Hon.
Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury; Boston: R.F. Walcutt, 1862; letter dated 3 February 1862.

76

under cultivation, but Pierce was well aware that there was a plan alternative to his own
that had very serious backing. While he was asking the government to gamble on the
success of a novel agricultural experiment, Colonel Reynolds proposed leasing
plantations and the laborers to a private organization”
169
. For the government, Rose adds,
“Reynolds’ plan had the merit of simplicity and much better prospects of immediate
revenue”
170
. Pierce’s plan “to reorganize the laborers, prepare them to become sober and
self-supporting citizens, and secure the successful culture of a cotton-crop,”—perceived
as so necessary from particular sectors of the northern populace, the federal government,
and British markets—for the south to contribute to the markets of the world. This
organizational structure and principle of economy recommended that the organization
“should not be a burden on the treasury”
171
. However, Pierce’s plan relied on “the
possibility of lifting [emancipated men and women] to civilization,” while aimed at
preserving the cultivation of cotton
172
. Drawing attention to the white, educated, middle-
class strata of men and women of the period, “when confronted with a social question of
this nature, [they] were affected by the ideas of [Jeremy Bentham] one of the most
influential social philosophers of Western thought”
173
. Gerald Jaynes states, “The
problem Bentham had originally sought to solve was to design an optimal prison system
which, among other things, would lead to the complete reformation of the character of the

169
Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 32.
170
Ibid.
171
Owens quoted in Gerald Jaynes, Branches without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the
American South, 1862-1882 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 21-22.

172
Ibid., 20.
173
Ibid.

77

inmates”
174
. Influenced by the social philosophies of his day, and using the theoretical
schema of an “optimal prison system”, Pierce’s architecture for these farming collectives
modeled the strictures Bentham outlined. Instead of contract- leasing plantations and the
people using them, which Reynolds opted for, Pierce’s course was to “‘appoint
superintendents for each large plantation,’ clothing them with an adequate power to
enforce paternal discipline’ upon the laborers”
175
. For those who refused to work under
such conditions, Pierce advocated “the milder and more effective punishments of
deprivations of privileges, isolation from family and society, [being sent to] the
workhouse, or even the prison”
176
. However, when arguing for trust-management of
government plantations, Edward Pierce admitted, “Leasing to private contractors ‘might
yield to the treasury a larger immediate revenue,’ even if ‘it would be sure to spoil the
country and its people in the end’”
177
. Jaynes asserts, with this admission, “Northern
commercial interests and small would-be northern capitalists looking to lease plantations
combined with Southern planters to form an unlikely political coalition”
178
. The New
York Times came out in favor of Andrew Johnson’s policy of restoring lands to owners
because it could pay the national debt faster than the radical plan could
179
.
While wealthy, white, Northern capitalists and opportunists were drawn south by
the Port Royal experiment hoping to make fortunes or to expand their political power

174
Ibid.
175
Ibid.,22
176
Ibid.
177
Ibid., 23.
178
Ibid.
179
Ibid.

78

through perfidious dealings, the poor, working-class whites conscripted into military
service perpetrated acts of terror against freed people. One of the many incidents of
terror, maltreatment, and violence by individual civilians and federal troops, happened
just before Tunis Campbell’s arrival. Miles northeast, on St. Helena’s Island, in February
1863, “unruly parties from several regiments, including the 9
th
New Jersey, the 100
th
New
York, known as ‘Les Enfants Perdus,’ and the 24
th
Massachusetts” terrorized the Black
coastal communities.
180
They killed and stole livestock, took money from Black men and
women, they beat Black men and attempted to rape Black women, and culminated their
rampage in burning all the cabins on the Daniel Jenkins plantations.
181
When
superintendents intervened, the soldiers threatened to shoot them. One particular
superintendent, Hammond, “wept helplessly” to Generals Saxton and Hunter, when he
reported the days of terror that occurred on his own plantations under his watchful eye.
182

“For three whole days and far into the night,” wrote Bostonian teacher and missionary
William Gannett, “I did nothing but chase soldiers and ride about to protect the
people.”
183
Future headmistress of Penn School, on St. Helena Island, Laura Towne,
relates the comments of Rina, the cook under her employ, referring to Black folks on the
island, “They would be glad if all the white people would go away and let them live by
themselves”
184
.

180
Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 240.
181
Ibid.
182
Ibid.
183
Ibid.
184
Ibid., 240-241

79

By 1865, some of the white philanthropists, who had come to “help their [B]lack
brothers,” had become businessmen, buying up plantations when the government sold
them back for taxes. They were pocketing substantial profits as a result of the experiment
in free labor. Black farmers preferred to raise livestock, corn, and potatoes, catch fish,
and plant a few acres of cotton to sell, on land of their own, “to ‘joy their freedom,”
185
to
reestablish the bonds of family and community, to live life according to their own
choosing. It became readily apparent that missionaries (and other whites on the islands)
heavily stressed cultivating a monoculture of cotton as a cash crop. Rose argues:
This exclusive preoccupation with cotton that has given most support to the idea
that the planter-missionaries were pure economic imperialists […]. Their vision
of the freed people as agricultural peasants devoted to a single-crop economy and
educated to a taste for consumer goods supplied by Northern factories fulfills the
classic pattern of tributary economics the world over. It is important to remember
that at this early time there seemed nothing conspiratorial about this
186
.

Martin Delaney’s July 1865 lecture in the Brick Church on St. Helena Island, where both
whites and Blacks worshiped on Sundays, illuminates and surmises the condition with
which freed people were faced. Delaney’s speech, primarily directed to freed women and
men, emphasizes the need for freed people to renew their determination to struggle for
survival and true equality within an American society still tethered to the social,
economic, and political arrangements of slavery. His comments implicitly triangulate the
predatory economic objectives of white Northerners, the specter of retaliatory modes of
mob violence, and the fear of Black self-determination:

185
See Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
186
Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 226-228.

80

I am going to tell you what you are worth. Your master lived in opulence
squandering away the wealth you acquired for him. He never earned a single
dollar in his life. You men and women, everyone [sic] of you around me,
supplied the means for your master to lead an idle life and to give his children the
education which he denied to you. […] ‘Oh the Yankees are smart,’ you say.
Now tell me, are you not worth anything? […] [T]hose cotton agents who come
honey-mouthed unto you, their only intent being to make profit by your
inexperience. There are good Yankees, but I don’t like those fellows who were
nothing at home and who now ape the Southerner with his big-brimmed hat.
They sit on a fence and say ‘Sam, Jim, do this, do that’—as lazy as any
Southerner ever was. […] I look around and notice a man, barefooted, covered
with rags […] I hear that he works for thirty cents a task. That must not be.
These Yankees talk smooth. Their tongues roll like a drum but that’s cursed
slavery again. I tell you slavery is over. We have 200,000 of our own men well
drilled in arms. It’s up to you and them to see that slavery never returns. […]
Before the South depended on you. Now the whole country will depend upon
you. Get up a community and get all the lands you can. Grow as much
vegetables as you want for your families. On the other part of the land cultivate
rice and cotton. One acre of land will grow a crop worth $90. Ten acres will
bring $900 every year—and carpets will take the place of bare floors in your
cabins
187
.
Delaney’s speech effectively uses the place of the Brick Church to tie together not only
the role of religion and family for strength and support, but also the necessity of building
self-determining communities and economic independence through collective land
ownership.
A few responses to Delaney’s lecture revealed the stance of military personnel—
supervising, and in some cases authorizing, Bureau activity—toward Black
representatives of the agency, Black soldiers, and the future of freed people. One
lieutenant taking notes of the lecture wrote in his report:
Major Delaney is a thorough hater of the white race and excites the colored
people unnecessarily. He says it would be slavery over again if a man should
work for an employer. […] The mention of having two hundred thousand men

187
Quoted in Sterling, The Making of An Afro-American, 257-258.

81

well drilled in arms—does he not hint to them what to do if they should be
compelled to work for employers? In my opinion he was trying to encourage them
to force their way by insurrection to a position he is ambitious they should
attain
188
.
The young lieutenant’s report traveled quickly, where Quincy Gilmore, commanding
general of the Department of South Carolina in Hilton Head, had previously shipped out
the Massachusetts 54
th
and 55
th
Regiments because he thought the Black troops gave
“seditious advice” to freed people
189
. In the file he sent to the War Department regarding
Delaney’s speech, Gilmore wrote, “The course pursued by Major Delaney since his
advent into this Department has been calculated to do harm, by inciting the colored
people to deeds of violence. The well- being of the freed people would be advanced by
his removal to some other field of duty”
190
. Reactions to Delaney’s lecture disclose the
posture and proclivities of army officers, in some instances, backed by white, Northern,
capitalist agendas or individuals with commercial interests of their own. By fanning the
flames for the potentialities of insurrection, army officers attempted to undermine the
legitimate grievances Black communities leveled against military personnel acting under
the auspice of the Bureau.
Black and white abolitionists pushed forward, married to the agenda to achieve
Black self-determination, aid Black communities in securing land, participate in the
political process, and gain access to education. Saxton, ignoring reports on the Brick
Church speech, strategically placed Delaney in charge of the Bureau’s office on the
island of Hilton Head, as “assistant sub-assistant commissioner.” His district included

188
Ibid., 258-259
189
Ibid., 259
190
Ibid.

82

Hilton Head and the smaller neighboring islands of Daufuskie, Bull, Pinckney, and Long
Pine. As a Bureau agent, Rev. Tunis G. Campbell requested to be sent to the Sea Islands
off Georgia’s coast; he was assigned “Burnside, Ausaba (Ossabaw), Saint Catherines
[sic], Sapelo, and Colonel’s Islands,” with orders to organize and establish governance on
the islands; protect freedmen and refugees for thirty miles back from the seashore in the
area known as Low Country (see Appendix III).
191
Campbell pens he was assigned as
governor of the five islands, however official documents indicate Saxton appointed
Campbell as superintendent.
192
Saxton gave Campbell the authority to act on his best
judgment in the administration of these islands, and by December 1865, Campbell had
settled or was in the process of settling 369 people on St. Catherine’s Island. On
Ossabaw Island there were seventy-eight freedmen, and on Sapelo 352.
193

However, before the first harvest, President Johnson began restoring the
“confiscated and abandoned lands” to their rebel owners, and Freedmen’s Bureau agents
were ordered to force freed people into signing labor contracts. Tunis Campbell,
amongst several others in regions all over the South, particularly in the coastal areas,
resisted this restorative executive order. With the aide of freed people, and defying
Johnson’s mandate, Campbell had established a self-governing colony with a militia on
Saint Catherine’s Island. In the fall of 1865, Commissioner Howard pleaded with Blacks
on Edisto Island to vacate lands that were to be restored to their former owners, and to lay
aside any bitter feelings they may harbor. One freedmen responded that it was not a

191
T.G. Campbell, Sufferings of the Rev. T.G. Campbell and his family in Georgia, 7.

192
Duncan, Freedom’s Shore, 18-19.
193
Ibid., 19

83

simple case of forgiveness, especially given that the same political system continued to
operate:
The man who tied me to a tree and gave me thirty-nine lashes and who stripped
and flogged my mother and my sister and who will not let me stay in his empty
hut except I will do his planting and be satisfied with his price and who combines
with others to keep land away from me well knowing I would not have anything
to do with him if I had land of my own—that man I cannot well forgive. Does it
look as if he has forgiven me, seeing how he tries to keep me in a condition of
helplessness?
194

Having been assured homesteads, the Edisto Island ex-slaves could not easily forget the
federal government’s promise to them. Although in this instance they did not succeed in
their aim, the firm stance of coastal Black communities demonstrated an acceptance of
the idea of land as the material and metaphysical foundation for autonomy, and indicated
that they would mobilize to ensure their political and social interests.
195
In South Carolina
and Georgia, Black communities bore a clear recognition of their political rights.
In an effort to counter calls for disbanding the Freedmen’s Bureau, as
Congressional Republicans felt compelled to respond to demands of white southerners,
Rufus Saxton reported, in October of 1865, that coastal Black communities in South
Carolina seemed to display a lack of resentment toward the society that formerly
sanctioned their enslavement.
196
Against these petitions, particularly claims that Black
coastal communities were planning an insurrection, Saxton forcefully argued, “This is a
dangerous misrepresentation designed to injure a race whose only crime is that they have

194
Quoted in Demetrius L. Eudell, The Political Languages of Emancipation in the British Caribbean and
the U.S. South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 45.
195
Ibid.
196
Ibid., 43

84

been freed by the act of the United States Government”
197
. He asserted that Blacks were
“grateful and joyful at their emancipation and nothing is further from their thoughts than
insurrection”
198
. According to Saxton, this attitude existed because “Negroes are not a
vengeful race—at the slightest show of kindness they seem to forget all their past
grievance;” and therefore, he proposed, rather than maligning Blacks, “[t]hey deserve
credit for their peaceful and orderly conduct”.
199

A month later, after Saxton related his perspective to Commissioner Howard, a
similar statement was made at the Colored People’s Convention of South Carolina. The
convention formed part of a series of national and state meetings organized by Blacks to
demand political rights, doing so, as Eudell argues, by invoking the political languages
espoused in the Declaration of Independence.
200
Held at the Zion Church in Charleston,
the convention lasted for six days. On the third day it passed a resolution that clearly
demonstrated the extent to which Black coastal communities, as distinct from their
former owners, adhered to the original revolutionary and transformative principles of
Christianity: “Resolved, that as the old institution of slavery has passed away, that we
cherish in our hearts no hatred or malice toward those who have held our brethren as
slaves but we extend the right hand of fellowship to all, and make it our special aim to
establish unity, peace, and love amongst all men”.
201
The strategic assertions and
political language employed at the South Carolina meeting, as was the case of other state

197
Ibid.
198
Ibid.
199
Ibid., 43-44
200
Ibid., 44
201
Ibid.

85

conventions, was marked by the terms at which coastal Black communities would
integrate, on one level, into the dominant American society.
202

Similarly, a November 1865 issue of the Philadelphian Black newspaper, The
Christian Recorder, published an epistle from Campbell’s adopted son Edward E.
Howard, at the time Howard was serving as an agent for the Bureau of Refugees,
Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands for the people of St. Catherine’s Island and Ossabaw
Island. In it he described the structural development of self-governing communities
amongst the freed people living on St. Catherine’s Island and Ossabaw Island, in which
he apportioned a republicanism articulated by the Declaration of Independence, to the
activities of these communities:
They have regularly established form of government […]. We have here our
courts of justice for the trial of offenders, and I am proud to say that we have
seldom had to exercise any of the functions of the same. […] An election for
members of the Legislature was held here, and eight senators and twenty
representatives were successfully elected for the term of one year. Their first
session was held on Monday, 6th of November, and several bills were passed,
namely: A bill for protection to property from the destruction of cattle and horses,
the island not having been apportioned off yet. A tax bill for support of schools; a
bill to establish a public treasury; and several were laid over until next session,
Dec. 4th, such as, a bill to raise revenue to pay current expenses of the
government; a bill regulating by law fishing and oystering. A message from the
Superintendent, and the message of the Legislature formed very important
features of the session. Thus closed the first session of the First Assembly of
black men, under such a title, that ever assembled in this country. The assemblage
of the American colonies, through their representatives, at their Congress Hall,
partakes of no such glory as does this; for they endeavored to clear themselves of
the British yoke, while they securely fastened the yoke of bondage upon the
ancestors of these men of Georgia, who to-day meet under such auspices and
circumstances. All works well, and bids fair to become a landmark for our
brethren throughout the entire South
203
.

202
Ibid.
203
Published in The Christian Recorder November 25, 1865.

86

Along a similar strategic assertion as the Colored People’s Convention in South Carolina,
Howard invokes the political symbolism of the early American Republic and likens it to
the conditions faced by the Black struggle for freedom and independence in the aftermath
of slavery. In Howard’s epistle, he provides a clear elucidation of the Black radicalism,
the thought and practice organizing the self-governing settlement on St. Catherine’s
Island and Ossabaw Island. However, it is this practice of self-governance and
organization, which threatened the political and economic arrangements necessary for the
reemergence of cotton production in the coastal region.
In March 1866, under President Johnson’s Reconstruction policy plan, General
David Tillson, who had replaced Saxton as head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and as
military commander-in-chief of Georgia, removed Campbell as superintendent of Saint
Catherine’s Island and Sapelo Island. A letter to Commissioner Howard from Tillson
issued a Special Order No. 130, which stated: “The Rev’d Tunis Campbell, colored, late
Agent of this Bureau, at St. Catherine’s Island, having been found guilty of dishonest
practices [granting land, selling timber, opposing contracts] and removed, and there being
good reason to believe that he is advising the freed people on Sapelo Island, to pursue a
course alike unjust to their employers, and injurious to themselves, is hereby forbidden to
visit Sapelo Island on pain of being arrested”
204
. At this time it was well known that
Tillson had protected capitalists and contracts instead of the rights of the freed people.
He considered Campbell’s teachings and system of social organization the main
impediment to get Black workers back into the employ of former planters.

204
Duncan, Freedom’s Shore, 35.

87

The two public schools Campbell established on the islands were destroyed, and
the people forcibly removed—unless they acquiesced to sign and work under contracts,
which Campbell later writes, “were purposely made to cheat the freedmen out of their
labor”
205
. Potential employers, Confederate Rebels, Campbell remarked, “Who before
had appeared humble and repentant, now insisted that all colored [sic] men and women
should sign these contracts; and when they refused they would waylay them and beat
them, telling them that they would have them back when the Yankees left the State
[sic]”
206
. It wasn’t just the Rebels insisting Blacks to work under labor contracts. By
May 1866, a white-owned agricultural firm (Flye, Middleton, and Magill, of which
Bureau Agent John W. Magill—who replaced Campbell as Freedmen’s Bureau agent for
Ossabaw on April 24, 1866—was part owner) “operated a three-hundred-acre plantation
on the island, growing Sea Island cotton under a share-cropping system”
207
. Magill wrote
to the Savannah office to complain that for some reason freedmen on the island were
defiant of his authority, “he freedmen have of late been very slack in the performance of
their labor, Etc. [sic] and pay no attention to orders of the Bureau, which have been sent
to the social agent…Now is the important time of the season and it is necessary that the

205
T.G. Campbell, Sufferings of the Rev. T.G. Campbell and his family in Georgia, 8.
206
Ibid.
207
Allison Dorsey, “ ‘The Great Cry of Our People is Land!’ Black Settlement and Community
Development on Ossabaw Island, Georgia, 1865-1900.” African American Life in the Georgia
Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee. Ed. Philip Morgan (Athens: The University of
Georgia Press, 2010), 226.

88

freedmen should faithfully and industriously perform their part of the contract, this they
are not doing.”
208

Historian Allison Dorsey notes that on Ossabaw Island, the largest of the sea
islands off the coast of Georgia, roughly twenty miles south of Savannah, the new owners
of land, it having been confiscated under Sherman’s Special Field Order and redistributed
in the spring and summer of 1865 to freed people, discovered that the nation was
reluctant to make good on the promise of land. It was a fact that, these formerly enslaved
men and women (including former soldiers in the United States Colored Troops (USCT)
33
rd
Infantry Regiment, such as Mustafa Shaw who through armed resistance, refused
arrest by the Freedom’s Bureau) who had vociferously fought for their freedom, now
found themselves once again engaged in a new assault on their hard won rights,
independence, and their right to retain their newly acquired property.
209
On December 3
rd

1866, Mustafa Shaw, along with brothers Robert and Lee Delegal, and Pauldo Brown
were charged by the Freedman’s Bureau with “contempt of authority.” Unable to be
arrested by fellow 33
rd
regiment soldier Andrew Waters, who was acting in the capacity
of a deputy of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Shaw resisted arrest and hurled insults to Waters
and the other men assembled to arrest him. Shaw cursed all Blacks signing contracts to
work for white planters. Shaw had previously received land from the confiscated
Middleplace plantation under Field Order #15, in the spring and summer of 1865. The
community of Ossabaw Island combined resettled refugees with those who remained on

208
Letter from J. Kearny Smith to W.W. Deane, August 30, 1866, Field Office Records, Letters, Bureau of
Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, Georgia 1865-1872, M1903 Roll 77, National Archives,
Atlanta.
209
Dorsey, “The Great Cry of Our People is Land!” 225-226.

