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Everything
wears a melancholy and gloomy aspect as the sad
result of Lincoln's Election. May the Good Lord
protect & guide us in this time of peril to
our country.
Shelton Palmer Sanford ~ Friday November 9th,
1860
The Coming of War .
In 1855, a traveling merchant from New England known
to history as “Webster” came to Greene County.
Word got around of him spreading his abolitionist
views. He was subdued, tarred and feathered, and driven
from Greene by a mob. The mood of the event was celebratory.
A few years later, Thomas Miller, a merchant from
Cleveland, was picked up, delivered to a depot and
forced to leave, despite his vehement denial of any
abolitionist intent. The tone of this confrontation
was said to be much more serious. The editor of the
local Weekly Gazette, soon to be named The
Planter’s Weekly, demanded that the designs
of outsiders be known and monitored. In 1859, a runaway
slave of William Luckey’s was captured. While
attempting to punish him, the slave grabbed a knife
and stabbed Luckey to death. But this was rare. For
as Jonathan Bryant stated in How Curious A Land,
“Greene County’s slaveholders did not fear
their slaves as much as they feared outsiders’
influence on their slaves.” Such could be said
of most of the cotton belt. Black slaves were as important
as legal tenure, commanding a price as high as $1400.
Insurrection at the hands of northern agitators was
as egregious an offense as armed robbery, abolitionists
nothing more than common criminals to the antebellum
mindset.
Yet the true threat to the wealth of the South, be
it their land or their slaves, was less the small
bands of abolitionists and more so the encroachments
of northern business interests. Politicians had taken
up the economic causes of their respective sections,
clashing repeatedly and viciously with opponents.
Dialogue fell away in the 1850s, was replaced with
presumption, stereotypes, reckless manipulation, fervor,
panic, and fear. In John Brown’s Private War,
C. Vann Woodward described the conditions as, “a
pathological condition of mind in which delusions
of persecution and impending disaster flourished.”
Economic rifts infected politics, in turn infecting
cultural points of view north and south. Northern
industrialists had gained controlling interests of
the emerging market-based economy upon which southern
exports relied. As a result they applied political
pressure and held sway over many areas of federal
decision-making directly impacting the future of the
southern plantation-based economy. Add in the growing
movements aiming dissent at the injustices of slavery,
and therein lay the perceived threats. The South was
moving from a self-sufficient civilization that produced
for the world market and more towards a culture dependent
on that market long prior to the Civil War. Still,
southern leaders were not about to let economic and
social forces outside their bounds determine how that
future should unfold. Southern leaders saw their culture,
as they knew it, being threatened to the very core.
The notions and practice of industrialism and the
howling of abolitionism sought to tear apart the very
fabric of southern culture. Opinions escalated into
battlecries. As Confederate patriot and Greene County
neighbor, Robert Toombs, proclaimed, “we must
expand or perish.”
Abraham Lincoln’s election in November of 1860
brought with it the Republican platform of halting
the expansion of slavery. In Greene County, the majority
of votes cast in the election had been for the Constitutional
Union, or “Whig,” party ticket of John Bell
& Edward Everett. Their platform had pushed dialogue
with the end hope of sectional reconciliation. As
impractical as this platform was, it was still a hope.
Yet it was a footnote. Lincoln’s victory equaled
a declaration of war to many southern leaders. Lincoln
would hold the Union together at any cost. In Greene,
a resolution denounced the election. Calls were made
to raise the militia. Economic extinction meant cultural
extinction and Lincoln was the very symbol of this
fear. Though Lincoln’s fledgling party enjoyed
no majority in Congress, thereby limiting legislative
power, even the mention of bottling up the slaveholding
states would not stand. The South would move towards
secession at various speeds, hinting the inclination
towards statehood over nationalism that would eventually
do in the Confederacy as a governing body. Yet in
early 1861, as Coulter wrote in Georgia, “excitement
ruled the day.” Crowds listened to fiery orations
and cheered southern independence. T. B. Rice quoted
a C. Yarborough who’d said, “the rich old
blood of the Revolution was leaping in the veins of
descendents of Revolutionary sires.” Coulter
describes state leaders as urging concerted action
to “end forever `Northern aggressions and insults`
and on this wave of enthusiasm Georgia was swept out
of the Union.” Nathaniel M. Crawford, Richard
J. Willis, and Thomas Poullain were elected to represent
Greene County at the capital in Milledgeville. On
January 19, 1861, the order of secession was passed.