89

the island throughout the Civil War and were formerly enslaved on Ossabaw Island. The
men and women who received land on Ossabaw Island in the spring and summer of 1865
were not locals. They did not live on the island before the war and after their land was
seized they moved off the island. Some tension existed between freedmen who had
secured land on the island and were not originally from Ossabaw Island, and freed people
who had not received land and had lived on Ossabaw Island before the war. Paul
Cimbala notes that many freedmen displaced by the war returned to their home islands in
early 1866 to find local plantations already divided amongst strangers who had been
given promissory title.
210
Without means of support, deprived of their portion of the old
homestead, and without access to rations, this near starving population was undoubtedly
hostile toward those Blacks they recognized simply as interlopers.
Dorsey adds, “Having fought to transform the social and political landscape of the
nation, these freedmen (and women) […] found themselves aligned against the federal
government, most of the white citizenry, and some fellow [B]lacks as they sought to
secure their hard-won freedom, […] rights, and lands”
211
. For Black Americans, true
freedom required access to land. The objectives of the Civil War were freedom, the
complete abolition of slavery, and the chance for Black Americans to recreate their lives
as autonomous people. They fought for the freedom to remake their lives, reunite with
their families, and make their way in the world. Through the Freedmen’s Bureau, white-
owned agricultural firms attempted to coerce Black men and women to sign
sharecropping contracts while plantations were formally restored to the former owners.

210
Paul Cimbala, Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Reconstruction
of Georgia, 1865-1870 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997).
211
Dorsey, “The Great Cry of Our People is Land!” 226.

90

In January 1867, promissory titles were wrenched from the hands of Black men and
women; however, with strength, defiance, and “armed with words of law or weapons of
war,” Black resistance to the authority of the Freedmen’s Bureau continued.
Dismissed under duress, Tunis G. Campbell’s position at the Freedmen’s Bureau
was lost, “largely at the behest of white planters and Georgia’s bureau commissioner
David Tilson”
212
. Forcibly removed from St. Catherine’s Island, where he had set up an
early colony, Gerald Jaynes argues that Campbell was in fact “unsuitable as a bureau
agent because his extreme Jacobin positions on free labor, Negro equality, and
confiscation made it impossible for him to arbitrate differences between planters and
[potential] employees”
213
. Campbell’s perceived unsuitably as Freedmen’s Bureau agent,
rather reflects the structural limitations of the Bureau’s capacities and the unsuccessful
implementation of radical Reconstruction’s policies
214
, alongside the formation of

212
See Jaynes, Branches without Roots, 294. Unlike her estranged mother British actress turned
abolitionist Fanny Kemble, Frances Butler Leigh proved to be her father’s daughter, a staunch confederate
and the progenitor of what the formerly enslaved and their descendents from Butler Island refer to as the
“Weeping Time,” when Georgia planter Pierce Butler auctioned off 436 men, women, and children in
March 1859 to pay off his gambling debts. Frances Butler Leigh reigned as “supreme dictator” of the
Butler plantations on St. Simon’s and Butler Island after her father’s death from malaria in 1867. Leigh
expresses the sentiments of coastal planters regarding fervent Black political activity in Ten Years on a
Georgia Plantation Since the War (1883), specifically comments on Tunis Campbell’s role. Leigh’s
account reflects the sentiments of Georgia planters towards Campbell.

213
Jaynes, Branches without Roots, 294.
214
Deeply affected by the 1866 massacres in New Orleans and Memphis, Congress enforced the Military
Reconstruction Act by sending Union troops to create “radical regimes” in the secessionist states.
Declaring martial law in the South and passing the Second Reconstruction Act, Republicans attempted to
create a Republican political base in the seceded states to facilitate their policies and plans for Radical
Reconstruction. When the Radical Republicans took almost complete control over policy making in
Congress, after sweeping the 1866 elections, they gained control over the House of Representatives and the
Senate, giving congress substantial power to override any potential vetoes by President Johnson. This
occurred in early 1867 and marked the beginning of Radical Reconstruction, also known as Congressional
Reconstruction. The first task that Congress approached toward reconstruction was the passage of the First
and Second Reconstruction Acts. The First Reconstruction Act passed in March 1867 (also known as the
Military Reconstruction Act) divided the secessionist states into five military districts, each governed by a
Union general. Congress declared martial law in the districts and dispatched troops protect freed people
and ensure peace. In addition, Congress stipulated that southern states needed to redraft their constitutions,

91

political and economic alliances between Northern agricultural capitalists and Southern
plantocracy.
When he learned that communities of freed people on the islands were being
harassed and violently coerced into signing contracts for former planters, while their
schools were being dismantled, Campbell went to General Tilson’s headquarters in
Augusta, to secure safe passage back to the islands; this time in the capacity of an Elder
of the Zion Methodist Episcopal Church in America, with his commission from the
“Right Rev. J.J. Clinton,” a missionary for the States of Georgia and Florida. Tilson
informed Campbell that he could not provide any protection. Upon his return to
Savannah, Campbell “sent down to a little village called Thunder Bolt” and purchased a
sail boat to take him back to the islands. He went to see the people and appealed to them
that, if they return to the mainland, he would try to get a plantation called Belleville,
owned by Charles H. Hopkins, in McIntosh County.
215
Belle Ville totaled 1,250 acres
and Hopkins would not sell the land for less than $14.50 per acre. Assessing the dire
conditions island residents faced, Campbell agreed to Hopkins’ terms and advanced him
one thousand dollars.
216
“As the people had to move with what they could only take in
small boats” Campbell recounts, he acquired one flatboat, but with torrential storms, “it

ratify the fourteenth amendment—ensuring that all persons born in the United States excluding indigenous
people, were citizens and were to be given full and equal benefit of all laws—and suffrage to Black
Americans was established for the constitutional conventions in order for southern states to seek
readmission into the Union. To safeguard the enfranchisement of Black voters, Republicans passed the
Second Reconstruction Act, placing Union troops in charge of voter registration. Congress overrode two
presidential vetoes to pass the bills.
215
T.G. Campbell, Sufferings of the Rev. T.G. Campbell and his family in Georgia, 8.
216
Ibid.

92

was almost worthless.”
217
When they arrived at Belle Ville plantation, “everything was
burned up” from the war”
218
. New residents, Campbell included, moved their families
into camps “made of old boards on the side and ends, and a Palmetto roof,” with one
room to cook and the other to sleep.
The social organization on Belle Ville was, as Jaynes argues, similar to the basis
of the Democratic Colleton County societies in South Carolina. A fall, 1873, issue of
Frederick Douglass’ The New National Era and Citizen details these organizational and
developmental practices, addressed as “Colored Communism”:
In this country, the colored people own some of the largest plantations. This is
done under a sort of communism. A number of them, in some cases so many as
fifty, form themselves into a society, elect officers and adopt by-laws. A
specified amount is paid into the treasury by each member. When sufficient is
accumulated a suitable plantation is selected and the purchase is made. The land
is equally distributed. Each is free to work as suits him and each can dispose of
his crop as he deems proper. The only thing required is honestly [sic] and a
prompt payment of all dues which are usually light. All sick are cared for by the
society if unable to care for themselves. All disputes arising between members
are brought before the society and the officers endeavor to amiably arrange
dissensions. These societies are principally formed from people who work for
hire, fifty cents a day being the sum generally. […] Upon those that have been in
operation three or four years, that land has been paid for and the members are
generally prosperous.
Life in the Belle Ville community can be gleaned from analyzing the social relationships,
the links between various residents through their communal responsibilities to one
another and the maintenance of their settlement. On March 4, Toby Maxwell and ‘other
Citizens, Farmers, & Laborers of Belle Ville, McIntosh County, Georgia’ formed the
Belle Ville Farmers Association, with Tunis G. Campbell as president, his son Tunis Jr.

217
Ibid.
218
Ibid.

93

as vice president, and adopted son Edward E. Howard as recording and corresponding
secretary. Maxwell assumed the position of fence viewer. Other positions among the
officers included: constable, road master, ‘janitor of buildings,’ market inspector (‘to see
meats or vegetables are disposed for sale’), and hog and cattle overseer.
219
Black women
and men set about the business of organizing their lives in freedom, establishing
communities and farmer’s cooperatives, establishing houses of worship, educating their
children, and sanctifying their marriages. In the spring of 1867, Campbell convinced the
new Freedmen’s Bureau regional head, J. Murray Hoag, to provide Belle Ville with
government-issued rations. By the summer, bureau agent Charles Holocombe reported
that residents of the Belle Ville agricultural cooperative were “contented and hopeful of
the future,” with “a fine crop of corn and cotton” that promised them a measure of self-
sufficiency by the fall.
220

An early manual on Campbell’s organizational and management methods and
practices offers insight into Belle Ville’s mode of social organization and development.
Prior to his enlistment as Saxton’s aide, for many years Campbell had supported his
family by working as a principal waiter, first in New York’s Howard Hotel and then at
the Adams House in Boston. While there, he wrote Hotel Keepers, Head Waiters, and
Housekeepers Guide (1848), the first manual written by an American about the
supervision and management of first class hotels.
221
Certificates of recommendation
from his employer and patrons of the Howard Hotel, which were appended to the text

219
See Appendix IV. Jones, Saving Savannah, 287. Sterling, The Trouble They Seen, 248-251.
220
Jaynes, Branches Without Roots, 294.
221
Duncan, Freedom’s Shore, 15.

94

praised him as “universally esteemed…an unusually intelligent, dignified, attentive, and
obliging man…of unblemished moral character, with a disposition to elevate the
condition and character of persons of his color”
222
. The Adams Brothers “found him
courteous and polite…prompt and honest”
223
. Recommendations aside, the content of
Campbell’s manual is revealing in that Campbell establishes an intricate system of social
organization based on his several year’s experience and observance of “the evident
necessity, which exists for an entire change in hotel-keeping, and waiting therefor [sic]”
(Campbell 1848, 6). Throughout the text Campbell’s intent is “to prove the necessity of a
change” in the old system of labor, by which Campbell identifies and attempts to remedy
poor labor relations between workers and proprietor (Campbell 1848, 7). Campbell
addresses issues ranging from neglect of the material conditions affecting the general
well-being of workers, to, “a reasonable compensation paid for them for their services,”
and, also, harsh treatment of workers. Campbell’s 1848 manual on hotel management is
of particular significance in that he stressed the importance of the dignity of Black
Americans. He also produced a manual on organizing labor, which, as of that time, was
one of the first books on labor organizing, and became a manual that influenced his later
practice in organizing Black labor in Low Country and the coastal islands.
In Campbell’s discussion of organizing and training rituals for hotel waiters, one
is privy to the ways Campbell may have applied this militarily-precise mode of
organizing to the practice of forming collective communities amongst mill workers,
domestics, farmers, etc. in the Georgia sea islands. Campbell’s description reveals the

222
Ibid.
223
Ibid.

95

potential organizational mode and form that Black militias and cooperative communities
took in main land McIntosh County:
[...]the men should be often on drill, to enable them to understand all the
signals, without making the slightest mistake. Every movement should be
carefully explained upon the Drill [sic]. This should be done every day,
until they understand it in every part, commencing with the first position,
and proceeding till you have got the dessert on the table. The men will be
drilled all together, and in squads. First the squad drill teaches them how
to step, and how to carry themselves; and for this purpose you must select
the most apt of them as officers, over whom should be appointed as drill
serjeant [sic], to act also as first lieutenant. Of the whole number, every
fifth man should be appointed an officer, whose duty it should be to drill
the men in squads every day after the regular drill, half an hour being
allowed for the whole drill, which is quite sufficient” (Campbell 1848, 20-
21).

From Campbell’s organizing strategies and tactics, one can ascertain the necessity of
such organizational sophistication. All of Campbell’s efforts at “drilling, uniforming,
[and] keeping up” such an organization reflected the deep undertones of violence
following social crisis, military conquest and “the perplexing new social, economic, and
political problems” facing Black coastal communities.
224
However, for white residents of
McIntosh County, like Mary Jones and her neighbors, who, taking note of the organizing
activities as Campbell traveled around the countryside, where he held “a great mass
(political) meeting of the freedmen” in places such as the Newport Church in April, 1867,
Jones writes: “I am told there never was such a turnout in this county, […] [T]hey were
addressed by Rev. Campbell [who]…urged them to hold fast to the Radicals and give the
democrats a wide berth. This is the onward progress to (I fear) a war of races” (Jones
2008, 287). White residents interpreted the organized sophistication of Black militias and

224
Otis A. Singletary, The Negro Militia and Reconstruction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957), 3.

96

even the necessity of Black militias as a precursor to an impending race war. Whereas,
Campbell, and Black communities throughout the South were well aware of the
precipitation of violence against Black women, men, and children when they refused to
be subservient to former planters, white-owned agricultural firms with coercing labor
contracts, and to angry white men who felt they should have authority over Black
Americans. In his discussion of the conditions necessitating the formation of Southern
Black militias, Otis Singletary describes the climate of Reconstruction and post-
Reconstruction through Charles Nordhoff’s 1875 “observation tour of the South:
[Nordhoff] expressed amazement in finding that, not only men, but, even boys of
fourteen were frequently armed and that ‘every trifling dispute’ was ‘ended with the
pistol’”(Singletary 1957, 3). Campbell, himself, recounts several incidents in which,
during his absence from Belle Ville, white residents in the county took it upon
themselves to harass and arrest various members of Belle Ville community when they
went to town for various quotidian tasks.
225

In another such instance, when the overwhelmingly Black electorate from the
Second Senatorial District (Liberty, Tatnall, and McIntosh counties) sent as their

225
An incident that elucidates this reality, involved a former “sheriff” for the islands during Campbell’s
administration. By point of fact, it was because this particular man was sheriff that his found to be
“obnoxious to the white people.” The incident involving the former sheriff is as follows: during
Campbell’s absence, the former sheriff of the islands was arrested on Doboy Island while waiting for
Campbell’s mail. Campbell’s wife resisted against the former sheriff’s arrest, disallowing him to be taken
away until Campbell returned and justly adjudicated the former sheriff’s case. “This,” Campbell recounts,
“encouraged the people,” (Campbell 1877, 9). Campbell affirms the object of this arrest was intended to
break up the settlement on Belleville. After the trial, Campbell traveled North to Savannah to the office of
the Freedmen’s Bureau. Upon Campbell’s request, the Bureau sent down an officer to examine the case.
At close examination, the agent, discharged the former sheriff, “as there was no evidence against him—
although he was fined before the court in Darien” (Campbell 1877, 9).

97

representatives the Reverends Tunis G. Campbell and William A. Golding,
226
Campbell
recounts, that upon his election as Senator, he was questioned about his eligibility to
office. “Compelled to stand alone for eight days on the floor of the Senate” Campbell
contended for “the rights of colored [sic] members to hold their seats; and at different
times when [he] was speaking [he] could see Democratic members, with their hands on
the butts of their pistols, with their teeth shut hard together, and using threatening
gestures at [him]” (Campbell 1877, 9). As early as 1865 Golding, a former slave, had
complained to the Freedmen’s Bureau, “We are a working class of people and we are
willing and desirous to work for fair compensation. But to return to work upon the terms
that are at present offered to us, would be, we think, going back to the state of slavery”
(Jones 2008, 293). The more that Black women and men asserted their civil rights and
dignity as human beings, refused to sign labor contracts or work under conditions akin to
slavery, and increased their political participation and engagement, the more that racial
and political violence and repression escalated. White paramilitary organizations, allied
with Southern Democrats, used intimidation, violence, and assassinations as modes of
retaliation against Black political power. Black Americans awakened to the necessity of
protecting themselves when the law failed to protect them. In Georgia, whites who
attempted mob violence came to realize that Black Georgians would respond against
them in the coastal counties that had Black majorities, strong traditions of Black political
power, and fortified Black communities.

226
Jones, Saving Savannah, 293.

98

Chapter 3 “As Goes the South, So Goes the Nation”
The menace of
unmitigated violence
inundated the
southern air like a
heavy suffocating
humidity.
-Gloria House

The Post-Reconstruction State Building Project
Reconstruction’s death knell unevenly reverberated throughout the southern
landscape. Fugitive sounds of Blackness, in its deregulated expansiveness, continued to
disrupt newly imagined bureaucratic spatial arrangements, which struggled to
conceptualize and contain the place of race and Blackness within expanding US geo-
political and social terrains. In the years following Reconstruction’s demise, Black
communities, citizens, and workers continued to strike against exploitive wage rates, the
return of the conditions of slavery, and the limitations of their hard fought freedom.
Invariably, Black Americans wedded politics and land with their desire for social and
economic justice. Despite the government’s contradictory and changing policies, by
1870 much of the coastal islands were owned by a society of Black farmers who had an
opportunity to become self-sufficient. On St. Helena Island, off the coast of South
Carolina, many of the land grants made under General Sherman’s Special Field Order
#15—as well as the previous auction sales, preemption settlement, and rent-to-own
programs—were never rescinded. However, property and land ownership were a major
cause of friction between Black and white Georgians, as land ownership for Black

99

communities afforded a modicum of autonomy. Black farmers were able to survive and
in some areas thrive; owning land gave them a basis of material wealth, and provided
them more economic security, which enabled them to refuse labor contracts from white
agricultural firms or former planters. Many poor upcountry whites viewed Black
farmers as their competitors, while white capitalists and Southern planters perceived the
political and economic sustainability of Black communities as a threat to their (the white
capitalists and southern planters’) ability to extract labor. Those Black women and men
who were unable to purchase land were forced into conditions of sharecropping. In the
late 1860s to 1870s, when poor Black communities migrated in search for fairer wages,
or less oppressive landlords, they sought to redress for social injustices. They still
believed in a modicum of legal justice, and they demanded improved working
conditions. In doing so they faced arrest and incarceration on the pretext of “inciting
riots,” or on the pretext of the condition of “vagrancy.”
Georgia was one of the first states to establish the convict lease system, which
was legalized in December 1866. The General Assembly passed an act “to regulate the
manner in which the penitentiary shall be managed, and to provide for farming out the
same.”
227
Together with the clause in the 13
th
Amendment that allows for slavery and
involuntary servitude, “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly
convicted,” the convict lease system restructured local and national state apparatuses
through the legal and prison systems to reinstitute slavery. To assert the dignity of Black
life became criminalized and, therefore, those who were engaged in this spatial activity

227
Acts of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia (Atlanta: Geo. W. Harrison, State Printer, 1866)
155.

100

were subject to arrest, incarceration, and subsequent enslavement. Activities such as:
demands for improved labor conditions; legal redress for acts of violence against one’s
person or property; domestic disputes; public intoxication; and civil unrest of any sort
became defined by the Southern judicial system as “criminal unrest,” thereby greatly
benefiting Northern and Southern capitalists. Convict leasing was a major source of
revenue for Georgia; the state legislature passed a law in 1876 that allowed companies to
lease people who had been incarcerated by the state for the duration of their sentence.
The courts provided the moral and legal justification for Black oppression as the prison
population after Reconstruction became overwhelmingly Black. James Blue
228
, a
representative of Glynn County in the Georgia House of Representatives from 1871 to
1877, many times the only Black member in office, made an impassioned speech in
1876 concerning the iniquities of the convict lease system.
While a combination of legal and extralegal coercion kept a vast majority of
Black workers in virtual peonage, the slavocracy mounted vicious campaigns to split
white farm workers and the urban working class from newly freed Black labor. The
systematic political and social dismantling of Black sectors of the Republican party, in
an act that appeared to many as betrayal, was punctuated by the Republican party itself,
and frayed into two factions. The Republican party was ultimately weakened by what
seemed like a decade long struggle over, as Gerald Jaynes outlines, three significant
issues: “what economic structure for [S]outhern agriculture would be efficient for
spurring economic growth and American economic development; what political
structure was most conducive to the strength of the Republic; and lastly, what role

228
According to the 1870 census, Blue owned $1,000 in real estate and $200 in personal property.

101

should and could the emancipated slaves assume in providing for the success of the first
two factors?” (Jaynes 1986, 7). However, the extent to which these issues produced
competing visions of what emancipation would mean and how it would be carried out,
was not in the exclusive domain of either the Republican party or the Democratic party,
as both parties shared concern. On the other side of the Atlantic, the economic and
political future of the newly reconciled Republic underwent intense scrutiny, as the
subject of when and where Europe would receive its supply of cotton was widely
discussed and bore upon what the United States could and would become.
229

The Hayes-Tilden Compromise

The compromise of 1877 officially initiated the counter-revolution of property
and planter power. With the departure of the last federal troops from South Carolina and
Louisiana, the Hayes-Tilden compromise of 1877 set about delimiting new socio-spatial
arrangements rendered through a vision of an industrialized New South. When the
federal government abjured interference in the affairs of the South in a political deal

229
“Across the Atlantic, the London-published Economist entered the contest with a new perspective.
European commercial concerns were just as anxious as those in the United States about the forthcoming
supply of cotton, for identical reasons. European holders of United States public securities and ‘European
capitalists’ counseled the United States to ‘return as soon as practicable to specie payments’ through
mechanism of large cotton exports. This would ‘reduce a portion of the volume of the precious metals
which flows to Egypt and Asia in payment for cotton, and engulfed in that maelstrom, never returns to the
commerce of American and European nations.’ It would also ensure prompt payment to the buyers of U.S.
Securities, and prevent a continuation of the recession caused by the reduced supply of cotton to Europe.
Support for this position was sought by appealing to the cotton textile industry, which had undergone a
harsh recession during the cotton famine period of the American Civil War. ‘We have stated repeatedly,
what indeed is obvious enough, that until industry and production in the southern states of the union shall
be once more settled, there can be no certainty nor much comfort for either spinners or importers.’ For the
Economist, there was only one method by which these disasters to the Atlantic economy could be avoided:
‘How the negroes will be ‘regimented,’ as Mr. Carlyle calls it, into industrial gangs or squadrons again,
does not seem clear. That some way or other they will be so ‘regimented’—and either induced to work, or
‘persuaded’ to work, we entertain little doubt’” (Jaynes 1986, 11). Jaynes, Branches Without Roots, 11.

102

negotiated between the Democratic and Republican parties over contested electoral
college votes in the 1876 presidential election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes
and Democrat Samuel Tilden, the Republican party bequeathed control over the South to
a reconstituted plantocracy retrofitted by Northern industrial capitalists. The Republican
party relinquished control of the South in exchange for the presidency. Despite “one’s
philosophical orientation,” the central question underlying these subsequent debates,
Jaynes argues, was that, “after the abolition of slavery, how was an industrial order
dedicated to commercial production of agricultural products for a market system to be
maintained?” (Jaynes 1986, 5). These significant issues and the subsequent failure of
federal policies pertaining to land distribution illuminate the parameters and,
consequently, the limitations of Republican political and agrarian reform. Historian Leon
Litwack writes, “Reconstruction was a failure, but a splendid failure”
230
. He contends,
“It didn’t fail for the reasons people expected it would fail. It failed because Radical
Reconstruction tested the limits of what was possible, the limits for egalitarian reform in
the United States. The challenge of racial equality overwhelmed the American
imagination"
231
. Notwithstanding, Black Americans sought to ensure their full equality
through political and economic rights, thereby creating a movement initiated by the
revolutionary changes, which shifted the reality of legal emancipation. This led to the
cleaving open of formidable Black political activity.
Spurred by the array of organizations collectively created by Black communities
in the wake of the Civil War, and politically charged by Union Leagues alongside calls

230
Alexander, “Forty Acres and a Mule”.
231
Ibid.

103

made by a variety of state and regional Black conferences in the late 1860s and 1870s,
Reconstruction saw a dramatic expansion of Black electoral participation in the South.
232

Chapter 2 provides a deeper discussion of Black political activity during Reconstruction
specifically in Low Country and Sea Islands and the implications of that activity in
influencing the course of Reconstruction and the production of this place as a region.
During the period following what Du Bois called “the largest and most successful slave
revolt,” Black Americans exerted a considerable measure of power, including: repealing
the Black Codes designed to undercut Black economic autonomy; shifting the tax base
from poll taxes to property taxes; and forming the ranks of armed Black militias.
233
More
than, two thousand Black Americans held public offices during that period, with
hundreds more white Republican allies being elected to offices with Black support.
The end of Reconstruction meant the end of protection against violations of civil
and political rights; it also meant the end of federal and state Republican patronage for
Black Americans.
234
Black Americans holding administrative positions in local offices,
in most cases, addressed daily issues faced by Blacks-- from road repair to criminal
justice-- more equitably than white Democratic appointees.
235
This was evident in Low
Country, from 1868, when Rev. Tunis Campbell established his residence in the county
seat in Darien, and, until 1875, when he held the offices of state senator, or, alternating
with his son, Tunis Jr., as state representative. Under Campbell’s leadership, the

232
Omar Ali’s In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886-1900, (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2010).
233
Ali, In the Lion’s Mouth, 2010.
234
Omar Ali argues, that while patronage assisted only a relatively few people, directly, the social impact
of patronage was key for Black communities as a whole (Ali 2010,16).
235
Ibid., 10.

104

Republican Party controlled key county offices, and, because of ballot supremacy, a
variety of appointive posts. Black residents served in many of these positions, such as:
city aldermen, city marshal, election manager, jurors, and justice of the peace. White
candidates filled other county offices, and, although some of them were actual members
of the G.O.P., they, nevertheless, received Low Country Black endorsement. Nationally
and locally, congressional measures enacted during Reconstruction—derived from the
distinctive social force of Black women and men eager to forge a political solution to
crises opened by emancipation—were either being curtailed or outright reversed (voting
rights, serving on juries, holding of public office).
236
The loss of federal protection and
patronage signaled a new period, one that severely circumscribed Black Americans’
political or legal recourse to counter a range of abuses and crimes including: exorbitant
interest rates and fees, the deprivation of wages, beatings, harassment, and murder.
237
At
the national scale, Southern Democrats prioritized passing laws, instituting congressional
measures, and creating policies conducive to, and ensuring local articulations of, “home
rule.” They effectively directed the limits and capacities of what the federal government
could do; for example, the subsequent passage of such laws as the Posse Comitatus Act in
1878(“Posse Comitatus” is a Latin phrase meaning “the power of the county”), which
effectively limited future presidential and congressional power by prohibiting the direct
use of federal military troops in domestic civilian law enforcement, except where

236
Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina 1860-1870
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 143.
237
Ali, In the Lion’s Mouth, 10.

105

authorized by the Constitution or acts of Congress.
238
This law was a response to federal
protection of Black Southerners and its sole purpose was to remove that protection.
Locally, the Posse Comitatus Act, particularly in county seats like Darien, imbued county
sheriffs with constitutional power to organize and deputize white militias to effectively
institute “home rule” through preemptive measures. The power of the county seat cannot
be understated when, in fact, it divested political power from urban areas to rural sections
of the state. “Home rule” in Georgia, particularly, flourished under the Posse Comitatus
Act, in that the rapid development of small towns changed the face of the South. Many
of these towns became county seats, with the emergence of increased commerce in the
form of small retail businesses and banks; the “old plantation master” gave way to the
“big farmer,” as these towns became centers for county government. As the centers of
political power moved to small towns, it became necessary to include a wider group of
persons within the ruling class. Through the “county seat government” a new ruling class
was formed that emphasized economics, trade, and industry; this ruling class was
consisted of bankers, lawyers, merchants, doctors, the governing class, and big farmers.
With this new political structure created, all members of the ruling class perceived their
economic problems to be the same. Thus, much of the plantation ideologies remained
and occasionally expanded, wherein, the big farmers wanted to retain Black labor, and
plant managers and merchants wanted to buy labor as cheaply as possible to avoid
unionism.
239
J. Earl Williams argues that much of the plantation philosophy was retained
and expanded in service of maintaining an economic order. To guarantee that this

238
The decades that followed saw the Posse Comitatus act, particularly in county seats such as Darien,
interpreted in common law to refer to local citizens over the age of 15 upon whom a sheriff could call for
assistance in preventing any type of civil disorder.
239
J. Earl Williams, Plantation Politics: The Southern Economic Heritage (Austin: Futura Press, 1972), 15.

106

philosophy would prevail, it was packaged in the idea of sovereignty, meaning the
“supreme and independent power” of individual states.
240
Thus, Williams states, the
expression and subsequent discourse of “state sovereignty” or “States’ Rights”
developed.
241

As early as 1870, the Economist (of London), the New York Times, the Boston
Board of Trade, the plantation bloc, and the Ku Klux Klan were all in agreement as to the
basic socio-spatial outlines of the next phase of reconstructing, regimenting, and
dominating for the New South.
242
To explain Clyde Woods’s conceptualization of the
“plantation bloc,” it is a concept in which the plantation bloc is an analytic, used to
understand a relational “social-spatial dialectic” and a system of representation. This
“social-spatial dialectic” calls for an explicit interrogation of the social production of
space and the ways political organization of space expresses social relationships, but also
how those relationships react back upon the political organization of space. The
“plantation bloc” is a regional bloc. Borrowing from Woods, the “regional bloc,” is used
in this work to:
[…] understand the forces constructing and contesting regional power structures.
The bloc can be conceived of as an alliance, a bargain, or a contract between
disparate ethnic, gender, class, and other elements. The goal of the regional bloc
is to gain control over resources and over the ideological and distributive
institutions governing their allocation. The institutions and movements of the
dominant group are typically explained in terms of moral, psychological,
biological, and intellectual imperatives and superiority (Woods 1998, 26).

240
Ibid.
241
I find it necessary to note Williams adds further, “[U]sage of this ludicrous phrase has never been
deterred by the fact that no sovereign state has existed since the United States of America was formed”
(Williams 1972, 15).
242
Woods, Development Arrested, 71.

107

As a “system of representation” the plantation bloc “can be generally viewed as a
Southern ethnoclass grouping engaged in the monopolization of resources, power,
historical explanation, and social action” (Woods 1998, 29). “The growth in power of the
plantation bloc was directly linked with the growth in potential power of” working class
Black American communities in the rural South and their diaspora (Woods 1998, 29).
Embedded within these communities was an ontology that “provided a sense of collective
self and a tectonic footing from which to oppose and dismantle the American intellectual,
cultural, and socioeconomic traditions constructed from the raw material of African
American exploitation and denigration” (Woods 1998, 29). Paying close attention to the
regional variations between the focus of Woods’s work and this study, his
conceptualization of relational regions and regional blocs provides a theory of social
change that can be used to interrogate the regional formation of Low Country and Sea
Islands during and after Reconstruction within the context of the New South.
For Northern capitalists, the plantation bloc, and the white supremacist
paramilitary organizations, not only did Black American labor have to be returned to the
fields, it had to be spatially fragmented for the purposes of social control. During the
financial panic of 1873—a depression caused in part by the collapse of railroad
securities—and the six years of economic depression that followed, the price of cotton
fell by nearly 50 percent and sources of credit in the South evaporated. Northern political
commitment to Reconstruction waned as Southern Republicans were increasingly forced
to defend themselves against Democratic accusations of mismanagement and corruption.
By the mid-1870s, federal enforcement of Reconstruction policies began to falter as the
nation sank into an economic depression. The plantation bloc mobilized in order to

108

perfect further this new regime of social, economic, political, and intellectual destruction
in order to achieve a complete restoration of power.
243

Led by white planters, Democrats took office and reasserted antebellum privileges
and prerogatives. They would now do so as the “Southern Democracy”—the network of
courts, banks, militias, sheriffs, and newspapers supporting redemption—helping to
ensure their control over Black labor and much of the Southern political economy with
the twinned realities of state-sanctioned and extralegal violence and the multivalent
nature of new agrarian economic arrangements in the region as a whole. Of these new
arrangements, the predominate system of sharecropping was more widespread in most
sub-regions of the South, however, in areas such as Low Country and Sea Islands, much
of the staple cash crops (rice and cotton) were subsequently destroyed from the ravages
and neglect brought on by the Civil War. In addition, a series of floods, hurricanes, and
boll weevil infestations further crippled the rice and cotton industries, yielding a
diversification in Low Country’s economy. Beginning circa 1870, the declining
importance of the agricultural economy in McIntosh County, coupled with Darien’s
location at the mouth of the Altamaha river—a key estuary in the coastal commercial
network—resulted in timber exporting; the creation of turpentine industries; and a steady
increase in related shipping activities. Timber cutters leveled trees as far as 150 miles
upstream from Darien, and raft hands floated the pine and cypress logs down the
Altamaha to the town’s port facilities, where numerous milling operations processed

243
Ibid.

109

lumber for export to Savannah and abroad.
244
Partly because of the demise of staple-
crop agriculture, real estate values in McIntosh County were lower during the late
nineteenth century than in predominantly neighboring Black belt counties, e.g. Baldwin
or Terrell.
245
The last half-century after the Civil War witnessed an increase in Black
land ownership, however, the white minority controlled most of the real and personal
wealth of these counties. Vulnerability to white economic power remained a limiting
factor in Black articulations of freedom.

New South Bourbonism
Unfurling “Bourbonism” and its systematic dismantling of Reconstruction, did
not “descend in a sudden rush of Democratic glory, but arrived slowly, tentatively” and
not without organized resistance to it.
246
The term “Bourbonism reaches back to a
French and Spanish monarchial dynasty, the House of Bourbon, “whose famed
indifference to human suffering led them to create one disaster after another” (Woods
2009, 429). The philosophy of Bourbonism was restored in Louisiana by “the
ultraconservatives who considered any whisper of moderation as rampant pseudo-
liberalism […and] they identified closely with the propertied interests and espoused
rabid racism.”
247
Taken up by the Redeemers, Bourbonism referred to the regimes set

244
Albert Colbey Smith’s “Down Freedom’s Road: The Contours of Race, Class, and Property Crime in
Black-Belt Georgia, 1866-1915” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Georgia, 1982).
245
Ibid.
246
Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992), 8.
247
Mark T. Carleton and William Ivy Hair, “Uneasy Interlude, 1877-1892,” in Louisiana: A History, 2
nd
ed.
Bennett Wall (Arlington Heights: Forum Press, 1990), 214.

110

up in the south as a conservative reaction against Radical Reconstruction. While
Bourbon Democrats “redeemed” Georgia in 1871
248
, some counties remained in Black
Republican hands long after Democrats took neighboring counties, years after their state
government wrested in the maligned hands of the “Bourbon Triumvirate”
249
. Black
Americans organized to ensure and maintain, if not advance, newfound liberties gained
during Reconstruction, as the interests of industry and capital appropriated those
liberties. Among the ways Black Americans sought to protect and extend their interests
included independent politics: establishing third parties, promoting insurgent candidates,
and running fusion campaigns (where two parties run a shared slate of candidates). Such
tactics not only fueled the Abolitionist movement of the antebellum era, but were also
used by Black Americans in the decades after the Civil War.
250

248
"Redemption" truly began in Georgia with the state elections held in December 1870. By then the state
Republican Party suffered from internal divisions and from charges of wastefulness and corruption.
Democrats took control of both houses of the state legislature, and in late October 1871, just before the
newly elected legislators took office, Governor Bullock resigned and fled the state (see previous chapter).
Republican Benjamin Conley, president of the state senate, succeeded Bullock, but the new legislature
passed a law that a special election be held in December 1871 to choose a new governor. Republicans
boycotted the election and did not put forth a candidate, Democrat James M. Smith won the no-contest
special election, and he went on to win the March 1872 general election over Republican Dawson Walker.
Bourbon Democrats took full control of the state government by 1872 with the ascendancy of Democrat
James M. Smith to the governor’s chair.

249
“There were divisions within the Democratic party in Georgia […] [O]ne of the most divisive was the
issue of reconciliation with the North. Those who supported sectional reconciliation were called
Bourbons,” although for some historians, the more accurate name is New Departure Democrats (Meyers
2008, 195). In addition to favoring reconciliation, New Departure Democrats adhered to historical amnesia
when it came to the Civil War and Reconstruction and “looked toward diversifying the state’s economy.
The leaders of this faction of the Democratic party were Joseph E. Brown, John B. Gordon, and Alfred H.
Colquitt. Along with Henry Grady, who worked behind the scenes, urged the state and the region to
industrialize; these three were known as the ‘Bourbon Triumvirate’; between 1873 and 1897 these three
men rotated in and out of the offices of governor and US senator” (Meyers 2008, 195). The “Bourbon
Triumvirate” controlled Georgia politics. Christopher C. Meyers, ed. The Empire State of the South:
Georgia History in Documents and Essays (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2008), 195.

250
Both prior to and following emancipation Black people in the Americas created their own fraternal
orders, mutual benefit societies, and secret societies that formed the basis of independent thought and

111

In the years preceding Reconstruction’s officiated demise Republican legislators
and officeholders were systematically, often brutally, removed from office by Democrats
who sought to “redeem” the South from Black Republican authority. These
“Redeemers,” as they came to be known, terrorized local Black populations through “rifle
clubs,” white paramilitary organizations such as the White Leagues and the Red Shirts,
which served as adjuncts of the Democratic Party. Black Americans became the targets
of these paramilitary organizations, organizations that were allied to the southern
Democratic Party, while Black and white Republican leaders were vilified, physically
intimidated, assaulted, incarcerated, and assassinated.
The Sufferings of the Rev. T.G. Campbell and His Family in Georgia, can be read
as an antecedent to Radical Reconstruction’s demise. Published shortly after his 1877
release from a prison camp on Colonel Jack Smith’s plantation in Washington County,
Georgia, Campbell’s essay addresses the reversal of Radical legislature and the coming
realities of a restructured plantocracy at the helm of a materializing New South. Through
a significant account of the collective labor of freed people to fully realize the human
possibilities of legal emancipation, The Sufferings of the Rev. T.G. Campbell outlines the
successes and subsequent derailment of Campbell and his family, alongside laboring

action. In North America, it took on several forms, such as Black Masonry or African American lodges.
These bodies, which in many cases (but not all) were often closely tied to Black churches, not only brought
a sense of solidarity to communities of Black women and men, but also served as political staging grounds.
As was the case in the U.S. South, where for several centuries’ plantation blocs, Clyde Woods explains,
“attempted to suppress [Black American] independent thought, cultural expression, and action. […]
[Therefore] to ensure the autonomy of thought and action in the midst of constant surveillance and
violence, African Americans constructed a highly developed tradition of social interpretation. This practice
finds its origins in the secret societies prevalent during slavery. During this period, African, Native
American and European intellectual traditions were forged in the crucible of the plantation South” (Woods
1998, 29). Woods, Development Arrested, 29.

112

women and men in Low Country and Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia from
1863 to 1876. Campbell recounts the eleven-year campaign Georgia Democrats privately
and publicly waged to rid themselves of Campbell and his influence on rural Black
communities in McIntosh County. During that time, McIntosh County had been the
center of Georgia Black Radicalism. By 1867, Black residents of McIntosh County
established the self-determining Belle Ville settlement (and the Belle Ville Farmer’s
Association) based on communal self-governance and mutual aid. Belle Ville Farmer’s
Association contributed greatly to the establishing of critical infrastructure to create self-
sustaining communities. For example they: drafted a constitution (which included
building and maintaining public works, e.g. fence and road repair); organized an active
armed militia; built schools and emphasized the importance of equal access to education;
instituted regulations on subsistence farming and fishing (that forewarned the depletion
of the regions oyster and shrimp) to prevent environmental degradation and maintain the
region’s biodiversity (and they were the first to establish these type of regulations); and
positioned several of its members to serve as local officiators and mediators of labor and
social relations in the region. From 1868-1875, Black residents of McIntosh County held
a variety of elected positions, including state representative and such county offices as
sheriff, coroner, ordinary, constable, and clerk of the Superior Court. Formerly enslaved
residents served in appointive offices as jurors, bailiffs, election managers, and city
marshals.
251
As the previous chapter details, Campbell, himself, served as a Freedmen’s
Bureau agent. As an agent of the bureau, Campbell had the authority to review, approve,

251
Tunis Campbell, Sufferings of the Reverend T.G. Campbell and His Family in Georgia (Washington:
Enterprise Publishing Company, 1877), 9-14. Bessie M. Lewis, They Called Their Town Darien (Darien:
The Darien News, 1975) 58. Georgia Department of Archives and History, McIntosh County Records,
Minutes of the Superior Court of McIntosh County, Georgia, 1875, Morrow, GA ; various issues of the
Darien Timber Gazette, 1874-1875.

113

or rescind the contracts of agricultural workers. Much to the irritation of white
employers, Campbell often intervened to protect the economic interests of the county’s
Black laboring population. As a Georgia state legislator, he sat on several committees
such as the Committee on Education, Petitions, Penitentiary, and Military. Campbell
introduced fifteen bills and resolutions. He introduced bills to: define the eligibility of
jurors; legalize juror selection in McIntosh County; establish district courts in each
Georgia county; stop the judicial process in state courts until reorganization was
complete; and require neighboring Black belt Tatnall County Ordinary to hold office in
Reidsville, a location more accessible to the people.
252
In addition, Campbell offered
bills to implement a nondiscriminatory system of public education in Georgia, to use the
money from railroad profits for education as provided by the constitution, and to change
selection procedures for the McIntosh County Academy (the only public high school in
McIntosh County, which opened in 1875).
253
He moved to incorporate three railroads,
the Seaboard, the Skidaway, and the Pine Island. He convinced the senate to amend acts
incorporating the city of Darien to make them conform to the current constitution and to
strike the words, “white,” “colored,” or “negro” so as to make no reference to race.
254
He
offered a bill to invest the governor with authority to raise and equip integrated militia
companies. Campbell’s work to ensure Black enfranchisement is evident in his Savannah

252
Journal of the Senate of the State of Georgia, 1870 (Atlanta: J.H. Estill Public Printer, 1870), 102, 216,
375.
253
Journal of the Senate of the State of Georgia, 1870 (Atlanta: J.H. Estill Public Printer, 1870), 26-27,
215-216, 262, 297, 291. Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1870
(Atlanta: Public Printer, 1870), 186.
254
Ibid.