Georgia had left the Union. A general feeling of celebration
swept the whites of Greene County. And the country
tumbled headlong towards a horrific war.
Shelton Sanford, Mercer’s quiet professor of
arithmetic, possibly foresaw the dark days that war
would bring. In his diary entry for January 21,
1861, he wrote:
"At
night (I) heard the firing of Cannon in Greenesboro,
rejoicing as I suppose over the secession of Georgia.
Whilst as a Georgian I shall submit to the action
of the state, still I cannot rejoice in the dissolution
of the Union."
Years of War .
Both Raper and Bryant document a letter printed in
the June 5th, 1861, Planter’s Weekly.
It was a call to arms to men of fighting age and residents
of the homefront. It said, “This is emphatically
a people’s war, and the people must sustain it
or perish.” The literal isolation of populations
at the time allowed emphatic alarm to spread without
check. In 1861, in Greene, this was answered with
resolve. Support of the Confederacy was total. On
April 12, Ft. Sumter was fired on. It was surrendered
a day later, Shelton Sanford noting, “General
joy everywhere.” Lincoln soon called for 75,000
Union volunteers to put down the rebellion. The infant
Confederate government in Richmond did likewise. Three
companies, approximately one hundred men each, were
raised in Greene County: The Dawson Greys from Penfield,
The Greene Rifles from Greenesboro, and the Stephens
Light Guards. Bonds were issued by the Inferior Court
to arm and cloth the men. Over the next two months
they were drilled into form, presented flags sewn
by the local women, given lavish celebratory galas
full of pomp and oratory, and paraded to depots where
they shipped out to join the army gathering in Virginia.
They would see deadly action immediately.
Scott Glass compiled an exhaustive resource on Greene’s
Confederate soldiers. He records 900 men as serving.
They were engaged in all major theatres of action.
His research also indicates that Greene’s soldiers
suffered heavy casualties early. At First Manassas,
the first major engagement of the war, the Stephens
Light Guards took part in the stand that would grant
“Stonewall” Jackson his nickname. The company
suffered, as part of the 8th Georgia to which they
were attached, the highest C.S. casualty rate of the
day. George Butler, just one of the many rank and
file who were quickly delivered from a flag-waving
naivety upon the carnage of military conflict, described
the sickening post battle scene: “i never want
to see such a sight again, the ground was covered
with our ded and the grones of the dying.” The
realities of war arrived to those back home almost
as quickly. Casualty lists were posted at the county
courthouse. Raper relays instances of soldiers’
letters from the front arriving home after their families
had found out that they’d been killed in action.
In the fall of 1861, a pro-secessionist play was held
in White Plains. Fourteen year-old Laura Alfriend
symbolized, allegorically, the Confederacy during
the play. She walked onto stage holding the “Stars
& Bars,” and took her place. As she did,
a candle-lit footlight on stage caught her robe on
fire. The young girl was burned to death before a
horrified crowd. The war’s staggering death toll
would soon swamp this local tragedy.
1862 was a reality check for the Confederacy, and
the people and soldiers of Greene. In the field, Greene’s
own fought and died in the Seven Days, the Battle
of Second Manassas, the cataclysmic clash at Antietam,
and Fredericksburg late in the year. With few exceptions
1862 was successful for the Confederacy, militarily.
But at home the situation foretold of expanding disillusion.
C.S. legislators realized early that they were outmatched
in men and material. Again, the call went out for
volunteers. In Greene two more companies were raised,
the “Greene” and “Stocks Volunteers.”
The “Greene Volunteers,” with the 44th Georgia,
were tested immediately at the Battle of Malvern Hill,
part of the Seven Days. They sustained heavy casualties.