114

Bill, which amended the Georgia Code thirteen times
255
Campbell wanted to eliminate
the voter registration fee and establish more polling places to ensure that every voter had
the opportunity to vote. As justice of the peace or magistrate for the Darien Militia
District (the only organized militia force in the county, primarily used to ward off white
aggression), Campbell, “the Congo Senator,” as Savannah Morning News derisively
notes, infuriated whites by arresting and fining those who had mistreated or assaulted free
Black residents or laborers passing through Darien. Several incidents involved ship
captains who had been charged with abusing Black sailors and Black merchants; this
prompted arrests, grand jury indictments, and several brief jail terms for the ship captains.
On numerous occasions Campbell was arrested for “falsely imprisoning” white
men who abused Black residents. In these instances the Belle Ville Militia intervened, at
times leading to confrontations, inciting judges to incarcerate Campbell in a Savannah
jail, forty miles north of Darien. In 1872, administration of the law came under the
control of a state-appointed, seven-member board of commissioners, usurping even
Campbell’s authority as justice of the peace. Confronted with an “iniquitous, unjust, and
diabolical” law, Campbell declared that if need be, Black women and men would use
their “one resource left”: “the musket and Bayonet.”
256
With the Belle Ville Militia
supporting Campbell, white men were afraid to reckon with Campbell head on. As
Campbell met white aggression with armed resistance, white residents and Democrats
initiated a campaign against Campbell using legal avenues.

255
Ibid.
256
Campbell, Sufferings of the Rev. T.G. Campbell, 9. Duncan, Freedom’s Shore, 89, 104.

115

White attorney and Democrat politician William Gignilliate resolved, “If
[Campbell] could be […] dismissed for malpractice as Justice of the Peace […] he would
then be obliged to quit the county or starve.”
257
Gignilliate urged state Senator Rufus E.
Lester of Savannah to present the Georgia legislature with a petition from McIntosh
County citizens.
258
The Committee on Privileges and Elections sent a three man
investigating subcommittee to Darien; they interviewed and took affidavits from at least
forty people who they believed had witnessed Campbell’s actions or could attest to his
character and motives. Those citizens who testified against Campbell, many of which
were Black officeholders from McIntosh County, were reluctant to let Campbell’s
recalcitrance endanger their status. Despite this reluctance, numerous McIntosh County
citizens both white and Black testified to Campbell’s integrity and circulated their own
petition showing their support of him. The petition, presented to the subcommittee by
129 residents, rebuked the Lester petition. The Lester petition originated from a small
group of “wrongfully and maliciously prejudiced […] [county residents who] have no
just or reasonable grounds to ask for his removal.”
259
The petitioners praised Campbell
for “using his means and time for the education of the colored people [sic]” and
explained further that Campbell “is doing all in his power to encourage the colored
people [sic] to work steady and save their money so that they may buy homes for
themselves and [their] children.”
260

257
Duncan, Freedom’s Shore, 84.
258
Ibid.
259
Georgia Department of Archives and History, Tunis Campbell File, Witnesses For or Against Campbell
and Petition, May 20, 1872, Morrow, GA.
260
Ibid.

116

The failure of the campaign to remove Campbell induced Democrats and local
residents who opposed the political power base Campbell collaboratively built up in the
county, to resurrect indictments of false imprisonment. It was by way of this indictment
that opponents of Campbell orchestrated his arrest and incarceration. While serving as
justice of the peace, Tunis Campbell was arrested on charges of false imprisonment of
Issac Rafe and indicted on January 9
th
, 1875. Back in 1873, Campbell arrested Rafe and
charged him with breaking into a house in which two Black families lived. Rafe was also
charged with abusive behavior due to his threats against the lives of both heads of family.
Upon receipt of affidavits, Campbell issued a warrant for Rafe’s arrest. At the hearing
Rafe was fined $100 ($50 for each case), ordered to keep the peace for six months toward
the families involved, and pay the costs of the court. Campbell reports in Sufferings that
Rafe agreed to the above stipulations and went to get a bondsman to pay the $100 bond.
On the advice of the bondsman, Walter A. Ray, Rafe refused to pay the fine or the costs
of the court. Campbell ordered Rafe to be jailed, and in Campbell’s record of the
incident, Rafe fled. The prosecutor in the case charging Campbell of false imprisonment
was the very same Walter A. Ray; Ray produced an affidavit signed by himself that
stated Rafe had paid the bond, a claim Campbell flatly denied.
Campbell was indicted without receiving a notice to appear before the grand jury,
and without notice that charges had been preferred against him. He learned of his
pending arrest by the following events: when he returned from Washington on business,
he found his house burned, and the grocery and dry goods stored his wife Harriet
Campbell and son managed were also burned. Arrested the following day, a session of
the superior court was called and Campbell was prevented from traveling two blocks to

117

retrieve his court records for his defense. His legal counsel requested one hour to prepare
Campbell’s case but was refused, he again asked for fifteen minutes, and was again
denied by Judge Henry B. Tompkins of Savannah. Tompkins, a staunch Democrat and
Confederate veteran, filled the vacancy created by Judge Schley in the McIntosh County
Superior Court. Tompkins was appointed by Governor James Milton Smith of Georgia,
who was also a Confederate veteran and Democrat; Smith, fulfilled Tompkins’s desire to
set Darien “to rights.” Tompkins proved to be part of the conspiracy Bishop Henry M.
Turner reported in 1872 that “[s]oon after Governor Smith went into the Executive chair,
the Negro-haters concluded to change their tactics and the threat went abroad that Negro
[sic] leaders must go to the penitentiary.”
261

Campbell plead not guilty to the indictment, and the case proceeded upon the
affidavit of Rafe, the testimony of the sheriff (who claimed he was not told to arrest
Rafe), and the prosecuting lawyer, who wrote the affidavit and swore Rafe had given him
bonds. Campbell’s legal counsel stated in court that it was impossible for him to get any
testimonies or proceed with any aspect of Campbell’s case on account of intimidation.
However, Judge Tompkins ruled that there was no intimidation and the case proceeded.
Campbell was incarcerated, and, eventually, sent to Colonel Jack Smith’s plantation in
Washington County, Georgia for eleven months and twenty-one days. In the interim,
Campbell’s lawyers attempted to force Judge Henry Tompkins to accept bail; they
challenged the McIntosh County Superior Court for rigging juries, and they tried to get
changes of venue. Situations were so fraught with duplicity, that Harriet Campbell’s

261
Letter from Henry M. Turner to the editor of the Savannah Journal, undated, in Washington National
New Era July 11, 1872, as quoted in Sterling, The Trouble They Seen, 408-409.

118

copious writing campaigns and tireless appeals to ameliorate her husband’s miserable
conditions in jail, eventually led to the involvement of federal courts and also the
involvement of a number of Campbell’s friends, including two U.S. attorneys. The
public debate that surrounded his trial forced his persecutors to articulate the justness of
their behavior. The press devoted multiple stories to the Rafe case when Tompkins
refused habeas corpus, and pages to the contestation of venue, citing lengthy sections of
the judicial code to prove that “having such a vile and unscrupulous agitator as Tunis at
liberty” was not a matter over which the federal court had jurisdiction.
262

As laid out in the previous chapter, in McIntosh County, Rev. Tunis G. Campbell,
collectively built a communitarian, self-determining base, using politics as a means to
actualize emancipation and ensure the survival, dignity, and legal rights of Black coastal
communities. These communities successfully delayed the restoration of planter
dominance for four years after Bourbon Democrats took control of state government.
McIntosh County Black communities controlled the ebb and flow of the county’s
political economy and prevented the return of planter power until 1876, when the
counterrevolution incarcerated Campbell.
263
Campbell’s case, however, was not an
isolated one, and moves were made within southern Republican leadership circles to
marginalize and then purge “Negro” elements (which included white sympathizers) from
their ranks. An 1875 letter to U.S. Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont from Henry
Farrows, a friend of Campbell’s, states, “It is difficult for people who do not reside in this

262
“Superior Court,” Savannah Morning News, November 15, 1875; “The State and Federal Courts,”
Savannah Morning News, November 29, 1875; “The Conflict between Federal and State Authorities,”
Savannah Morning News, January 12, 1876.
263
Duncan, Freedom’s Shore, 10.

119

country […] to realize how negroes [sic] can be murdered [or jailed] here with such
impunity”
264
. The preface’s closing provocation of Campbell’s treatise frames the
terrains of struggle social movements will face as the new American state comes into
being: “[…] I ask the laboring men and women of this nation, How long will it be before
you will have no rights that the capitalists or property-holder is bound to respect? It is
time you began to think about this” (Campbell 1877, 3). Campbell’s closing provocation
makes an explicit reference to the 1857 Dred Scott decision, pointing his audience to
ways race and class oppression are administered and naturalized by the demands and
desires of capitalists through state institutions.

The Power of the County and Black Populism
Significant political changes made during the 1870s and 1880s reached their
culmination during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Segments of the former
plantocracy fought industrialization and urbanization, as some of America’s
development spread to the South aided primarily by the Bourbons. J. Earl Williams
argues that with the growth of some industry in the 1890s, “the plight of the Negro,” the
agitation of nonagricultural workers, and the discontent of poor white farmers (the
preceding all evidenced in the growth of two distinctive, yet intersecting and overlapping

264
Department of Justice, Letters Received by the Department of Justice, Henry P. Farrow to Edwards
Pierrepont, November 30, 1875, Roll 2, Washington, D.C., 789-790. Georgia Department of Archives and
History, McIntosh County Records, Superior Court Minutes, 1875, Morrow, GA, 243-244, 248-249.
Savannah Colored Tribune, January 15, 1876. Georgia Department of Archives and History, McIntosh
County Records, Treasury 1873-1879, Morrow, GA.

120

Populist movements in the South) the wheels of a reconstituted old plantation system
came creaking to a halt.
265

During a nearly thirty year period of political dominance by the “Bourbon
Triumvirate,” state government promoted the interests of planters and businessmen over
those of small farmers and laborers, including sharecroppers. They encouraged
immigration, and they invited the exploitation of mineral resources, water, power, and
timberlands in an attempt to diversify the economy of the state.
266
Industrializing the
New South, securing the land, labor, resources, and capital to make this transformation
possible and profitable (which was required in Henry Grady’s vision detailed in
“Bourbon Triumvirate”) made Georgia:
safe and attractive for strangers to unite with them in developing their resources.
The pioneers in manufacturing are not the only men who would profit by such co-
operation. The land-owners [sic] whose unsaleable estates are now a burden to
them, would either find it profitable to cultivate them, or would be able to dispose
of them at something like their value. Labor would be in greater demand and of
greater value, and the whole State would feel the stimulating influence of the new
life infused into it.
267

Grady’s vision, along with Robert Toombs—the leading advocate for revision—led to the
rewriting of Georgia’s state constitution in 1877.
268
Arguably, the most conservative
constitution in Georgia’s history, some provisions of significance were those that
prohibited the state from offering tax exemptions to encourage industrial development, as

265
Williams, Plantation Politics, 14.
266
Meyer, The Empire State of the South, 204.
267
Atlanta Daily Herald, March 14, 1874; Ibid., 198-199.
268
Georgia’s 1877 constitution would last until 1945.

121

well as provisions including the cumulative poll tax and revisions pertaining to state
government officials.
269

In the late 1890s, the county seat of McIntosh County experienced destructive
hurricanes in 1896 and 1898, which proved devastating for the timber and rice industries.
An 1887 fire had destroyed a good portion of the upper bluff business section along the
Darien River, including the town’s leading hotel, which was never rebuilt.
270
Darien’s
problems entailed more than just the business downturn brought on by declining profits
in timber and rice—there were serious social concerns as well. Between 1886 and 1900
(within a decade following the end of Reconstruction and before the consolidation of Jim
Crow—) Black Americans mobilized tens of thousands of Black farmers, sharecroppers,
and agrarian workers to action. They demanded higher wages, debt relief, government
ownership and regulation of railroads, farmer subsidy protection, the protection of civil
and political rights, and electoral reform. The movement grew out of established
networks of Black benevolent associations, fraternal orders, and churches that served as
centers for the recruitment, education, and leadership-training of Black Americans in
post-Reconstruction South; it took organizational form in 1886 with the creation of
various mutual aid societies and labor unions, including the Colored Agricultural Wheels,
the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, the southern branch of the Knights of Labor, and the
Cooperative Workers of America. In the Low Country, Black Americans maintained a
vision of freedom, which they ubiquitously defined as the pursuit of self-governance, the
right to political participation, the right to resist authority, the right to personal freedom,

269
Meyer, The Empire State of the South, 195.
270
Buddy Sullivan, ed., The Darien Journal of John Girardeau Legare, Ricegrower (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2012),16.

122

and the right to secure and maintain economic freedom. Organized in Troup County in
1889, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, at its peak, had a membership of 84,000, which
included a significant number of women. Through the Union League and the Georgia
Colored Farmers’ Alliance, Black Americans pushed against emerging social institutions,
premised on systems of neo-dependency and neo-paternalism, through the restoration of
planter power. By the late 1880s and early 1890s, the Georgia Colored Farmers’ Alliance
became the principal vehicle for grassroots activism in Low Country.
The formation and development of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance remain
somewhat shrouded in mystery despite its subsequent vast range of influence; the need
for this mystery was a result of the hostile environment created by white supremacy,
extralegal, and state sanctioned violence. Like the Belle Ville Farmers’ Association,
primary sources such as official records, correspondences, diaries, and newspaper articles
regarding membership, activities, and leadership of the alliance are scarce. Information
from diverse secondary sources provides much of the activity and historical background
of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. The alliance was founded as an agrarian association to
assist the economic plight of Black farmers in Houston County, Texas in 1886.
271
Within
five years, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance became the largest Black American agrarian
organization of the

nineteenth century, maintaining over a million Black farmers with

271
The first Colored Farmers Alliance was actually established four years earlier, in 1882, however Gen.
R.M. Humphrey did not record it in the 1891 official history of the organization. Milton George had
helped establish this “Negro Alliance” in Prairie County, Arkansas, as documented in Roy V. Scott,
"Milton George and the Farmer's Alliance Movement," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLV, (1958):
107.

123

members in every Southern state.
272
The Alliance protected Southern Black farmers from
falling commodity prices, rising farm costs, and high interest rates. Many Black
Americans who joined the alliance were previously active in the Knights of Labor or the
Grange or Agricultural Wheel, which were all agricultural unions in the South. The two
unions, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance and its rival the National Colored Alliance (also
founded in Texas and led by white alliance member Andrew J. Carouthers) merged in
1890.
273
Richard Humphrey Manning, the national spokesman for the Colored Farmers’
Alliance, estimated the breakdown of alliance membership included 300,000 females,
150,000 males under the age of 21, and 750,000 adult males. Due to the large
membership in every southern state, the alliance became the nation’s largest Black
agrarian organization.
The Colored Farmers’ Alliance philosophy steered Black members toward a
philosophy akin to the likes of the Black radical Republican ideals during Reconstruction.
Alliance members were encouraged to own their own homes and pay off debts, and they
were also encouraged to uplift themselves with hard work, sacrifice, and education.
Similar to the Belle Ville Farmers’ Association and mutual-aid societies, the alliance
solicited funds to: help sick and disabled members, provide for longer public school
terms, and establish a few academies. Much of the organizing efforts of the alliance were
covert, led by its grassroots leaders, many of whom were ministers. Historian Charles

272
This figure of one million plus is contested by Lawrence Goodwyn in Democratic Promise. He believes
that a figure of 250,000 is a more accurate estimate of the number of those active in the Colored Farmers
Alliance. See Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1976).
273
General Richard Manning Humphrey, “History of the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Co-
operative Union,” in The Farmers’ Alliance History and Agricultural Digest, American Farmers and The
Rise of Agribusiness: Seeds of Struggle (New York: Arno Press, 1975).

124

Postel noted, “The Colored Alliance was a semi-clandestine movement based primarily in
the [B]lack church.”
274
Congregations equipped the alliance with membership and
material support, historian Omar Ali adds, “Churches served as meeting sites for the
organization; when greater secrecy was required, members met elsewhere, in individual
homes or in the fields” (Ali 2010, 50). Members employed the organizing strategies,
tactics, and community building efforts of their ancestors.
In response to Reconstruction era political disenfranchisement, economic crises,
and civil repression, Black Americans organized distinctly Black institutions, which
included unions, towns, secret self-defense groups, mutual aid societies, businesses, and
churches. Some of the most important social institutions for McIntosh County Blacks
were the Black churches, which included a diverse array of denominations:
Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Baptists. Darien also had a congregation affiliated
with the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) association, headed by bishop Henry M.
Turner, and an affiliation with African Baptist Church of more than one thousand
members. The St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church operated one of many independent Black
schools. The churches raised money for Black candidates in local elections. Black
alliance members elected Black Americans to local and county positions and were
instrumental in electing two Black American legislators to the Georgia State Legislature
in 1890: Lectured Crawford of McIntosh County, and J.M. Holzendorf of Camden
County. In 1890, the movement began to shift toward the electoral arena. Black
Americans and white independents would help to establish, and then grow, the People’s
Party to challenge the Bourbon Democratic Party authority in the South. Black

274
Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

125

Americans ran insurgent and independent campaigns with the Republican Party. Some
of their candidates won; certain concessions and reforms were even briefly put into place
(including election reforms and greater funding for public education).
For McIntosh County, the election of Lecture Crawford—Campbell’s Republican
adversary and the lone Black juror on Campbell’s case in 1876, which led to his
incarceration—in 1882 marks, in many ways, the culmination of internal divisions within
local Black residents, coalescing with Bourbon Democratic-led attacks against Black
social institutions and political formation. That is illustrated by the strategic alliances
formed by local Black residents (who became disillusioned with Campbell and Belle
Ville residents, evidenced through political decisions undertaken by this subsection of
local Black residents) and local Bourbon Democrats and the white ruling class. Although
Crawford remained in office until 1907, nearly three decades after Redemption’s
incipient formation, this is possible through alliances formed with the white Bourbon
ruling class.
In 1882, Campbell returned to McIntosh County to oppose Lectured Crawford’s
bid for the state legislature, and to campaign for the election of a Republican governor.
Campbell returned to also support Chester Arthur’s programs, primarily a tariff reduction
that would relieve indebted farmers and middle class consumers. A few days after
Campbell arrived in Darien, Judge Tompkins issued a bench warrant for Campbell’s
arrest and had him arrested on the old charge of false imprisonment of John Fisher, the
same charge Tompkins used to incarcerate Campbell seven years prior. This was
Tompkins’s way of warning Campbell against any effort to stir up Black militancy.

126

Tompkins set bail at $500, and Campbell was set free after a brief stay in jail.
275
When
“redeemers” removed Campbell from the county by putting him in the chain gang in
1876, Campbell’s well-organized, unified, political machine withstood the Bourbon
onslaught. It remained an active force in McIntosh County politics for forty years. With
vestiges of the Black agrarian radicalism, the Black political machine successfully
returned a Black legislator to the General assembly in every election, except for the
period between the 1890s and 1907. In three of the five contests in the 1890s, the white
candidate owed his victory to Black voters opposing Campbell’s long-time rival,
Lectured Crawford.
276

Lectured Crawford of McIntosh County was a Black American Knight of Labor
and a leading figure in Georgia’s Colored Alliance. In 1891, when Georgia’s Alliance
legislature introduced bills proposing three laws that would increasingly define the place
of Black Americans as that of a subordinate and segregated group of people: a Jim Crow
law for railroads, which was a law that required railroad companies to furnish separate
coaches for Black and white travelers; a law that prohibited Black and white prisoners
from being chained together; and a law that would reinstate the use of the whipping post
in chain gangs, the Colored Alliance of Georgia protested all these bills before they
became laws.
277
Crawford was the only representative to speak against the bill when it
came to a vote in the state house. Crawford’s participation in electoral politics

275
E. Merton Coulter, “Tunis G. Campbell: Negro Reconstructionist in Georgia,” Georgia Historical
Quarterly 52 (1968): 46-47. Darien Timber Gazette, May 26, 1882; Darien Timber Gazette, June 9,
1882; Darien Timber Gazette, July 29, 1882.
276
Albert Colbey Smith “Down Freedom’s Road: The Contours of Race, Class, and Property Crime in
Black-Belt Georgia, 1866-1915” (PhD diss., University of Georgia, 1982),128.
277
Kenneth Coleman, ed., A History of Georgia, 2
nd
ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 277.

127

representing the enclave of Black Republican political power in overwhelmingly
Democratic legislatures, wrested power from the Bourbon elite as the last decade of the
nineteenth century began. Despite Crawford’s highly questionable and conspiratorial
role aiding the departure and incarceration of Tunis Campbell, Crawford represented a
different iteration of Black agrarian radicalism. As an alliance member and active
supporter of a third party, articulated largely in the Populist movement, but specifically
invested in Black Populism, Crawford maintained Alliance and Black populists
philosophies of the importance of land ownership, mutual-aid, education, and Black
industry while forestalling complete Democratic control of the state legislature in the
final decade of the nineteenth century.
Black populism from 1886 to 1900, a Black-led independent movement broad
enough for all farmers and not a distinctly separatist movement as earlier scholarship
suggests, was deeply rooted in the Black radical tradition and agrarian culture. Omar Ali
situates Black Populism and the social activity of the many thousands of Black
Americans who actively participated in building Black Populism from the mid-1880s
through the late 1890s, as a movement that remains a little-known chapter in the history
of post-emancipation Black political struggle. Ali’s work is crucial in that he re-
establishes Black Populism as a separate movement, with it’s own history. Black
Americans followed their own leaders, had their own organizations, and made demands
derived from their own particular experiences.
278
Held within Black populism was a
distinctive politics of culture with groundings in African culture and the experience of

278
Omar Ali’s In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886-1900 (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2010).

128

slavery; Black populism was a collective act of self-determination. It challenged the
economic and ideological structures of the day, and offered a democratic alternative the
nation might have followed. The emergence of Black populism reveals the
contradictions of class within Black communities and political formations. Locally and
nationally, some Black Republicans and various “representative” race leaders denounced
the movement’s militant tactics and they also disapproved of the support for a third
party—the people’s party. By the late 1890s, and mostly under Democratic led attacks,
Black Populism collapsed.

129

Chapter 4 Racial Capitalism and the Struggle for Black Self-Determination
How curious a land is this,—how full
of untold story, of tragedy and
laughter, and the rich legacy of
human life; shadowed with a tragic
past, and big with future promise!
- W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls
of Black Folk

The Souls of Black Folk is a journey; a meditation on the social and racial
divisions marked in the different regions of the United States. Traveling through the
landscape, Du Bois makes a series of “stops” in order to map his surroundings and
account for his conceptual concerns. As he sojourns in Georgia’s historic terrain,
279
its
crimson soil bears the “rememories”
280
of the dispossession of indigenous and African
people; of intensive resource extraction and capital accumulation; of enslavement and
resistance. He saw the place where, just southwest of “the city of a hundred hills […]
Sam Hose was crucified”; where, down in Darien, the Delegal uprisings took place; and,

279
See Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and Cartographies of Struggle
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006), 22. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
(Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.; Cambridge: University Press John Wilson and Son, 1903).

280
Toni Morrison uses the word “rememory” to mean the act of remembering a memory. The word is a
noun; it is an actual thing, person, or place that takes on the existence of a noun. Rememory is that act of
attempting to forget yet the recollection still surfaces vividly. The legacies of slavery, indigenous
genocide, dispossession, and displacement all surface as a psychic haunting in which the specifics of a
series of traumatic incidents, are told and retold, even as teller tries to block their full emergence into the
conscious mind. In Morrison’s Beloved, when Sethe explains to her daughter Denver “rememory,” she
states, “Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If
a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but
out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around there outside my head. I mean, even
if I don’t think about it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in
the place where it happened” (Morrison 2004, 43). Rememory is reconciliation and a vexation, a healing
and a wound. See Toni Morrison’s Beloved (New York: Vintage, 2004), 43.

130

for Du Bois, this historical conjuncture represented “the geographical focus” of
America’s Black population, whose plight seemed to be centered in this place (Du Bois
1903, 75). Du Bois reminds us that, “No other State [sic] in the Union [could] count a
million [Black Americans] among its citizens, a population as large as the slave
population of the whole Union in 1800; no other State [sic] fought so long and
strenuously to gather this host of Africans” (Du Bois 1903, 75). Coupling Black
geographies with Black knowledge, Du Bois “provides a kind of geographic genealogy
[…] expos[ing] how U.S. democracy was laboriously built up, and the ways in which the
production of this particular nation-space is uneven” (McKittrick 2006, 22). That is, the
social practices and processes described in Du Bois’s commentary create places,
landscapes, and nation-states, which contribute to how we organize, build, and imagine
our surroundings. It is through Black geographic knowledge that Du Bois exposes the
economic legacy of slavery “as a visual spatial project that organizes, names, and sees
social differences, and determines where social order happens” (McKittrick 2006, xiv).
Thus, our knowledge of the geographic elements of Black history in Georgia brings into
focus, through different vantage points, the responses of Blacks to geographic
domination, and it advances a different way of knowing and imagining our world. This
chapter re-examines the events represented as the Darien Insurrection of 1899, or, as Du
Bois refers to them, the “Delegal uprisings,” to analyze the ways in which former slaves
and their descendants organized collective responses to state and structural violence.
This is the story of the “Darien Insurrection”, as reported in the Darien Gazette
and the Savannah Morning News: On August 21
st
, 1899, a locally prominent elder and

131

politician
281
, Henry Delegal, turned himself in to the McIntosh County sheriff upon
learning, days prior, that he had been charged with the rape of his white neighbor,
Matilda Ann Hope. Hope’s father, Troup Wallace, who issued an affidavit a few days
after his daughter gave birth to a Black child, prompted the accusation. The Independent
reported that “especially in the country districts” “where the races […] are brought
together into such familiar and friendly acquaintances, we must not be surprised that such
cases as that of Henry Delegal also occur.”
282
The birth of Henry Delegal’s daughter to
Matilda Ann Hope “gave occasion to no sudden or immediate excitement.”
283
In fact,
Hope and Delegal’s daughter was a month or two old “before some white men, who
wished to make trouble for Delegal,” brought against him the charge of rape and had him
arrested.
284
Conspicuously absent from accounts of Delegal’s case is his recollection in
an Atlanta Constitution article that his arrest was a case of retaliation for the incarceration
of Wallace’s nephew, who had attempted to sell Delegal a stolen ox years earlier. Since
then, the Wallace family had tried to get Delegal arrested on charges such as cutting
timber on another man’s land, and subsequently failed. Knowledge of Delegal’s arrest,
and information that Sheriff Thomas B. Blount intended to move Delegal to Savannah,
allegedly for safekeeping, spread throughout McIntosh and Liberty counties. Moving
Delegal signified his vulnerability to extralegal violence, and, in anticipation of this,
Black farmers, laborers, and domestic workers, many armed, encircled the jail holding

281

An August 31
st
1899 issue of The Nation remarks that Henry Delegal was a Black politician from
Darien, Georgia. “Phases of the Negro Problem,” The Nation, August 31, 1899.

282
“The Delegal Riots in Georgia,” The Independent, September 7, 1899.
283
Ibid.
284
Ibid.

132

Delegal, intending to protect him from the rumbling lynch mob. Through a series of
organized actions, such as: sounding the bell of Darien’s Black Baptist church and the
strategic placement of sentries, armed Black residents circumvented all attempts by the
county sheriff and deputies to move Delegal out of Darien. For two days, these Black
residents that were referred to as the “dregs” of McIntosh and Liberty counties, initiated
an effective policing of the county sheriff, his deputies, and local militias. On the second
day of the “insurrection,” Mayor Kenan and Sheriff Blount wired Georgia Governor,
Allen D. Candler, requesting troops. It should be noted that, months earlier, Candler
285

had personally contributed $500 to the $1,600 reward monies offered for the capture of
Sam Hose, a young Black man who had been accused of a crime under questionable
circumstances, and horrifically murdered.
286

Sam Hose, birth name Tom Wilkes, was born in South Georgia near
Marshallville, in Macon County, around 1875. A young, Black laborer, Tom Wilkes
moved to Coweta County and assumed the name Sam Hose (the reasons around his name
change are unclear), where he found work as a farmhand for Alfred Cranford. On April
12, 1899, Hose was accused of killing Cranford after a dispute over pay due him.
Cranford’s wife reported that, after Hose had argued with her husband, Cranford ran into
their home to get his revolver. Just as Cranford was about to shoot Hose, Sam picked up
an ax and threw it at Cranford, killing him instantly in self-defense. Hose immediately

285
Kinfolk of Coca-Cola magnate Asa Griggs Candler—amongst several other notable Candlers,
constituents of Georgia’s new aristocracy—who in the early 1880s acquired most of the northern tenth of
Cumberland Island, the southern most sea Island off Georgia’s coast. See Lary M. Dilsaver’s Cumberland
Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2004), 36.
286
Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random
House, 2002), 4.

133

fled. Over the next few days, reports were made and sensationalized in the white press
that Hose killed Cranford, assaulted his infant son, and raped his wife. None of these
claims were true, as confirmed by Cranford’s wife when she made a statement to a white
detective hired by Reverdy C. Ransom, a Black activist and A.M.E. minister in Chicago,
who financed an investigation of Hose’s horrific murder.
287

It was public knowledge that Candler endorsed lynching as a method to control
what he perceived as Black criminality.
288
In response to Mayor Kenan’s and Sheriff
Blount’s distress call regarding the insurrection, an express train was assembled, and,
within a matter of hours, Candler sent two hundred men from the state’s militia in
Savannah to Darien. Shortly after their arrival, hundreds of armed Black residents were
dispersed, and a portion of the regiment escorted Delegal to Savannah. In the days that
followed, recently deputized Darien residents Octavius Hopkins and Robert Townsend,
went to Delegal’s homestead under the pretext of arresting Delegal’s sons for inciting the
“riot,” subsequently leading to the arrest of fifty-eight men and five women. Newly
deputized white residents surrounded and raided homesteads, and hunted down residents
in surrounding swamps. The details of what occurred at the Delegal homestead are
unclear, however, both Hopkins and Townsend were shot, and Townsend died instantly.
Within weeks of the “Darien Insurrection,” in a series of round-the-clock court
proceedings, twenty-three people were convicted and sentenced to twelve months’ hard
labor on a chain gang in Adrian, Georgia that was leased to “Captain” T.J. James, owner
of Georgia’s largest operating sawmill. Teenagers John and Edward Delegal were

287
Grant, The Way it Was in the South, 163.
288
Ibid.

134

sentenced to life in prison, to be served in Brooks County Convict Camp, and Henry
Delegal was acquitted. The retrial for John and Edward Delegal cites that Hopkins and
Townsend acted illegally in their attempts to arrest Delegal’s sons. In accordance with
Georgia law, the boys acted within their legal rights, however, their arrest, incarceration,
and sentencing evince the legal and extralegal coercion abrogating the rights of Black
residents.
This story, of miscegenation, insurrection, fugitivity, and confinement, is a story
of spatial politics and spatial processes. In response to the realities of the onslaught of
Jim Crow segregation in the economic sector, as well as to the social, political, and
interpersonal conditions of Jim Crow, the “Darien Insurrection,” as a collective act of
resistance and survival, brings into focus the political economies of racial capitalism.
The Insurrection illustrates the ways in which local and state institutions mobilized
immense resources to punish “transgressors,” and how constructions of race and
criminality made the new American state.
289
When white Darien residents went after
Delegal’s two sons, who, within their legal rights resisted arrest, a crowd of Black
residents from the settlement in which the Delegal’s lived surrounded the arresting
deputies. What occurred is unclear, however, the crowd of Black residents dispersed and
fled into the swamps for protection. White residents sent a call to every surrounding
convict labor camp for bloodhounds, dispatched an armed posse on horseback to the
scene, organized another posse by train, and sent a steamship to Brunswick to bring as
many volunteers possible. This was in addition to the militiamen and soldiers that
Governor Candler had already sent to Darien to quell the rumblings of insurrection after

289
Robin Kelley, Race rebels: Culture, politics, and the Black Working Class. (Florence, MA: Free Press,
1996), 9; McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, and Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk.

135

Delegal’s arrest. The raids of Black settlements in McIntosh and Liberty counties began
early the following Saturday morning, and every Black resident the raiders came upon
was arrested. Men, women and children were placed “under guard” to prevent messages
and information from being carried across the county to the eight cabins that represented
the “Delegal stronghold,” located near Harris Neck, on the coast. The cabins were
searched without result and the “swamps were being beaten closely while the soldiers
lined the bluffs, prepared to send a volley into the negroes [sic] as they came before the
posse,” when, finally, Delegal’s aged mother came out and arranged for his surrender.
290

The structural inability to seek legal redress for extralegal violence, coupled with
the lack of access to adequate resources, underfunding from state agencies, and anti-
miscegenation laws, caused residents of McIntosh County to expose, “not only the spatial
management of race/class/gender, but also the ways in which new geographic
formulations” were in the process of being produced, which Ruth Wilson Gilmore
describes as the “normative views of how people fit into and make places in the world”
(McKittrick 2006, 131). When Black communities of McIntosh and Liberty counties
rose in revolt, destabilizing the covering conceits of Jim Crow, they did so necessarily
and explicitly in violation of a series of codes that attempted to define their existence in
this “nation-space”.
291
Their displacement was materialized by the structure of property,
and institutionalized by law.
292
In order for them to preserve their collective lives and
demand social justice, it was indeed necessary to revolt against and “destroy many of

290
“Phases of the Negro Problem,” The Nation, August 31, 1899.

291
Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” in Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian
History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha, 45-84. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 45.

292
Ibid.

136

those familiar signs which [they] had learned to read and manipulate in order to extract a
meaning out of the world around [them],” bringing into focus networks and relations of
power, resistance, histories, and the everyday (Guha 1983, 45). It is a spatial story that is
still unresolved; that points to the limitations of existing geographic patterns; that starts to
reveal alternative spatial strategies and desires, and offers a new kind of historical
present.
293

The spatial strategies used in Georgia in response to state-sanctioned and
extralegal violence were necessarily different, and were implemented through furtive
means. In the rural regions, Black Georgians “sought protection through a variety of
strategies, ranging from flight to self-defense, but the specific social environment of
each region made each response unique” (Brundage 1993, 205). By the turn of the
twentieth century, an appeal for protection against state-sanctioned and extralegal
violence “on grounds of the need to maintain the sanctity of the courts,” historian W.
Fitzhugh Brundage argues, “made no sense in the Cotton Belt and southern Georgia,
where legal rights for [B]lacks were [becoming] little more than abstractions” (Brundage
1993, 205). During the 1890s, Black communities experienced the post-Reconstruction,
racial capitalist state as punitive and reactionary; within the purview of the state, civil
unrest became criminal unrest.
Given the histories of Black coastal community responses to state sanctioned
violence (discussed in chapters 2 and 3), “the swampy and malarious districts” of Glynn,
McIntosh, and Liberty counties, where Black residents owned most of the land, were

293
McKittrick, Demonic Grounds.

137

prosperous, and a number of Georgia’s best schools were in these counties. Brundage’s
charge to understand the spatiality-yielding, various, furtive responses to state-
sanctioned and extralegal violence is impaired by regarding events such as the 1899
Darien insurrection as a “spontaneous demonstration.” Rather, these events reveal the
link between seemingly invisible intellectual traditions and social movements. Georgia
“tidewater” Black communities had, since Reconstruction, gained their communal and
political strength through social organization and institution building in a collective
sense of unity and purpose, not solely, as several authors suggest, through sheer
numerical majority. The formerly enslaved women and men of the coastal rice and Sea
Island cotton plantations were in the majority in most of the coastal counties. However,
beginning in the early 1870s, the limited economic opportunities for Blacks in the
growing timber and lumber industry, coupled with the political power base that Tunis
Campbell and the Belle Ville community had established during Reconstruction and its
aftermath, laid a solid foundation for a collective challenge and confrontation when
conditions in the coastal region reached a precipice.
However, the potentialities for building new social relations emerging from the
Darien insurrection, were, in many ways, circumvented by a contract made between
segments of the Black middle class in McIntosh County and the local white ruling class
and state officials. As several scholars suggest, the ideal of racial uplift, articulated with
liberal notions of propriety, temperance, and thrift, alongside theories of Black
criminality, moral deviance, and abject poverty, cohered in events following the
insurrection. Colonel Lawton, customs collector for Darien, met with ten of the county’s
most “prominent [B]lacks” and asked them to use their influence to dissuade further

138

action. The group was comprised of men from Darien and McIntosh County: “E.M.
Brawley, Paul R. Mifflin, and J.P. Davis, all ministers in local Baptist churches; J.D.
Taylor of the Presbyterian Church; G.W. Butler of the African Methodist Episcopal
Church; F.M. Mann of the St. Cyprian Church; Charles R. Jackson, postmaster of
Darien; John C. Lawton, federal collector of customs for Darien; S.W. Iver, chair of the
local Republican party; and James L. Grant, editor of the Darien Spectator” (Brundage
1993, 134). These men collaborated on a circular that was posted throughout the county
and widely published.
294
They prevailed upon the leaders of the uprising to turn
themselves in so “social order” could be restored. An appeal to former planters to
intervene on the behalf of arraigned insurrectionists resulted in lower fines and
decreased time spent at hard labor (Brundage 1993, 134).
After Delegal’s sons
295
were arrested, along with those who were sought out as
“ringleaders” and organizers of the occupation at the Darien jail in which Henry Delegal
was held, the Reverend F.M. Mann, rector of St. Cyprian’s Church, telegraphed a
message to Sarah Wister in Philadelphia. Reverend Mann followed the telegraph with a
letter to Wister:
Dear Madam—I sent per telegraph that the Superior Court is in special session
trying the colored people charged with the killing of Mr. Thownsend [sic] and
those for riot. The Colored People that belonged to you who are charged with
being implicated in the riot are as follows: Renty Young, the son of Issac Young,
Simon Deveraux, Jr., the son of old Simon Deveraux, Andrew Young, the

294
Journal of the Senate of the State of Georgia, 1899 (Hapeville: Longino & Porter, 1899).
295
One of Delegal’s sons was acquitted of life in prison. His counsel, Judge Twiggs of Savannah moved
for a new trial on the grounds of a technical irregularity. However, the motion was denied for Delegal’s
other son. As for the twenty-four insurrectionists who were unable to pay the fine, they were sent to an
interior town to work on the chain gang.

139

grandson of old Captain Caesar Young, John & Richard Coffee, the sons of Nero
Coffee, Marshall Dowsey, the son of old Amos Dowsey, William and Jack
Cooper, the grandsons of old Tony Maxwell, Kitt Alexander, & old Carter
Williamson. These are all that have been arrested or that warrants have been so
far issued. The whole affair grew out of excitement. No one was killed or even
injured in the riot, no one’s property destroyed or molested. I consulted Dan
Wing & others, and what these people now need is money to help pay their
lawyer to defend them in Court. The White People do not seem to be anxious to
injure the Colored People.
296

Wister, the daughter of former planter Pierce Butler and his estranged wife, British
abolitionist Fanny Kemble, responded by raising a fund in the North. Wister inherited
her mother’s abolitionist tendencies and sided with the Union army during the Civil War.
When added to the money that Black communities in Darien had gathered, and to a small
amount from the Black clergymen of Savannah, the collective funds paid the attorney
fees for the defense of the accused.
297
However, Mann’s appeal to Wister reinforced
erroneous notions of white paternalism and Black dependency, which undermined the
collective capacities that Black coastal communities had created within a generation after
emancipation. While archival material on the participants of the Darien Insurrection is
virtually nonexistent, save that from the individuals mentioned in Mann’s letter and from
the Delegal family, their response and organizing efforts draw attention to property and
land ownership as major causes of friction between Black and white Georgians.
Additionally, the political, social, and economic power that land ownership afforded
Black coastal communities benefited not only property owners, but also those members
of the community who were not landowners. Land ownership brought Black self-
determination, schools, mutual-aid societies, farmers’ cooperatives, and the material basis

296
Malcolm Bell Jr., Major Butler’s Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family (Athens: The
University of Georgia Press, 2004), 456.
297
Ibid.

140

for building intergenerational wealth. With respect to Henry Delegal’s case and the
Darien Insurrection, incarcerating his entire family, his wife and his children, had the
effect of ensuring that the land he held title to would not be passed down to his
successive generations. This was one way of destabilizing Black coastal communities
and Black political power bases, while securing workable land and a disciplined labor
force.
The frequency with which Black men, women, and children were arrested, denied
due process of the law, and turned over to lynch mobs, affirmed Black resistance, and in
some instances Black communities even took it upon themselves to administer
retribution. In addition to attempted and actual extralegal executions of individual Black
residents by white mobs bent on maintaining white supremacy, Black Georgians had to
also contend with “whitecapping—the use of terror, intimidation, and violence to kill or
drive away from the community persons deemed undesirable.”
298
This was especially
prevalent in the case of the Darien Insurrection, and local and federal government
officials made subsequent moves to restore a white supremacist racial order. The
ordering logic of lynching was intended to keep Black Americans “in their place,”
whereas “whitecapping was used more to drive [Black Americans] out of the area, than to
ensure the docility of those who remained.”
299
Whitecapping, historian Donald Grant
explains, was used “primarily to remove [Black Americans] as competitors of poor

298
Ibid., 169.
299
Ibid., 169

141

whites.”
300
In the instance of the Darien Insurrection and its aftermath, whitecapping was
used to expel Black insurrectionists from McIntosh County.