Yet volunteerism was not enough. In April, Richmond
was forced to initiate the first draft in American
history. It brought vehement denunciations from Southern
governors. Georgia’s own Joseph Brown, a tireless
defender of the state described by Coulter as watching
over Georgia with “a sharpness often more zealous
than wise,” fired off vicious attacks against
the “dictator Jeff Davis.” Still, the draft
went forward. Two more companies of men were formed
in Greene. The war would require unequalled sacrifice
from the South.
In the beginning, the war was a remote entity in Greene.
Yet as much as its inhabitants tried to maintain normalcy
things were changing, economically, socially, culturally,
beyond the simple expectations of 1861. Bryant explains
that, “slavery shaped and literally colored the
economic, social, and cultural structures that defined
southern society.” And though a small percentage
of whites owned slaves, this view holds. For slavery
represented the lowest rung in the succinct class
structure that defined antebellum days. Slavery would
continue in Greene long after the Emancipation
Proclamation was issued; continuing until occupation
forces arrived months after Lee’s surrender.
But even amongst the staid order of the plantation,
things had changed. Most of the white men were off
fighting. As a result, many slaves took on more important
roles. Women often oversaw plantation operations,
but it was the slaves who worked its fields. This
war went forward under the relatively simple notions
of nationalism, honor, patriotism and rights. But
it would prove to be the killing grounds of such cultural
innocence. For this war would transform everyone and
everything, would become the proving grounds of our
cultural expectations of a democracy.
1870s map of "Fontenoy," or the
area around Scull Shoals ~ |
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Anonymous letter written home by a Confederate
soldier in the field ~ |
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Front of the Davis & Kimbrough store,
soon to be known as "the Big Store"
~ |
The War Comes to Greene .
Raper documents a Grand Jury resolution passed early
in 1862, stating, “members of this body individually
will plant no cotton except enough for domestic use
during the year of 1862.” Since most of the men
on the grand juries of the time were of the wealthy
strata who ran Greene, this directive, to pursue only
those enterprises that would support the cause, was
law. This was made apparent when the owners of the
largest manufacturing interests in the county, at
Long and Scull Shoals, were found guilty of price-gouging.
Matters often fell to the mob. Isaac Harman, a Jewish
merchant in Penfield, was accused of price-fixing
by Mercer students, and beaten. Harman’s guilt
is questionable. Yet speculation and profiteering
was having a disastrous effect on Confederate legal
tender. As early as 1862, the C.S. dollar was wracked
by a spiraling inflation. Prices rose rapidly. One
redeeming factor was that the South, especially Greene,
once again became a land of self-subsistence; important
since Southern money was soon worthless. Most pursued
the day-to-day routine with honest resolve. Thomas
Janes and David Barrow were wealthy planters who supported
the war with foodstuffs, providing, in the antebellum
tradition of `noblesse oblige,` charity to needy neighbors.
But this charity only went so far. Resources became
scarce. Raper states, “supplies from farms and
towns were drained off with the men.” Greene
produced little industry for the war effort; this
indicative of the agrarian South in general. Cotton
bagging was produced at Scull Shoals and the Leech
& Rigdon Arms manufacturers produced revolvers,
but there was little else. The contribution of women
were many. They took over arduous tasks on the small
farms and “virtually clothed the Confederate
armies,” as Coulter states in his monumental
history, The Confederate States of America.
Greene’s Soldier’s Relief Society
provided hand-sewn clothing. Rice stated, “the
list of women who provided by making stockings and
clothes … runs likes a muster roll.” In
the fall of 1862, the Wayside Home opened in Union
Point. A crossroads relief station on the Georgia
Railroad line, it provided food and lodging and saw
to the terrible work of nursing the wounded, convalescing,
and dying soldiers that passed through. A soldier
under their care called the women of the Wayside Home,
“visions of angels.”