Legacies of Reconstruction and Black Political Power
The Sam Hose lynching, together with the Palmetto lynchings of 1899, were
events that encompassed local, regional, and national issues. Between January and
March, 1899, the community of Palmetto, Georgia experienced a series of unexplained
fires in its business district.
301
In March, 1899, nine local Black men were imprisoned in
“the little house doing service as a jail” for allegedly setting three or more of the
destructive fires.
302
A mob of one hundred and fifty whites shot the detained men, killing
four and badly wounding the others.
303
Local whites later charged that Blacks in
Palmetto had organized a conspiracy to assassinate white Palmetto leaders and burn the
Coweta County community to the ground.
304
Governor Allen Candler expanded the
Palmetto incident to encompass what he considered to be a significant change in the
region’s race relations.
305
The governor, and white Georgians in general, were convinced
that the racial tensions in 1898 and 1899 began with “baneful influence and example of

300

Ibid., 169

301
Gregory Mixon, “Henry McNeal Turner Versus the Tuskegee Machine: Black Leadership in the
Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Negro History 79, no.4 (1994): 372.
302
Ibid.
303
Ibid.
304
Ibid.
305
Ibid.

142

[…] lawless rowdies who disgraced the [Union] uniforms they wore.”
306
In the 1890s,
both governors Candler and William Northen suggested that lynching was related to the
legacies of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Black political activity that made
Black enfranchisement possible. Black sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox noted
“[d]isenfranchisment makes lynching possible and speedily squelches any movement
among Southern Negroes for enfranchisment.”
307
The NAACP’s Walter White stated
“[l]ynching has always been a means for protection not of white women, but of
profits.”
308
Anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, in concert with White’s preceding
statement, “assigned to lynching the imprimatur of barbarism motivated by commerce”
and the attempt to disenfranchise the Black male.
309
As Hazel Carby explains:
“By the right exercise of his power as the industrial factor of the South, the Afro-
American can demand and secure his rights.” But economic power was only one
force among the possible forms of resistance, [Wells] concluded: “a Winchester
rifle should have a place of honor in every black home.” […] The loss of the vote
was both a political silencing and an emasculation, which placed black men
outside the boundaries of contemporary patriarchal power. The cry of rape, which
pleaded the necessity of revenge for assaulted white womanhood, attempted to
place black males “beyond the pale of human sympathy.”
310

The lynching of Black men and the rape of Black women were attempts by white men to
regain control over Black bodies. Carby adds that “[t]he terrorizing of Black
communities was a political weapon that manipulated ideologies of sexuality […]

306
Atlanta Constitution April 25, 1899
307
Cox, Caste, Class, and Race, 555.

308
Grant, The Way it Was in the South, 161.
309
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America, (New York: Routledge, 1997), 107.
310
Hazel Carby, “’On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist
Theory,” in Race, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1986), 308-309.

143

ideologies of manhood—as well as citizenship—which were embodied in the right to
vote.”
311
The closer a Black man got to the ballot box or to political offices, the closer he
looked like a rapist in the white media. Lynchings were one of the few occasions that
united the several parts of government and civil society. Equally important to the
meaning of these awful spectacles was the renewal of the social contract. Most of those
lynched had committed offenses against the laws of property, and at the heart of the
“social contract” was respect for private property. To the Black communities throughout
the South, each lynching repeated the lesson that breaking the social contract was
punishable by death. Each lynching represented the conflict of the ruling classes and the
propertied against poor laboring classes, structured by the racial logics of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Populist threat, coupled with the political
power of Black Georgians, increased competition in the political sphere. In the period of
1890-1900, Georgia had the second-highest number of lynchings in the country. In some
few instances, armed Blacks successfully resisted attempted lynchings, as was the case
with the Darien Insurrection. However, in this instance, Neil McMillan insists, “Black
resistance brought greater violence to these besieged communities—from state militias,
from white vigilantes, and from other forms of overwhelming white force.”
312

At an April meeting following Sam Hose’s murder, a cadre of Black Atlantans
(including W. E. B. Du Bois, who was, at that time, an Atlanta University professor)
discussed with Georgia’s Bourbon governor, Allen D. Candler, the safety and future of
Georgia’s Black residents. Candler’s response, in reference to the bloodletting of Sam

311
Ibid.
312
Robinson, Black Movements in America, 106.

144

Hose and a peak in lynching in the state (twenty-seven reported cases in 1899), reflected
the sentiments of Bourbonism. He charged, “the whole trouble of these disorders is
traceable to politics.”
313
This response, and his subsequent address the following month
at Atlanta University’s Fourth Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems, fused
Black criminality with: the emergence and character of Black political activity during
Reconstruction, the then-present iterations of Black politics articulated by Black
populism, and the misbegotten conferment of citizenship for Blacks. Candler’s response
was precise and direct. Negroes, he argued, became “in the eyes of the law, the equals of
the other races of the Republic [only] as a result of the unfortunate experience of
Reconstruction” (emphasis added)
314
. He continued, “they were clothed not only with the
privileges, but all the responsibilities of citizenship,” but, being unprepared for these
duties, they had proved to be “unsatisfactory citizens of the country.”
315
He further
issued a warning directed at Black political activity, in response to the recently
introduced Hardwick Bill, a measure introduced in the Georgia legislature for the purpose
of disenfranchising Black voters. The Black populist movement was demonized and
marginalized “by conjuring up distorted images of Reconstruction” (Ali 2010, 28). This
distorted version of the Black populist movement, along with the threat of “Negro rule”
(“the myth fabricated by Redeemers that during Reconstruction white Southerners had
been subject to [B]lack domination”), was promoted throughout the white press to

313
Atlanta Constitution April 25, 1899.
314
Allison Dorsey, To Build Our Lives Together: Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875-1906
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 145.
315
Ibid.

145

frighten its readers
316
. Bourbon Redeemers drove a wedge between Black and white
Southerners by invoking the specter of “social equality between the races.”
317
As the
Charleston News and Courier charged several years earlier: “Social equality means
miscegenation…[leaving] the Southern country in possession of a nation of mongrels and
hybrids.”
318
Omar Ali notes, “At issue was the Redeemers’ dominance over the majority
of the population in the South” (Ali 2010, 28). “For all the legal, political, economic, and
paramilitary strength wielded by the white planter and merchant class,” Ali continues,
“the formation of [B]lack and white alliances threatened their authority, and, therefore,
control over labor; the Southern Democracy rested on dividing the region’s poor and
working class” (Ali 2010, 28-29).
According to Candler and his lot, the “prime cause of all friction” in Georgia was
the “scalawags and carpet-baggers, who came here and took charge of him [the negro]
[sic], filled his head full of false ideas, characterized him the ward of the nation, and, for
partisan purposes, induced him to believe that he would be protected by the general
government.”
319
Candler’s take-home message invoked Reconstruction’s diminution-
cum-spectrality (that is, any individual or collective action to assert one’s humanity, or a
dignified existence, either articulated through new or renewed social movements that
agitated for social justice, enfranchisement, or improved labor conditions) was taken as
an “unruly,” a threat to the (re)new(ed) American state’s national purposes, and will be

316
Ali, In the Lion’s Mouth, 28.
317
Ibid.
318
Ibid.; Charleston News and Courier, October 7, 1886.
319
Atlanta Constitution, April 25 1899

146

met with state-sanctioned extralegal violence. As far as Georgia’s governor was
concerned, the state legislature could do no more to protect the lives of Black residents
than had already been done with regard to state-sanctioned mob violence (Brundage
1993, 204). Rather, Candler’s directive to the conference attendees placed onus on “good
negroes” in that, “The only solution[…][was] to build up ‘sentiment in their race against
the [alleged] diabolical crimes which are always at the back of these lynchings”
(Brundage 1993, 204). Candler encouraged “training in the arts and science and
literature, and morality, especially morality,” so as to create “a successful merchant or
[…] a useful intelligent mechanic,” but not an education for the purpose of becoming a
skilled political actor, or, as Candler describes, “a third-rate member of the American
Congress.”
320

Requests by Black citizens that Candler use his social and political authority to
protect Black lives were ignored. The only possibility for common cause by state
authorities and Black citizens was a Black-initiated campaign against what was
characterized as Black criminality and moral deviance, by which “good negroes” could
exhibit proper [second-class] citizenship through aligning with a rule of law that
compelled Du Bois, more than a decade later to assert that, under this law: “Blackness
must be punished. Blackness is the crime of crimes […]. It is therefore necessary, as
every white scoundrel in the nation knows, to let slip no opportunity of punishing this
crime of crimes” (Lewis 1993, 427). This crime of crimes is clearly expatiated in
Candler’s opening address at The Fourth Conference for the Study of the Negro

320
Allison Dorsey, To Build Our Lives Together: Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875-1906
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 145.

147

Problems, in May, 1899. If politically active segments of the Black community were
somehow in doubt as to their assigned status, Candler hastened to make it clear.
Historian Leroy Davis notes that Candler’s speech at the conference was “unprepared and
hurried” and “revealed no new thinking in the New South of the late 1890s.”
321

Candler, a confederate veteran of the Civil War and a Georgia upcountry native,
was elected mayor of Gainesville in 1872, and, the following year, became a state
legislator. He served in the Georgia House of Representatives until 1877, at which time
he was elected state senator. In 1883, Candler attained a seat in the U.S. House of
Representatives as a Democrat from Georgia’s Ninth District. He remained in the House
until 1891, and three years later he became Georgia’s Secretary of State. In 1898,
Candler won the governor’s office, defeating Populist candidate J. R. Hogan with 70
percent of the vote. During his two terms in office, Candler pushed a Bourbon agenda.
He advocated for pensions for widows of Confederate veterans, and reduced both taxes
and expenditures, limiting state services to poor whites and Black Georgians. Most
notably, Candler promoted the establishment of the all-white Democratic primary,
claiming the Democratic Party to be a private organization and, thus, able to adopt white-
only membership. In addition, he tacitly condoned—by failing to discourage—corrupt
elections, lynching, and rampant mob violence, culminating in the disenfranchisement of
Black residents.
322

321
Ibid.

322
Luckett, Robert E., "Allen D. Candler (1834-1910)," New Georgia Encyclopedia. May 13, 2013,
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/government-politics/allen-d-candler-1834-1910. (accessed
July 9, 2014).

148

After leaving office in 1902, Candler was named the first compiler of Georgia
records. He spent the last ten years of his life “preserving” some of the state’s most
important historical documents, including twenty-one volumes of colonial records, three
volumes of revolutionary records, and five volumes of Confederate records. In 1906,
with Clement Evans, he coauthored a three-volume encyclopedia of Georgia history.
323

Candler’s role as an archivist of Georgia’s history assured the obfuscation of Black socio-
spatial contributions to the creation and possibility of America’s southern “empire state.”
In the days that followed Sam Hose’s murder, the Darien Gazette cursorily
remarked, “Gov. Candler has the lynching business down about right. The governor is
generally right”.
324
Candler was widely known to endorse lynching as a method of
controlling Black criminality, and his personal contribution of $500 to the $1,600 reward
monies secured Hose’s capture, torture, and murder. In the midst of an economic
depression, the frenzied manhunt for Hose was given an extra incentive due to the hefty
bounty Candler and Atlanta Constitution editor (New South journalist and creator of the
Uncle Remus collections) Joel Chandler Harris, provided. In the words of the
Constitution, “the state” bank rolled the capture and delivery of Sam Hose, aka Tom
Wilkes, to state or local authorities.
325

Candler sought to set a standard of living for Black Americans that would be
acceptable to white Southerners. He represented an effort among the white elite to
discredit ministers, teachers, and other leaders that were directing autonomous Black

323
Ibid.
324
The Darien Gazette, April 29, 1899.
325
Atlanta Constitution, April 25 1899.

149

American ideals, goals, institutions, and projects. He cursorily addressed the designated
theme of the conference, and then, instead, focused on the aftermath of the Civil War.
Candler characterized the war as having caused the “abnormal conditions” that left the
“people of the entire South in a state of turmoil.”
326
Further addressing the Civil War
and Reconstruction, Candler surmised that historical conjuncture ushered in an aberrant
mode and model of politics, unknown to “the men who controlled [sic] the destinies of
this State [sic] prior to that time.”
327
As a Confederate veteran, in Candler’s historical
perspective, Reconstruction’s modus operandi conclusively yielded, for his class, that
politics was “the chief end of life.”
328
Following Candler’s logic, the governor believed
that active involvement in political and civic life was the means by which the end goal of
holding political office was achieved, this being “the only avenue to distinction.”
329

However, Candler fails to understand that the strife to realize a dignified existence,
conditioned by the experience of chattel slavery through an assertion of political and
economic power, are also powerful motivators to achieving an active involvement in
political and civic life. In these conditions, political power was exercised to achieve
racial equality, political enfranchisement, equal rights, and higher education. For
Candler, however, it was “more honorable” for a Black American “to be a successful
merchant, or to be a useful, intelligent mechanic, than it is to be a third rate member of
the American congress.”
330
Adding further, “he can serve his fellow citizens better,” and

326
Ibid.
327
Ibid.
328
Ibid.
329
Ibid.
330
Ibid.

150

“will serve his God better than any man who stands in the arena of partisan politics” as a
merchant or mechanic.
331
In Candler’s vision, the proper role of Black Americans was to
serve the needs of labor in the South and to be devoid of any political-social position in
the United States. Candler asserted that “the colored race” was unable to grasp American
politics, and unable to heed and love its “law and order”. Candler knew this to be
“unreasonable to suppose”, given that the race “emerg[ed] from a state of servitude,” and
could not “accomplish in one generation what it has taken [his] race six hundred years to
accomplish.”
332
Candler articulates Bourbon racial ideologies of the last three decades of
the nineteenth century, boiling over into the succeeding one. Race is offered up as an
easy and comprehensive universal language of differentiation that would naturalize the
demands and desires of state and capitalist markets, making class oppression more easily
administered. In this instance, Bourbon ideologies of race gave class a seemingly natural,
perceivable, and embodied historical referent. Lee D. Baker contends:
[a]t the turn of the twentieth century a variety of ideas regarding racial inferiority
served as the unifying ideology to guide the expansion of foreign markets and
monopolies, the exploration of natural resources, the imposition of American
civilization on islands of ‘savages,’ and the promotion of disenfranchisement and
segregation for Negroes (25).

Race was used to explain away social inequalities while justifying structural conditions
that produced such inequalities. The “God-serving and God-loving […] good Negroes”
Candler spoke so fondly of in his address at the two-day conference, were tempered by
Du Bois’ report on the results of his investigation, confirming: the “great mass” of

331
Ibid.
332
Ibid.

151

“American Negroes” who were “still serfs, bound to the soil or house servants […]”
adding “the nation which robbed them of the fruits of their labor for two and a half
centuries, finally sent them adrift penniless.”
333
These issues prompted Atlanta
University investigations, and, when coupled with “the large death rate of the Negroes
[sic],” led scholars to conduct “a study of their condition of life, and the efforts they were
making to better that condition.”
334
As the editor of the report on the results of the
investigations, Du Bois added, “when studied [the aforementioned efforts], brought
clearly to light the hard economic struggle through which the emancipated slave is to-day
[sic] passing.”
335

The Fourth Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems was a result of
successive annual publications of Atlanta University “carrying out a plan of social study
by means of recurring […] inquiries into the same general set of human problems.”
336

Previous years’ investigations included: “One, in 1896, into the ‘Morality of Negroes in
Cities’; another, in 1897, into the ‘General Social and Physical Condition’ of 5,000
Negroes living in selected parts of certain Southern cities; a third, in 1898, on ‘Some
Efforts of American Negroes For Their Own Social Betterment.’”
337
An 1899

333
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro in Business; Report of a Social Study Made Under the Direction of Atlanta
University, Together With the Proceedings of the Fourth Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems,
Held at Atlanta University, May 30-31, 1899 (New York: AMS Press, 1899), 5.
334
Ibid.,4.
335
Ibid.
336
W.E.B. Du Bois ed., Economic Co=Operation Among Negro Americans: A Social Study made by
Atlanta University under the patronage of the Carnegie Institution of Washington D.C. (Atlanta: The
Atlanta University Press, 1907),5.
337
Du Bois, The Negro in Business, 1.

152

investigation addressed “The Negro in Business.”
338
Being the fourth installment of an
intercollegiate scholarly “movement,”
339
the conference sought to “carefully and
thoroughly” study “the definite aspects of the Negro problems.” The conference, and the
subsequent publication of its proceedings, was the first careful documentation of the
Black American’s economic advancement since slavery (Lewis 1993, 220). What
emerged from the conference “was a blueprint of the segregated [B]lack world’s
economic infrastructure” (Lewis 1993, 220). For instance, John Hope, a professor at
Atlanta Baptist College for Men (the future Morehouse College), “read three papers, one
of which, ‘The Meaning of Business,’ presented a keen analysis of […] the impending
displacement of unskilled [B]lack labor caused by industrial development in the South”
(Lewis 1993, 220). Thus, the inquiry of the fourth investigation attempted to “ascertain
the extent to which the Freedman and his sons [were] entering into business life.”
340
The
aim of the conferences, as a method, intended to aid those interested in “making easier
the solution of the Negro problems.”
341

Commerce and the New South Economy
The close of the nineteenth century, punctuated by: rapid industrialism, the
extension of national administrative capacities alongside the expansion of its geo-

338
Ibid.
339
Participants include “Graduates of Fisk University, Berea College, Lincoln University, Spelman
Seminary, Clark University, Wilberforce University, Howard University, the Meharry Medical College,
Hampton and Tuskeegee Institutes, and several other institutions.”
340
Ibid.
341
Ibid.

153

political territories, and consolidation and growth of federal judiciary bodies, grew with
the power of the party machines through strong-arm tactics—as Du Bois succinctly puts
it in an 1899 edition of New York’s Independent Journal—seemed to flow “faster and
faster in the last ten years.” In Du Bois’ estimation, “The power of the trust and
combine was so great that the Sherman [Antitrust] Act was passed in 1890” (Du Bois
1940, 141). The scope of commerce power started expanding with the creation of the
Interstate Commerce Commission, in 1887, and the passage of the Sherman Antitrust
Act in 1890. When Senator John Sherman of Ohio (the brother of William Tecumseh
Sherman) introduced his bill, the Sherman Antitrust Act, he denied that commerce
power was applicable. His position was that the only constitutional way to regulate
trusts was with punitive taxes.
342
The Farmers’ Alliance, which was the backbone of the
Populist movement, lobbied for a broader approach, and Congress came around to the
view that the Commerce Clause could sustain federal regulation.
343
Thus, from its very
inception, as Gerard Maglicoaa argues, “the idea of reading the Commerce Clause
expansively was tied to the agrarian agenda.”
344
The Supreme Court’s negative response
to the Populist agenda, actually catapulted the Commerce Clause into legal orthodoxy.
The effect of the clause represents one of the most fundamental powers delegated to the
Congress by the founders of the nation.
345
Beginning with the enactment of the
Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Sherman Antitrust Act, congress ushered in a

342
Gerard Maglicoaa, The Tragedy of William Jennings Bryan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
The Commerce Clause as defined in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the Constitution gave Congress the
power “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian
Tribes.”
343
Ibid.
344
Ibid.
345
Ibid.

154

new era of federal regulation under the commerce power.
346
New interpretation of the
Commerce Clause helped define the balance of power between the federal government
and the states, and the balance of power between the two elected branches of the Federal
government, along with judiciary capacities.
347

The monopolistic tendency of the Sherman Antitrust Act, a law enacted in the era
of “trusts,” and of “combinations” of businesses and capital, organized and directed to
control the market by suppression of competition in the marketing of goods and services,
all of which had become a matter of public concern. Trusts were a defensive weapon of
property interests. However, tariffs, at the demand of manufacturers, continued to rise in
height from the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890. Tariffs raised the average duty on imports
by almost fifty percent, an act designed to protect domestic industries from foreign
competition (which gave rise to protectionism), but also which raised fiscal revenue for
the federal government. The indefensible 1894 Wilson-Gorman tariff lowered U.S. tariff
averages, making Democratic domination easier. “The understanding between the
industrial North and the New South was being perfected, and, in 1890, a series of
disfranchising laws began to be enacted by the Southern states” in the following years “to
make voting by Southern Negroes practically impossible” (Du Bois 1940, 141). The
financial crisis that shook the United States in 1893, and the whole question of the burden
of taxation, began to be discussed; popular discontent swelled and continued to show
itself in the Populist movement.
The panic of 1893 was the result of several factors. An overabundance of silver

346
Ibid.
347
Ibid.

155

mines had been opened in the West, and their high level of production drove the price of
silver down. To stabilize the silver market, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was passed,
and the Federal government required all currency to be backed by silver or gold. On May
5, and again on June 27, 1893, the New York Stock Exchange crashed, and the nation
was left without a system of credit. Marked by the overbuilding and unstable financing
of railroads and accompanying industries, coupled with the decline in prices for
agricultural commodities such as wheat and cotton, the panic of 1893 resulted in the
failure of more than 15,000 businesses and 500 banks. An estimated 17% to 19% of the
workforce was unemployed, nationwide, at the peak of the crises. People could not pay
their mortgages and rent; houses and farms were abandoned.
348
Nature added to the
damage with a crippling drought in the Western states, causing crop failures that wiped
out farmers and their creditors.
349

In Low Country and coastal islands, the impact was felt within the forest products
sector as major export orders were cancelled. Logging had become a significant industry
due to the thinly populated pine savanna of the Atlantic coastal plain, however, as a result
of the panic, new building stopped, devastating the lumber market. This also affected the
usage of the local port, as well as local sawmills, turpentine distillers, timber suppliers,
and adjacent naval stores. The halt in these industries created a ripple effect for other
local businesses, from suppliers of provisions such as fresh meat and produce, to shipyard
repairs. In Brunswick, Glynn County’s county seat, three of the city’s banks closed.
1893 brought more than a financial panic for Low Country and coastal island residents,

348
Leslie Faulkenberry, “The Terrible Year: 1893,” Golden Isles Arts & Humanities Association,
http://www.signaturesquares.org/archives/The%20Terrible%20Year.pdf (July 18, 2014).
349
Ibid.

156

as an epidemic of yellow fever, accompanied by the Great Hurricane of 1893, hit the
barrier islands of Georgia and South Carolina. On August 26, the fourth deadliest storm
in the United States claimed between 2,500 and 3,000 lives, with countless more
succumbing to disease and starvation in the months that followed. Those most vulnerable
to the storm’s devastation comprised the formerly enslaved and their descendants, living
on barrier islands in small communities at the water’s edge. Clara Barton, president of
the American Red Cross, relocated her office to Low Country to assist in relief work.
Barton estimated that, of the thirty-five thousand primarily Black residents of the Sea
Islands near Beaufort, South Carolina, “four or five thousand had been drowned.”
350

Thirty thousand, Barton said, “remained with no earthly possession of home, clothing, or
food.”
351
The estimates of property losses on Georgia’s low-lying islands were valued at
“much more than $1,000,000 (present day value $19,563,829).”
352
Two-thirds of
Georgia’s Low Country rice crop was lost—about $400,000 in value (approximately
$7,825,532 today)—the “cotton badly hurt,” and 25 percent of the pine trees used in the
naval stores business were down.
353
Damage to vessels driven ashore at Savannah, or
wrecked on Georgia’s Sea Islands, was in the “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
354

Georgia’s governor at the time, Benjamin Tillman, obviously believed that property loss
eclipsed the human tragedy on the Sea Islands, when he publicly stated, “The people have
the fish of the sea there to prevent them from starving. I hope, too, that someone will

350
Walter J. Fraser Jr., Lowcountry Hurricanes: Three Centuries of Storms at Sea and Ashore (Athens: The
University of Georgia Press, 2006), 177.
351
Ibid.
352
Ibid., 171-172
353
Ibid., 172
354
Ibid., 172

157

make them go to work at once and plant turnips on the islands. I do not want any abuse
of charity.”
355
Tillman waited nearly a month before asking for assistance from the
American Red Cross.
356

Three more tropical storms hit the Georgia and South Carolina Low Country and
Sea Islands in September of 1894 and 1896, in addition to the hurricane in October, 1898
that “simply wiped out part of Darien.”
357
The four hurricanes of the 1890s were, as
Fraser notes, “an unprecedented number for a single decade,” and they shattered the
tenuous Low Country economy, which was based on rice, phosphates, timber, lumber,
and the export business; these industries were the major employers of the region.
358
The
phosphate and timber industries never recovered, and the end of two hundred years of
rice cultivation drew near.
359
Clyde Vernon Kiser argues in his 1932 study of Southern
Black migration, Sea Island to City, that the natural and environmental impacts of the
hurricane of 1893 and the boll weevil of 1919 “threatened the existence of the community
through the impairment of means of livelihood” and cultural continuity (Kiser 1932, 85).
The natural and social vulnerabilities manifested by hurricanes reveal the spatial
interaction of Black coastal communities with their environment over time. Numerous
Black Low Country communities lived in outlying, sandy, tidewater areas, (where the
water level rises when the tide comes in) in low marshes, on riverbanks, near swamps,

355
Savannah Morning News, August 30, September 3, 1893; Charleston News and Courier, September 3,
7, 1893; New York Times, September 2,3, 1893.
356
Ibid.
357
Fraser, Lowcountry Hurricanes, 200.
358
Ibid., 202
359
Ibid.

158

and in areas generally considered uninhabitable. No official warnings reached the poor
Black settlements, as frailly-built houses were swept into the ocean. In the aftermath of
the hurricanes Black communities had limited or no access to basic provisions of
healthcare, food, funds to repair damages to homes and crops, nor political representation
to receive such resources. Improvements to the social conditions and living standards in
adversely affected Black coastal communities were desperately needed.

The Populist Party and State-sanctioned Extralegal Violence
Low Country planters controlled state politics through Georgia’s county seat
system, which inflated the value of rural votes over urban votes in Democratic primaries,
essentially rendering Georgia politics a one-party state. Sparsely settled rural counties
dominated the legislature and elected rural governors. If the planters controlled state
politics and Low Country plantations, a new urban middle class conquered the upcountry.
Led by Atlanta Constitution journalist Henry Grady, boosters trumpeted a “New South
Creed” of urban industrial development. Rural political transformation, as well as the
“New South Creed,” spurred upcountry industrialization.
To temper the unchecked power of industrialists, at the risk of small farmers and
laborers, the Populist Party appealed to the cotton and wheat farmers in the South and
West. In 1892, white Georgian, Tom Watson, led discontented Black and white farmers
into the nationalist Populist Party. The national party was initially founded through a
merger between the Farmers’ Alliance and the Knights of Labor. The party was
comprised of Black and white farmers from the South and Midwest, both owners and
tenants, who began by organizing into farmers’ associations, and ended up forming an

159

independent third party, the People’s party, to advance their economic status.
360

Watson sought to empower producers over the planter-industrialist establishment,
urging Black and white farmers to unite on the basis of shared economic self-interest. In
his essay “The Negro Question in the South” Watson framed his appeal:
You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are
made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the
arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and
blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary
system which beggars both.
361

Southern Populists shared the economic and political goals of the national Populist
movement, however, they took a much greater interest in addressing racial inequality
because they needed Black American votes to win at the state level. Southern Populists
still believed in white supremacy, but, in the South, Populists could overcome the
Democratic advantage only by forming a class alliance with Black sharecroppers (and
the few Republicans that remained). The electoral universe in which the Populists
operated was shaped by the Fifteenth Amendment‘s grant of the vote to the formerly
enslaved, and that voting majority, in the early 1890s, attracted politicians. The broad-
based Southern Populists party stressed the protection of Black American rights, and the
need for joint strategic action on economic affairs. Furthermore, agrarian activists took a
strong stand for the right to vote, for the right to serve on juries, and against lynching.
The Georgia Populist platform stated, “We condemn lynching and demand of our public

360
Omar Ali, Preliminary Research for Writing a History of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance in the Populist
Movement: 1886-1896, Columbia University, May 11, 1998,
http://www.populist.com/Colored.Populists.html (accessed December 12, 2014).

361
C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), 220.

160

servants the rigid enforcement of our laws against this barbarous practice,” and some
party members backed that position by using force to stop white mobs intent on
lynching. However, as Cedric Robinson notes, when the Farmer’s Alliance—which
played a leading role in establishing a national third party, the People’s or Populist Party
in the early 1890s—moved east, the result was “absorbing or allying with state-particular
farmers’ groups, its mission was compromised by racism and Redemption politics of the
Democratic party and [was] muted by the ambitions of powerful pro-farmer dissidents
like Leonidas L. Polk (of North Carolina), Benjamin Tillman (South Carolina), Rueben
Kolk (Alabama), Frank Burkitt (Mississippi), and most significantly, Tom Watson
(Georgia).”
362
It should be duly noted that once Tom Watson became part of the ruling
class in the early twentieth century, his anti-black, anti-immigrant sentiments were
virulently pronounced in his renewed political agenda. He advocated reorganizing the
Ku Klux Klan, and, by 1908, he identified himself as a white supremacist, running as
such during his presidential bid. He played a prominent role in fanning the fire against
Jewish factory owner Leo Frank, using his publications Watson’s Magazine and The
Jeffersonian, to greatly influence public opinion, especially in his native Georgia.
The Colored Farmer’s Alliance and Cooperative Union quickly absorbed Black
cooperatives in other Southern states. By around 1890 or 1891, its membership included
40,000 Black alliance members in South Carolina, and “[a]ccording to Reverend Richard
Manning Humphrey, its white superintendent, at its height […] [it] obtained more than
one million members. […] the Colored Farmers’ Alliance boasted a large female
membership (one-fourth of its membership was female by contemporary estimates),” and

362
Robinson, Black Movements in America, 103.

161

it also included “a large but uncounted number of farm laborers.”
363
The Colored
Farmers’ Alliance became increasingly race conscious. Although some of its most
important leaders were white, as the organization grew, it confronted paternalism and
even corruption among these contentious figures.
364
The Alliance sought the
“redemption of the race” and the freedom of “the toiling masses.” It taught Blacks
“about monopoly, about the meaning of ‘burdensome taxation,’ about unequal legislation
and what it had done to the Afro-American farmer, and about the reasons why money
was scarce.” The Alliance also immersed Black farmers into leadership roles in
interracial politics.
365

However, within a decade of its founding, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance fell to
the forces of that which undermined the white alliance and its political successor, the
Populist Party. The racism of white farmers and the refusal to protect the Black franchise
drove a wedge between the colored and white alliances. In the pre-industrial capitalism
of Southern farming, Edward Ayers maintains, “most blacks remained tenants and most
whites remained landowners.”
366
In the 1890s the Southern white reformers and the
Democratic Party appropriated segregation as the basis of their new social order. As
Charles Crowe understands the moment:
In fact, white reform often meant Black repression. Populists and Progressives
frequently went so far as to equip their demands for more repression and Jim
Crow laws with reform credentials calling for ‘better race relations’ or ‘the
prevention of friction between the races.’ Many Black voters, who apparently

363
Ibid., 104
364
Ibid.
365
Ibid.
366
Ibid., Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),
234.

162

grasped the fact that they had little or nothing to gain from the reformers, voted
conservative as the lesser of two evils […] conservatives [were] inclined to accept
the status quo and to doubt any urgent need for new repressive measures.
367

In the 1890s Blacks confronted the most oppressive conditions since the ending of
slavery. “Peonage, a practice that gave employers complete control over their laborers,
practically reinstituted slavery.” Pete Daniels writes, “[it] infected the South like a
cancer, eating away at the economic freedom of blacks, driving the poor whites to work
harder in order to compete with virtual slave labor, and preserving the class structure
inherited from slavery days.”
368

Cedric Robinson notes: “much like the slave years, Jim Crow nurtured two Black
communities and two traditions of resistance. Inside the curtain of violence, brutality,
and the most oppressive work conditions, a Black community withdrew into itself.”
369

On their behalf, seven months after the death of Frederick Douglass in 1895, Booker T.
Washington successfully claimed national leadership of Southern Blacks by giving voice
to their resignation: “The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of
questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that [the] progress […] that will
come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial
forcing.”
370
Robinson further maintains, “beyond the curtain, more insulated from the
daily exercise of racial intimidation and violence, and where a minimum of civil decorum

367
Charles Crowe, “Tom Watson, Populists, and Blacks Reconsidered,” Journal of Negro History 75, no.3,
(1988): 842-856.
368
Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 11.
369
Ibid.
370
Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” in Justice Denied, ed. William Chace and Peter
Collier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 204.

163

was maintained, a tradition of organized protest was being spawned.”
371
As political,
economic, and social oppression intensified, places such as the Burroughs community in
Chatham County, Georgia, sought to obtain economic and social independence through
self-segregation within the protective confines of the all-Black community.
The Burroughs community became the only incorporated town in Chatham
County in 1896, with residents serving as mayor, town council members, and constable.
An internal land trade became the primary means by which community members had
access to land, thus, the subdivision of small tracts of land into smaller parcels enabled a
shift from cash crop farming to primarily subsistence agriculture. The land was typically
held in common throughout generational transfers, so that no individual or small group of
individuals had clear title. Originating in both African traditions and the system of land
distribution after the Civil War, the Burroughs’ community concept of land distribution
and land ownership (not unlike other Black coastal communities in the region) was both
complex and radically different from dominant notions of property. As was practiced in
parts of West Africa, land within Black coastal communities was held in common
ownership by the family.
372
All members of the family, including the extended family,
had a partial interest in the property. William Pollitzer describes, “cooperative
organizations evolved among [B]lacks in the Sea Islands after emancipation; following
kinship lines, relatives purchased land near each other” (Pollitzer 1999, 31). On islands
such as Wadmalaw, off the coast of South Carolina, Pollizter continues, “land is not
normally sold but passed on by an unwritten contract; when one moves, he (or she)

371
Robinson, Black Movements in America, 107.
372
Twining and Baird, eds. Sea Island Roots.

164

relocates where a relative offers land” (Pollitzer 1999, 131). Historically and culturally
for Black coastal communities, land served as a form of social security system—
subsistence agriculture and fishing provided food security, while the proximity of
extended family provided help and social support when needed. With children raised by
a multigenerational extended family network, life ways, systems of knowledge, culture,
and sacred religious practices were transmitted, and a quality of life for families was
assured.
In the political arena, Burroughs created its own system of governance, however,
in the areas of trade and education it remained dependent on Savannah’s urban center.
Burroughs maintained its own courthouse and system of punishment; for instance,
misdemeanor offenders performed roadwork, one of the public services cut off by the
county. Yet, Savannah maintained jurisdiction over capital crimes such as murder.
Burroughs’ town charter of incorporation advanced the principles of self-help,
moral-uplift, and racial solidarity through its governing body. The incorporation allowed
the community’s residents jurisdiction over a wide range of civil affairs. Communities
such as Burroughs represented safe havens from the racial subjection endemic to local
and state government throughout the Jim Crow South at the turn of the twentieth century.
The struggle of the residents of Burroughs to own land made this possible; few rural
communities in Georgia, or elsewhere in the South, took part in such amenities.
The second-class status and abysmal conditions of Black Americans throughout
the rural South created the impetus for sustained protest movements during, what
historian Rayford Logan termed, the “nadir.” Throughout the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Black Americans devised strategies and organized institutions to

165

enable them to protest against economic subordination and de jure segregation. Both a
burgeoning Black American middle class, and grass roots community intellectuals, led
these movements. In twenty-five cities throughout the South, these two groups organized
boycotts against segregated public transit systems, and engaged in legal assaults against
legal disenfranchisement.
373
The deteriorating status of Black Americans led to
migration to Northern cities during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

373
Rayford Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901 (New York, 1954).

166

Conclusion
By the turn of the twentieth century, the nostalgia for the antebellum South had become a
selling point for developers, for wealthy northern industrialist families such as the
Rockefellers and the Carnegies, and for real estate agents pursuing land acquisition in the
“golden” coastal isles of Georgia and South Carolina. Those places, where properties
had literally been stolen from residents of Black coastal communities by means of
dispossession, and displacement, were also the places that exemplified the hope, dignity,
and prosperity of Black communal life. These were the places of diverse African and
local knowledges, of Black identity, culture, history, and freedom, and they had now
become tourist destinations of the new American aristocracy of the gilded age. This
development, undergoing several permutations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, made visible the enduring legacy of the political economy of the plantation.
The inevitability of a restructured plantation economy and political governance
was not a foregone conclusion. Over a decade after emancipation, the meaning of free
labor was still hotly contested; the faltering, Republican-led, experiment of a bi-racial
democracy confronted white Democrats that were intent on carrying through a counter-
revolution that would restore the authority they held under an antebellum regime. The
profound social confrontation, the “complex interpenetration of racial, class, and social
conflict” that characterized Reconstruction, witnessed the mass political mobilization of
free Black communities that were seeking to create a new society based on justice and
equity.
374
In the decade following emancipation, Black communities organized
themselves and mobilized the few material, military, and political resources at their

374
Armstead L. Robinson, “Beyond the Realm of Social Consensus: New Meanings of Reconstruction for
American History.” Journal of American History 68, (1981): 27.

167

disposal, in pursuit of realizing a justice-oriented citizenry where they had autonomy, full
participation, and creative capacities in the political, economic, and social systems
governing their lives. Black coastal communities demonstrated a clear understanding of
the critical issues at stake as they fought for land, political participation, and equality.
The social hierarchy that chattel slavery made possible, now overthrown,
profoundly disrupted the political, economic, and social logics of the plantation.
Disoriented by the environment of free labor, and deeply resentful over their loss of
authority as employers, Southern planters found themselves compelled to engage with
Black emancipated labor, subject to the terms that Black coastal communities demanded
for their lives. The emergence of previously established, underground, Black radical
networks into institutions like the Union Leagues transformed Black coastal communities
in Georgia and South Carolina. With intensely political conversations that emancipation
had fomented among Black laborers, alongside “the proliferation of grassroots organizing
by the Republican party,” the conditions were set for a war of position.
375
Black coastal
communities organized and mobilized resources to ensure autonomy, land redistribution,
self-protection, the right to vote, access to education, and fair wages. The formation of
their direct collective action, and their struggle to be self-determining, combined to
destabilize and disrupt the authority and legitimacy of the former plantation political,
economic, and social relations.
Black resistance to laboring for former planters and in some regions, the failure of
the Black struggle for land, fueled the contest over the meanings of emancipation and

375

Brian Kelly, “Black Laborers, the Republican Party, and the Crisis of Reconstruction in Lowcountry
South Carolina,” International Review of Social History 51, no. 3 (2006): 383.

168

free labor. Strategic action that spurred collective solidarity was, in many ways,
undermined by a “complex matrix of class, sectional, and national political and economic
pressures”.
376
The fissures of solidarity became increasingly apparent in the disparities
among varying cross sections of Black political activity in the decade following
emancipation. The vast differences in literacy and educational background, in wealth and
previous status, and gender, differentiated the mass of propertyless freed people from the
“representative men of the race” elected to plead their cause.
377
Relationships between
Black-laboring constituencies who made up the Republican Party’s Southern base, and
the “representative men,” were, in many instances, strained. Black elected officials, who
shared, for the most part, the bourgeois orientation of white Republican officials, were
constricted by towing the party line, or, complicit in what became Black labor’s defeat.
There were, of course, exceptions, such as Rev. Tunis Campbell, who arrived in the
coastal region with a similar orientation; however, his experience in organizing self-
determining communities and in establishing a Black political power base, radicalized his
ideas regarding the possibilities of creating an egalitarian free labor society. Campbell,
like white elites of the Republican Party, abandoned the mid-century vision, yet, for
divergent interests. His work and life with Black coastal communities in Georgia and
South Carolina bore witness to the abolition of slavery, the brief possibilities of an
agrarian democracy, and the resurgence of planter power through federal recognition of
the rights of property and property-holders over the rights of people.

376
Kelly, “Black Laborers, the Republican Party, and the Crisis of Reconstruction in Lowcountry South
Carolina,” 379.
377
Ibid., 381.