Yet despite these efforts, the war overwhelmed the
South. Unrecoverable losses were occurring in the
field. The Confederacy could not replace the men falling
in battle and its countryside was stripped bare by
marching armies and its own government impressment
agents. In July of 1864, Sherman successfully invested
Atlanta. Only a hundred miles east on the Georgia
RR line, Greene was soon inundated by the casualties
of Atlanta. Most every building in downtown Greenesboro
found use as a hospital. But for the supreme optimist,
or the unrealistic, the darkness of war was spreading
long shadows. Coulter states in Georgia, “the
lot of the mass of the people during the war was one
of great privation and suffering.” Even the great
wealth of the plantations was not enough. The majority
of small farms endured near starvation. The war taxed
the land as hard its people. But it was the people
who suffered. A soldier came home on furlough to be
with family, and his daughter Secessia, named in honor
of the cause. As Raper relates in Preface to Peasantry,
“in preparing to return, he and his slaves were
on the front porch repacking some gunpowder. A spark
from the father’s pipe fired the cotton about
the powder, which he quickly brushed off the porch.
The burning cotton fell upon little Secessia.”
The young girl was burned to death.
In November of 1864, Sherman began his March to the
Sea. It passed just south of Greene and spared it
most of the “howling” destruction visited
upon areas in its path. The most documented destruction
was on the plantation of James Park, where the mill
was burned. Most of the bridges over the Oconee were
put to the torch and Union foragers took most of what
was left of resident livestock and provisions. A detachment
entered Greenesboro and marauders showed up at Scull
Shoals, but both communities escaped destruction.
The Federals moved on quickly. In their wake followed
an army of slaves now free. Bryant states, “Sherman’s
march must have seemed both tantalizing and disappointing.”
Some did indeed follow Sherman’s army to the
coast. Many eventually returned. Most never thought
of leaving. And as 1864 gave way to 1865, most slaves
plodded along in the only way they’d ever known.
Even with freedom their future was at best a question
mark. For as noted southern scribe C. Vann Woodward
states in The Burden of Southern History, “equality
was a far more revolutionary aim than freedom.”
It would be tested soon enough.
The End and the Beginning .
Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, Joseph
Johnston surrendering the only other C.S. force east
of the Mississippi within the month. Scott Glass records
95 Greene soldiers as present at the surrenders. The
passes these soldiers were issued following parole,
guaranteeing amnesty on their return home, were proof
of faithful service to the end. Many of these relics
were shared with this project by the descendents of
Greene County soldiers. Faithful duty is also recorded
on the tombstones of over two hundred Greene soldiers
who gave their lives for their cause. Rice described
the post-war days. “A melancholy and sadness
prevailed,” he wrote. Legend has it that Jefferson
Davis, under cover of darkness, identity hidden, was
lodged at Park’s Mill during his flight south;
the tale extended to include the burying of C.S. treasury
gold nearby. There were reports on the other side
of the coin, as well: reports of slave celebrations
with the news of Appomattox. Slaveowner Hardy Peek
had called together his then former slaves and told
them, “you all is just as free as I is …
you ain’t obliged to call me old Mahster no more.”
Greene, and the South was a place of conflicting emotions,
charged with the arrival of occupation troops. The
175th New York, a regiment decimated early in the
war and used as a reserve force, arrived in June,
1865. Stationed in Greenesboro, their district covered
seven counties. Ideally, their duty was to insure
stability in a volatile region. Despite vehement resentment
there is only one report of violence, a Union officer
being shot from a window during the first weeks of
their arrival. But this was an isolated event. Greene
soon settled into a post-war transformation, the presence
of Federal troops less an issue than slave freedom.
In 1864, black slaves had built the Springfield Baptist
Church for their own use. When the war ended, freed
blacks built up a community around it called “Canaan.”