169

The Northern allies of the Republicans only conditionally supported freed people;
the white Republican elite’s vacillating interest waned as the demands of capital and
global capitalist markets required labor. The betrayal of Republicans by a wide swath of
white, bourgeois, party members that were aligned with the interests of Southern planters,
whose sensibilities as property holders and employers were inextricably bound up with
the restoration of racial supremacy, and this alliance was affronted by their inability to
maintain discipline in the field and in the ballot box. Racial and political violence and
repression escalated all across the South, wherever Black women and men asserted their
civil rights and dignity as human beings by refusing to sign labor contracts that required
them to work under conditions akin to slavery, or increased their political participation
and engagement. Around the late 1860s and 1870s, white paramilitary organizations that
were allied with southern Democrats used intimidation, violence, and assassinations as
modes of retaliation against Black political power. The white Republicans that had allied
with Black communities also experienced waves of violence, and faced accusations of
corruption and misdealings.
In areas like Low Country and Sea Islands, where Black Americans were a
majority, they posed a formidable threat to a restructuring plantocracy because they had
established a strong Black political power base within those communities, and owned
much of the coastal islands. Black farmers spent the decades after emancipation creating
farmers’ cooperatives and alliances; they created mutual-aid societies, built schools and
churches, and reconstituted their families with actual and fictive kin. They created a
political culture appropriate to the situation that they had confronted in the aftermath of

170

chattel slavery; spatial issues were raised as their “fundamental organizing concern.”
378

The spatial logic of Black coastal communities was bound up with the legacy of the
plantation. Their sense of place, and their place-making practices, was tethered to the
places where they had formerly labored, and to the experience of chattel slavery. Those
conditions necessitated the formation, out of natal alienation, of new familial and
communal bonds. The moral, legal, and sacred claim to the land by Black coastal
communities reflects the relationships, social activity, and historical and cultural legacies
involved in the production of space.
The distinctive politics of culture and place were grounded in diverse West
African cultures, and the experience of slavery; each iteration of Black radical activity
and organizing in the coastal regions was a collective act of self-determination. Black
coastal communities followed their own leaders, built their own organizations, and made
demands derived from their own particular experiences. They challenged the ideological
and economic structures of each historical moment, and offered a democratic alternative
that the nation might have followed. In the years following the demise of radical
Reconstruction, Black Americans all over the South and the Midwest mounted an
independent, Black-led, movement against a restructured plantocracy, and Northern
industry. Out of farmers’ alliances, cooperatives, associations, and Black farming
communities emerged the Black Populist movement, in response to the growing debt that
Black farmers had amassed in the latter half of the nineteenth century while Northern
bankers, railroad owners, and industrialists reaped enormous profits from the products

378
Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146
(1984), 71-89.

171

farmers produced. As in the prior decade, this iteration of Black radical political activity
responded to the political and economic subjugation of control held by Black farmers and
Bourbon Democrats over trade, industry, banks, governance, and the law. Bourbon
Redeemers created laws, instituted congressional measures, and established policies
ensuring a new political structure conducive to effectively disenfranchising Black men,
displacing Black communities, and dispossessing them of the land they vigorously fought
for.
Freedom is a Place expresses the political ambition of these struggles, from the
perspective of the endeavor for land by Black farmers in Low Country and Sea Islands.
It studies how Black farmers expressed the central realization that liberation required
access to land, and it examines their spatial concerns, and their capacity to form and build
communities for the benefit of actual and fictive kinship ties. This project revolves
around the revolutionary transformations that formerly-enslaved communities envisioned
and materialized through a socially-just vision of social organization; that is: what the
public sphere should look like, how to govern, how to reconstruct social lives around
schools and churches, the right to vote, and reconstituting families. The subsequent
defeat of this radical political tradition and social vision, facilitated by state-sanctioned
extralegal violence and geographic dispossession (natal alienation, alienation from actual
and fictive kin, alienation from the land and one’s labor), occurs at the nexus of the
material conditions of Jim Crow and the libratory desires of the Black South.
These Black geographies highlight the ways Black coastal communities thought,
experienced, and expressed space and place. They tell the history of the Low Country
and Sea Islands through powerful geographic shifts, such as forced migration, chattel

172

slavery, land dispossession, and the structures of legal segregation. Freedom is a Place
highlights how location impacted repression and resistance, on the ground and in Black
social and political imaginations. Throughout the course of researching and writing this
project, the ‘hows and whys’ of rural Black community development and transformation
became more implicit; as the formation of the post-Reconstruction state (particularly in
response to the political activity occurring within Black coastal communities) shifted
more into focus. This dissertation addresses the obstacles that rural Black communities
faced when trying to create and practice their specific systems of social organization in
pursuance of a distinct paradigm of collective political governance and economic
development. The interconnected landscapes of community, land, freedom, and place
were affected by, and affected, the vitality of the state. In essence, what initially began as
an anthropology of the community becomes, rather, a history of the Low Country and Sea
Islands during Reconstruction. Protracted struggles for freedom are yet unfinished, and
cannot be viewed as unrelated moments of insurrection or spontaneous possibilities of
contestation. Intergenerational struggles for freedom, in many cases articulated in their
outlawry, are productions of long and winding, complex, histories that need to be broken
down, piece by piece, person by person, and place by place, so that the experience,
creation, and remaking of these places of freedom are possible. Freedom is a Place
examines a generation of Black political community organizing; how they organized,
how the state responded, and how Black coastal communities evolved in relation to the
state’s evolution. What, therefore, is instructive for the present historical moment is: if
there is an understanding of the cycle or stage that state responses are in, in relation to the
everyday tactics and spatial practices of contestation by non-state actors, it can inform the

173

strategy and tactics of contemporary modes of Black political organizing. Therefore,
raising a consciousness and awareness of what the state is doing is tantamount to
revolutionary social transformation.

174

Appendix I: Newspaper Account of a Meeting between Black Religious Leaders and
Union Military Authorities
379

[New York, N.Y. February 13, 1865]
MINUTES OF AN INTERVIEW BETWEEN THE COLORED MINISTERS AND
CHURCH OFFICERS AT SAVANNAH WITH THE SECRETARY OF WAR AND
MAJOR-GEN. SHERMAN.
HEADQUARTERS OF MAJ.-GEN. SHERMAN, CITY OF SAVANNAH, GA.,
Jan., 12, 1865–8 P.M.
On the evening of Thursday, the 12th day of January, 1865, the following persons of
African descent met by appointment to hold an interview with Edwin M. Stanton,
Secretary of War, and Major-Gen. Sherman, to have a conference upon matters relating
to the freedmen of the State of Georgia, to-wit:
One: William J. Campbell, aged 51 years, born in Savannah, slave until 1849, and then
liberated by will of his mistress, Mrs. May Maxwell. For ten years pastor of the 1st
Baptist Church of Savannah, numbering about 1,800 members. Average congregation,
1,900. The church property belonging to the congregation. Trustees white. Worth
$18,000.
Two: John Cox, aged fifty-eight years, born in Savannah; slave until 1849, when he
bought his freedom for $1,100. Pastor of the 2d African Baptist Church. In the ministry
fifteen years. Congregation 1,222 persons. Church property worth $10,000, belonging to
the congregation.
Three: Ulysses L. Houston, aged forty-one years, born in Grahamsville, S.C.; slave until
the Union army entered Savannah. Owned by Moses Henderson, Savannah, and pastor
of Third African Baptist Church. Congregation numbering 400. Church property worth
$5,000; belongs to congregation. In the ministry about eight years.
Four: William Bentley, aged 72 years, born in Savannah, slave until 25 years of age,
when his master, John Waters, emancipated him by will. Pastor of Andrew's Chapel,
Methodist Episcopal Church–only one of that denomination in Savannah; congregation
numbering 360 members; church property worth about $20,000, and is owned by the
congregation; been in the ministry about twenty years; a member of Georgia Conference.

379
Clipping from New-York Daily Tribune, [13 Feb. 1865], “Negroes of Savannah,” Consolidated
Correspondence File, series 225, Central Records, Quartermaster General, Record Group 92, National
Archives.

175

Five: Charles Bradwell, aged 40 years, born in Liberty County, Ga.; slave until 1851;
emancipated by will of his master, J. L. Bradwell. Local preacher in charge of the
Methodist Episcopal congregation (Andrew's Chapel) in the absence of the minister; in
the ministry 10 years.
Six: William Gaines, aged 41 years; born in Wills Co., Ga. Slave until the Union forces
freed me. Owned by Robert Toombs, formerly United States Senator, and his brother,
Gabriel Toombs, local preacher of the M.E. Church (Andrew's Chapel.) In the ministry
16 years.
Seven: James Hill, aged 52 years; born in Bryan Co., Ga. Slave up to the time the Union
army came in. Owned by H. F. Willings, of Savannah. In the ministry 16 years.
Eight: Glasgon Taylor, aged 72 years, born in Wilkes County, Ga. Slave until the Union
army came; owned by A. P. Wetter. Is a local preacher of the M.E. Church (Andrew's
Chapel.) In the ministry 35 years.
Nine: Garrison Frazier, aged 67 years, born in Granville County, N.C. Slave until eight
years ago, when he bought himself and wife, paying $1,000 in gold and silver. Is an
ordained minister in the Baptist Church, but, his health failing, has now charge of no
congregation. Has been in the ministry 35 years.
Ten: James Mills, aged 56 years, born in Savannah; free-born, and is a licensed preacher
of the first Baptist Church. Has been eight years in the ministry.
Eleven: Abraham Burke, aged 48 years, born in Bryan County, Ga. Slave until 20 years
ago, when he bought himself for $800. Has been in the ministry about 10 years.
Twelve: Arthur Wardell, aged 44 years, born in Liberty County, Ga. Slave until freed by
the Union army. Owned by A. A. Solomons, Savannah, and is a licensed minister in the
Baptist Church. Has been in the ministry 6 years.
Thirteen: Alexander Harris, aged 47 years, born in Savannah; free born. Licensed
minister of Third African Baptist Church. Licensed about one month ago.
Fourteen: Andrew Neal, aged 61 years, born in Savannah, slave until the Union army
liberated him. Owned by Mr. Wm. Gibbons, and has been deacon in the Third Baptist
Church for 10 years.
Fifteen: Jas. Porter, aged 39 years, born in Charleston, South Carolina; free-born, his
mother having purchased her freedom. Is lay-reader and president of the board of
wardens and vestry of St. Stephen's Protestant Episcopal Colored Church in
Savannah. Has been in communion 9 years. The congregation numbers about 200
persons. The church property is worth about $10,000, and is owned by the congregation.

176

Sixteen: Adolphus Delmotte, aged 28 years, born in Savannah; free born. Is a licensed
minister of the Missionary Baptist Church of Milledgeville. Congregation numbering
about 300 or 400 persons. Has been in the ministry about two years.
Seventeen: Jacob Godfrey, aged 57 years, born in Marion, S.C. Slave until the Union
army freed me; owned by James E. Godfrey–Methodist preacher now in the Rebel
army. Is a class-leader and steward of Andrew's Chapel since 1836.
Eighteen: John Johnson, aged 51 years, born in Bryan County, Georgia. Slave up to the
time the Union army came here; owned by W. W. Lincoln of Savannah. Is class-leader
and treasurer of Andrew's Chapel for sixteen years.
Nineteen: Robt. N. Taylor, aged 51 years, born in Wilkes Co., Ga. Slave to the time the
Union army came. Was owned by Augustus P. Welter, Savannah, and is class-leader in
Andrew's Chapel for nine years.
Twenty: Jas. Lynch, aged 26 years, born in Baltimore, Md.; free-born. Is presiding elder
of the M.E. Church and missionary to the department of the South. Has been seven years
in the ministry and two years in the South.
Garrison Frazier being chosen by the persons present to express their common sentiments
upon the matters of inquiry, makes answers to inquiries as follows:
First: State what your understanding is in regard to the acts of Congress and President
Lincoln's [Emancipation] proclamation, touching the condition of the colored people in
the Rebel States.
Answer–So far as I understand President Lincoln's proclamation to the Rebellious States,
it is, that if they would lay down their arms and submit to the laws of the United States
before the first of January, 1863, all should be well; but if they did not, then all the slaves
in the Rebel States should be free henceforth and forever. That is what I understood.
Second–State what you understand by Slavery and the freedom that was to be given by
the President's proclamation.
Answer–Slavery is, receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by
his consent. The freedom, as I understand it, promised by the proclamation, is taking us
from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own
labor, take care of ourselves and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom.
Third: State in what manner you think you can take care of yourselves, and how can you
best assist the Government in maintaining your freedom.
Answer: The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it
by our own labor–that is, by the labor of the women and children and old men; and we

177

can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare. And to assist the Government,
the young men should enlist in the service of the Government, and serve in such manner
as they may be wanted. (The Rebels told us that they piled them up and made batteries of
them, and sold them to Cuba; but we don't believe that.) We want to be placed on land
until we are able to buy it and make it our own.
Fourth: State in what manner you would rather live–whether scattered among the whites
or in colonies by yourselves.
Answer: I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the
South that will take years to get over; but I do not know that I can answer for my
brethren. [Mr. Lynch says he thinks they should not be separated, but live together. All
the other persons present, being questioned one by one, answer that they agree with
Brother Frazier.]
380

Fifth: Do you think that there is intelligence enough among the slaves of the South to
maintain themselves under the Government of the United States and the equal protection
of its laws, and maintain good and peaceable relations among yourselves and with your
neighbors?
Answer–I think there is sufficient intelligence among us to do so.
Sixth–State what is the feeling of the black population of the South toward the
Government of the United States; what is the understanding in respect to the present war–
its causes and object, and their disposition to aid either side. State fully your views.
Answer–I think you will find there are thousands that are willing to make any sacrifice to
assist the Government of the United States, while there are also many that are not willing
to take up arms. I do not suppose there are a dozen men that are opposed to the
Government. I understand, as to the war, that the South is the aggressor. President
Lincoln was elected President by a majority of the United States, which guaranteed him
the right of holding the office and exercising that right over the whole United States. The
South, without knowing what he would do, rebelled. The war was commenced by the
Rebels before he came into office. The object of the war was not at first to give the
slaves their freedom, but the sole object of the war was at first to bring the rebellious
States back into the Union and their loyalty to the laws of the United States. Afterward,
knowing the value set on the slaves by the Rebels, the President thought that his
proclamation would stimulate them to lay down their arms, reduce them to obedience,
and help to bring back the Rebel States; and their not doing so has now made the freedom
of the slaves a part of the war. It is my opinion that there is not a man in this city that
could be started to help the Rebels one inch, for that would be suicide. There were two
black men left with the Rebels because they had taken an active part for the Rebels, and
thought something might befall them if they stayed behind; but there is not another

380
Brackets in the original.

178

man. If the prayers that have gone up for the Union army could be read out, you would
not get through them these two weeks.
Seventh: State whether the sentiments you now express are those only of the colored
people in the city; or do they extend to the colored population through the country? and
what are your means of knowing the sentiments of those living in the country?
Answer: I think the sentiments are the same among the colored people of the State. My
opinion is formed by personal communication in the course of my ministry, and also
from the thousands that followed the Union army, leaving their homes and undergoing
suffering. I did not think there would be so many; the number surpassed my expectation.
Eighth: If the Rebel leaders were to arm the slaves, what would be its effect?
Answer: I think they would fight as long as they were before the bayonet, and just as
soon as soon as they could get away, they would desert, in my opinion.
Ninth: What, in your opinion, is the feeling of the colored people about enlisting and
serving as soldiers of the United States? and what kind of military service do they prefer?
Answer: A large number have gone as soldiers to Port Royal [S.C.] to be drilled and put
in the service; and I think there are thousands of the young men that would enlist. There
is something about them that perhaps is wrong. They have suffered so long from the
Rebels that they want to shoulder the musket. Others want to go into the Quartermaster's
or Commissary's service.
Tenth: Do you understand the mode of enlistments of colored persons in the Rebel States
by State agents under the Act of Congress?
381
If yea, state what your understanding is.
Answer: My understanding is, that colored persons enlisted by State agents are enlisted
as substitutes, and give credit to the States, and do not swell the army, because every
black man enlisted by a State agent leaves a white man at home; and, also, that larger
bounties are given or promised by State agents than are given by the States. The great
object should be to push through this Rebellion the shortest way, and there seems to be
something wanting in the enlistment by State agents, for it don't strengthen the army, but
takes one away for every colored man enlisted.
Eleventh: State what, in your opinion, is the best way to enlist colored men for soldiers.
Answer: I think, sir, that all compulsory operations should be put a stop to. The
ministers would talk to them, and the young men would enlist. It is my opinion that it

381
The act, adopted on July 4, 1864, permitted agents from Northern states to recruit soldiers among Black
men in the Confederate states, crediting them against the draft quotas of the Northern states. U.S., Statutes
at Large, Treaties, and Proclamations, vol. 13 (Boston, 1866): 379–81.

179

would be far better for the State agents to stay at home, and the enlistments to be made
for the United States under the direction of Gen. Sherman.
In the absence of Gen. Sherman, the following question was asked:
Twelfth: State what is the feeling of the colored people in regard to Gen. Sherman; and
how far do they regard his sentiments and actions as friendly to their rights and interests,
or otherwise?
Answer: We looked upon Gen. Sherman prior to his arrival as a man in the Providence of
God specially set apart to accomplish this work, and we unanimously feel inexpressible
gratitude to him, looking upon him as a man that should be honored for the faithful
performance of his duty. Some of us called upon him immediately upon his arrival, and
it is probable he would not meet the Secretary with more courtesy than he met us. His
conduct and deportment toward us characterized him as a friend and a gentleman. We
have confidence in Gen. Sherman, and think that what concerns us could not be under
better hands. This is our opinion now from the short acquaintance and interest we have
had. (Mr. Lynch states that with his limited acquaintance with Gen. Sherman, he is
unwilling to express an opinion. All others present declare their agreement with Mr.
Frazier about Gen. Sherman.)
Some conversation upon general subjects relating to Gen. Sherman's march then ensued,
of which no note was taken.

180

Appendix II: Fig. I A Plan of Port Royal Harbour in Carolina
382

382
Herman Moll, A Plan of Port Royal Harbour in Carolina with the Proposed Forts, Depths of Water,
&c…, 1711, Hand colored print, 10.5 x 5 inches, Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc., La Jolla,
CA. Available from: Rare Maps,
https://www.raremaps.com/gallery/detail/30316/A_Plan_of_Port_Royal_harbour_in_Carolina_with_the_Pr
oposed_Forts_Depths_of/Moll.html (accessed August 10, 2014).

181

Appendix III: Fig. II Map of the coastal region of Georgia
383

383
A. Sydney Johnson, Hillburn O. Hillestad, Sheryl Fanning Shanholtzer, G. Frederick Shanholtzer, Map
of the coastal Georgia region, 1974, digital image. From: A. Sydney Johnson, et al. An Ecological Survey
of the Coastal Region of Georgia. Cumberland Island: National Park Service Scientific Monograph
Number Three, 1974. http://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/science/3/contents.htm (accessed
August 10, 2014)

182

183

Appendix V: Constitution of the Belle Ville Farmers’ Association
384

Belle Ville, McIntosh County, Georgia, March 4,1867, reads as follows: We the
undersigned citizens, Farmers & Laborers of Belle Ville, McIntosh Co., Georgia, feeling
the necessity of improving our status, have this day formed ourselves into an association
to be known as the Belle Ville Farmers Association and have nominated and duly elected
the following named persons to serve in their several capacities for the ensuing year:
For President & General Agent- Tunis G. Campbell, Sen.
“ Vice Presidents – Tunis G. Campbell, Jr., Reamus Elliot
“ Treasurer- William Williams, Sen.
“ Recording & Corr. Secretary- Edwin E. Howard
“ Sheriff & Collector- Lunnon Spaulding
“ Deputy Sheriff- James Spaulding
“ Constables- William Williams, Jr., Reamus Elliot
“ Fence Viewer- Toby Maxwell
“ Road Master- Bristoe Hopkins
“ Market Inspector- John McKeiver
“ Janitor of Buildings- William Williams
“ Hog & Cattle Reeve- Charles Campbell
Rules governing Belle Ville Farmers Association:
I. The President shall preside over all meetings; and in his absence either of
the Vice Presidents may act as Chairman.

384
Sterling, The Trouble They Seen.

184

II. The duty of the Treasurer shall be to receive all moneys from the hands of
the Secretary, paying them out by order of the President at the desire of
the Association, also keeping a regular account which may be at any
time audited as necessity requires.
III. The duty of the Secretary shall be to keep a true account of all the
deliberations of the Association, attend to all correspondence, keep a
record of the working of the Association in order to demonstrate to all
feasibility of this plan of working and to show to the people of the State
& Country that we can be, are, and with Freedom will be a producing
tax-paying element.
IV. The duties of the other officers shall be in accordance with their several
appointments: the Sheriff to serve and make returns of all writs, to be
also assisted by the Deputy and by the constables who shall preserve
good order. The Fence viewer to take charge of all fences, keep up all
gaps, see that the gates are closed. The Road Master to see all Public
Roads cleared of brush and dirt, and all byroads cleared of debris, filth
and unnecessary nuisances.
The Hog & Cattle Reeve to keep all hogs, cattle & horses within
inclosures, impounding all not so cared for, allowing none to be released
without paying damages. The Market Inspector to see that no diseased
meats or vegetables are disposed for sale, confiscating all such and
reporting the person so selling.
The Janitor of buildings to take charge of all public buildings, keeping
them clean and lighted as required.
And we hereby pledge ourselves, our interest and our labor to the
successful issue of this the first permanent [organization] for our welfare
and hope thereby to merit the approbation of our friends who have
assisted us and the disappointment of our enemies who seek our
downfall.

185

Respectfully submitted, T.G. Campbell, President & General Agent
Edw. E. Howard, Secretary

186

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