Though these steps towards independence were taken,
most still worked on the plantations they’d been
brought up on, had their old master’s name, received
their sustenance from the same landed families. With
freedom, the “freedmen” now entered into
written contracts based on share-wages. A “Freedman’s
Bureau” was established with regional branches
to assist the transitions of labor. These bureaus
and the hovering threat of “Reconstruction”
were highly resented by the old landed planters, most
of whom were in dire straits with the loss of their
property in slaves. But there was a new order on the
rise. Plantations were sold off, some abandoned. Some
were divided up amongst “tenants.” A new
mercantile class began to emerge. Equal parts ex-large
landowners and men once outside the closed class structure
of plantation-based economics, these merchants, “a
distinct product of the destruction of the plantation,”
as described by Coulter, would oversee the conversion
from plantation to a “share-cropping” agricultural
structure whose support would funnel directly from
mortgaging and credit. The influence of this re-organization
would shift power from the country to the town. But
it would not flourish until the “radicals”
had been driven out.
Reconstruction and Redemption
.
Andrew Johnson was sworn in as president following
Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in April, 1865.
Johnson, like Lincoln, envisioned a magnanimous rejoining
of sections following the Civil War. Johnson, a southern
Unionist, met fierce, bitter resistance. Northern
Republican legislators held the majority in Congress.
Led by the fiery Thaddeus Stevens, they set to a brusque
re-Unionization process for the former Confederate
states; the most stinging condition being a voting
rights forfeiture for any man who had served the Confederacy
in any capacity. The actions of the time would bring
“radicals, carpetbaggers, scalawags and redemption”
into the lexicon of the era, all the while balancing
the “freedmen” at the center of the fury.
In Greene County, as mentioned, most freed slaves
continued working the only farms they’d ever
known. But there were many forays into spheres of
greater independence and influence. In early 1866,
there was a freedman’s strike in Greene arising
from contracts setting wages lower than the minimum
set by the regional Bureau (headed by David Tillson,
in Augusta). The local Farmer’s Bureau court
was run by resident whites who brought with them inherent
prejudices in dealing with their former slaves. Jonathan
Dawson was its first director and per research he
showed little sympathy. The strike was settled through
intervention. But it had revealed a line in the sand.
As Bryant states, “the oppressive contract system,
the unequal laws passed by the state legislature,
and the justice meted out by the county court, all
accelerated the development of active political consciousness
among Greene’s freed people.” In 1865, President
Johnson allowed each southern state to convene a Constitutional
Convention to repeal the orders of secession and amend
their constitutions for re-admittance into the Union.
Yelverton P. King, Miles W. Lewis, and Nathaniel Crawford
(who signed the order of secession) were sent to the
convention from Greene. Robert L. McWhorter and John
Swann were soon after elected to the legislature late
in 1865. Their efforts would prove inadequate for
Steven’s “radical” bloc in Congress,
and the more ambitious, emerging leaders of Greene’s
freed people. A freedmen’s “Equal Right’s
Association” was soon initiated. Greene’s
local leader was a man named Abram Colby.
Colby, the son of a white landowner and slave, was
granted his freedom in the 1850s, finding work as
a barber in Greenesboro. He never learned to read
or write, but had a knack for political leadership.
He made the Greene ERA into an organ for equality,
imploring the state legislature, “as we are willing
to bury the past and forget the ills of slavery …
we expect your encouragement by the creation of such
laws as are equitable and progressive.” But this
was not forthcoming. In March, 1866, freedman leader
Henry Turner came to Greenesboro to talk to Colby’s
ERA. Speaking before a large audience, Turner launched
into a fiery denunciation of the freedmen’s inability
to stand up to the transgression of whites. A group
of whites gathered and soon grew angry over the black
speaker’s audacity. Tensions ran high, Donald
Grant relating the story in The Way it was in the
South: “Turner defied them and went on speaking.
When he urged black men in Greensboro to keep white
men away from their women, whites in the audience
drew their guns. Since the blacks were also armed,
nothing came of this incident.” An editorial
in 1868 claimed, “essential to the return of
Southern prosperity is the establishment of confidence
and increasing good will between the two races.”
Though there are many on record as wishing nothing
less, reality was not so accommodating; as “Abe”
Colby would soon find out.
“Radical Reconstruction,” as the era became
known, began in 1867. Congress signed into law the
14th amendment: “citizenship rights are not to
be abridged,” a civil rights addition to the
13th amendment that abolished slavery. Georgia (along
with most of the deep-South states) rejected it and
was cast out of the Union. Its legislature was abolished
and the state was put under military rule. Military
leaders, many of them former Union generals, oversaw
carefully picked delegates of the Republican mindset
to take the place of the conservative legislators
of the South. Many high offices went to northerners.
The capitol was moved to Atlanta. In 1868, open elections
were held. Native conservative leaders protested by
non-participation. Despite a spike in white-supremacist
violence, chiefly a result of the Ku Klux Klan, freedmen
voted in large numbers. The resulting state legislature
was a mix of opportunistic whites, a few conservatives,
and the first black representatives in state and local
history. Robert McWhorter and Abram Colby braved death
threats, ran on the Republican ticket, and were elected.
The history of this period has often documented sectional
emotion over objective review. Rice wrote, “in
Greene County, just as it was in all of the South
after the war, ignorant ex-slaves filled the legislative
halls of Georgia and were the tools with which the
“carpet-bag” Governor Bullock and his henchmen
used to fleece the State.” Rice went on to describe
Abram Colby as a drunken menace. As inadequate as
these conclusions are, they were the prevailing view.
Lost is the notion that there existed intelligent
freedmen politicians after honest social gains, an
obvious historical omission in failing to mention
the smear campaign initiated by the Klan against Colby;
who in 1870 took him from his house, beat him unmercifully,
and left him for dead. Abe Colby would survive and
would eventually move to Atlanta. So would survive
the Klan’s reign of terror; the “law of
the revolver,” as described by Bryant. But objectivity
separates many freedmen leaders from the unscrupulous
locals and “carpetbaggers,” white to a man,
who did participate in the rampant corruption of private
enterprise; most notably in bonds issuances for southern
railroad development. Under military rule, despite
the elected legislatures, business interests –
southern and northern – took complete advantage
of the political structure. The South, Georgia, and
Greene, was a vast, conquered land at the mercy of
economic exploitation. Taxation ran rampant and was
imposed upon a populace denied the right to vote.
And it spawned “redemption.”
Redemption in Georgia gained its symbolic start with
the expelling of all black members from the state
legislature in 1868; Colby included. There is truth
in the notion that the freedmen vote was manipulated
for Republican Party ends. Yet as time moved into
the 1870s, no less can be said of the emerging conservative
opposition: the Democratic Party. The Herald Journal
was founded in 1868. “Vincit Amor Patri,”
or “the cause of truth and justice and the interests
of the people,” was its motto. It quickly picked
up on the motivations of redemption, or “home
rule,” and attempted to deflate radical influence.
Raper related an editorial aimed at freedmen:
“…
if those people (referring to the “carpetbag”
politicians and Republican Party natives who were
nicknamed “scalawags”) want you to vote,
it is not because they love you; it is only because
they think they can make something of you …
we remember how faithful you were when you were
slaves … We have not forgotten our old friendships.”
Almost
as a natural course, the Reconstruction governments
were failing anyway; mainly due to the results of
massive capitalistic exploitation. Occupation troops
had left and local whites were gaining back local
judicial control through boards of commission; as
well as settling into a new economy. In the end, if
Reconstruction accomplished anything, then it was
only to galvanize the Southern mindset and place Democratic
Party loyalty alongside reverence for the “Lost
Cause.” It “succeeded only in making the
South more Southern,” wrote Coulter. In 1873,
a bank panic caused the “radical” government
in Georgia to fold. Though Reconstruction wouldn’t
end until Southern electorates made it a part of the
deal that would seat Rutherford B. Hayes in the White
House, by the mid-1870s “home-rule” had
been fully restored. As early as 1872, the elected
Republicans from Greene County, Greene Thompson and
Jack Heard, fielded little power. Many native Republicans,
derisively called “scalawags,” began to
contemplate a jump back to the Democrats, who though
still banned from the electoral process were by influence,
be it through the KKK or economics, undercutting Republican
ends. With no where to turn, freedmen faced what Bryant
described as the “terrible choice of confrontation
or accommodation.” In The Burden of Southern
History, Woodward wrote, “the new electorate
of freedmen proved … remarkably modest in their
demands … In no state did they hold place and
power in anything approaching their actual numbers
and voting strength.” The final foray the freedmen
would make was in the 1874 elections. Predictably,
it went against the Republican candidates. Results
were suspect at best. Many were outraged by what seemed
outright fraud. Freedmen George Battle and Montgomery
Shepard chose the route of “confrontation”
and led a midnight protest through Union Point. Shepard
was soon sentenced to a chain-gang for his actions.
He would be shot to death while attempting to escape.
A “New South” on the
horizon .
The 1870s in Greene County were indicative of the
“Black Belt” South. The restructured agrarian
economy saw the town and the merchant take precedence
over the plantation. A casualty of this was Mercer
University. Abandoning its forty year residence in
the village of Penfield, Mercer officials relocated
to the urban community of Macon in 1871. Bryant, in
discussing another of the residual casualties of transformation
– the old mills – relates, “the decline
and eventual failure of the mills left Greene County
more dependent than ever on the commercial market,
placing merchants and lawyers at the center of the
county’s economy.” Indeed, self-subsistence
was a thing of the past. Since the only collateral
most had would be that year’s crop, “crop-liens”
or attaining credit for supplies by offering a portion
of one’s crop as security, emerged as economic
method. This inevitably meant that “tenants”
and “sharecroppers” grew cash crops that
would yield the highest return; and this meant cotton.
James Park lamented, “the policy of raising all
cotton and depending on the West for the stuff of
life has well nigh ruined this state.” As if
to underline the point, the 1880 census recorded a
per capita wealth of only $113.14 in Greene. In the
slave days of 1860, it had been $710.
The decade progressed, nonetheless, as normal as possible.
Edward Copelan of Greenesboro, James Hart of Union
Point, and William Penn McWhorter of Woodville, all
sons of antebellum planters, became men of prominence.
Long-time county planter Thomas Janes became the state
of Georgia’s first agricultural commissioner.
Charles A. Davis, called the “merchant prince,”
became the most important financier in the county.
In 1874, Greenesboro could boast of a marshal, seven
lawyers, kerosene street lamps and a volunteer fire
department. The county had fifteen practicing physicians
and a dentist. Early resident of the county, Gwynn
Allison, had died at a very old age, leaving behind
a fund that philanthropically provided for the schooling
of the poor. The fund would be a wellspring far into
the twentieth century. Boosterism had begun to show
itself in the form of the Greene County Agricultural
and Mechanical Association. “Redeemers”
championed the dual causes of southern nationalism
and southern industry. In White Plains a “Negro”
academy was opened by a white teacher. A year later
another was opened. By 1880, the state of Georgia
was second in railroad miles in the South and could
claim 40 new mills. Yet there remained an underlying
strain on this emerging future. It could be seen on
the land. Raper noted, “the tenants owned no
livestock or farm implements, had no credit, had to
be furnished everything … was always in debt;
even the crop the tenant had not yet harvested belonged
to the landowner.” He went on, in bleak terms,
“the tired land leached and washed. The gullies
gnawed deeper into the red lands of Greene.”
In T. B. Rice’s history of Greene, he documents
his first impression of Greenesboro during his days
as a traveling salesman or “drummer” in
the 1880s:
"mid-summer
… the streets were dry and dusty, a number
of the stores were unpainted wooden buildings with
wooden awnings that extended across the sidewalks
with benches on the outer edges; the store windows
were covered with wooden shutters"
It
seems a lonely description of what seems a lonely
time. Everything had changed in the life of the residents
of Greene. And everything was to keep on changing,
rapidly.
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Tintype of a flat boat ferry that once operated
on the Oconee River ~
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Next Page
A History of Greene County, Georgia
- Table of Contents
Early Years:
Pre-History - 1800
Golden Days: 1800 - 1860
War, Reconstruction &
the Coming of a New South: 1860 - 1885
The New South & the
Turn of a Century: 1885 - 1915
War, Uncertainty &
a New Deal: 1915 - 1940
Research Sources, Credits
& Acknowledgements
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