Slavery and Freedom in Savannah

Leslie Harris, Daina Berry

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780820344102
• eBook ISBN: 9780820347066
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Slavery and Freedom in Savannah is a richly illustrated, accessibly written book modeled on the very successful Slavery in New York, a volume Leslie M. Harris coedited with Ira Berlin. Here Harris and Daina Ramey Berry have collected a variety of perspectives on slavery, emancipation, and black life in Savannah from the city's founding to the early twentieth century. Written by leading historians of Savannah, Georgia, and the South, the volume includes a mix of longer thematic essays and shorter sidebars focusing on individual people, events, and places.

The story of slavery in Savannah may seem to be an outlier, given how strongly most people associate slavery with rural plantations. But as Harris, Berry, and the other contributors point out, urban slavery was instrumental to the slave-based economy of North America. Ports like Savannah served as both an entry point for slaves and as a point of departure for goods produced by slave labor in the hinterlands. Moreover, Savannah's connection to slavery was not simply abstract. The system of slavery as experienced by African Americans and enforced by whites influenced the very shape of the city, including the building of its infrastructure, the legal system created to support it, and the economic life of the city and its rural surroundings. Slavery and Freedom in Savannah restores the urban African American population and the urban context of slavery, Civil War, and emancipation to its rightful place, and it deepens our understanding of the economic, social, and political fabric of the U.S. South.

This project is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. This volume is published in cooperation with Savannah's Telfair Museum and draws upon its expertise and collections, including Telfair's Owens-Thomas House. As part of their ongoing efforts to document the lives and labors of the African Americans—enslaved and free—who built and worked at the house, this volume also explores the Owens, Thomas, and Telfair families and the ways in which their ownership of slaves was foundational to their wealth and worldview.

1

The Transatlantic Slave Trade Comes to Georgia

James A. McMillin

Georgia is often touted as the only British North American colony to outlaw slavery. True, the colony’s founders, the Georgia Trustees, rejected slavery soon after the colony came into being in the early 1730s, but their ban only delayed the expansion of slavery, for a little more than a decade. After the trustees removed restrictions on slavery, the slave population grew rapidly, increasing from four hundred in 1751 to some sixteen thousand on the eve of the Revolutionary War. The overwhelming majority of these enslaved laborers were Africans. Convinced that slavery was critical to the colony’s economic development, Georgia planters and merchants imported thousands of black captives, both directly from Africa and indirectly through South Carolina and the West Indies. Most of the forced migrants entered Georgia through the colony’s principal commercial port, Savannah. By the Revolutionary War, slavery was a central element of Georgia’s economy.¹

In 1732, King George II of England granted a distinguished board of trustees, led by the British general and member of Parliament James Edward Oglethorpe, a twenty-one-year charter for the colony of Georgia. The British government and the trustees intended for the new province, located between the Savannah and Altamaha Rivers and stretching west to the Pacific Ocean, to provide a buffer between the Spanish in Florida and British South Carolina. By settling the borderland with white farmer-soldiers instead of planters and slaves, they hoped to shield South Carolina’s rich plantation economy from Spanish invaders and Native Americans.² They had other motives as well; the sponsors envisioned the colony as a haven for England’s “worthy poor” and European Protestant refugees.³ The immigrants would “gain a comfortable subsistence” by producing silk and wine, which were in great demand in England, and would buy imported British manufactured goods, thus increasing “the trade, navigation, and wealth of these our realms.”⁴ Convinced that only white Protestant yeoman farmers could accomplish these goals, the trustees banned Catholicism, slavery, and rum, and created a land system that limited individual property ownership.⁵

James Edward Oglethorpe and the Georgia Plan

Richard West Habersham, James Edward Oglethorpe at Belgrade in 1718, 1885.
Courtesy of the Georgia Historical Society, A-1361-327.

In late 1732, the ship Anne, carrying 114 persons from the London area, dropped down the Thames and was soon rolling in the swells of the open sea. Many of the voyagers were failed, hard-bitten, sometimes hard-drinking small merchants, artisans, laborers, along with their wives and children. The well-to-do James Edward Oglethorpe, former member of Parliament, military officer, compassionate reformer, and visionary, led the expedition. He was also hotheaded and violent. On one occasion he wounded two political opponents with a sword, and on another he killed a man in a bawdy house.

Together with other prominent Englishmen, Oglethorpe had convinced King George II to grant them a charter to establish a colony in Georgia to be governed by a board of trustees that included him. Such a colony would offer the “worthy poor” a second chance to pursue commercial opportunities for the benefit of the British Crown; and it would establish a military buffer to protect England’s southern colonies in North America from the Spanish in Florida. In sum, the colonists from one of the world’s largest metropolitan centers were expected to become farmers and citizen-soldiers on a hostile and desolate frontier, a rather utopian scheme.

After a fifty-eight-day voyage, the colonists struggled up forty-foot Yamacraw Bluff on the Savannah River in early 1733. The river’s name became that of the first settlement in Georgia, the last of the original thirteen colonies and the only British colony that almost from its founding banned black slavery. Oglethorpe believed that slaves would jeopardize the work ethic of white yeoman farmers, threaten the colony with the possibility of insurrections, and discourage white immigration.

As they adjusted to their new surroundings, the colonists tried to reconcile the “paradise” promised to the reality found. In the spring of the first year, Oglethorpe returned from a brief visit to Charles Town (Charleston), where he had sought aid for the colony, to find the settlers discontented, disobedient, and ill. He believed their condition stemmed from heavy rum drinking and the employment of slave artisans from South Carolina, whose presence encouraged shiftlessness among the settlers. He immediately sent the slaves back and stove in the barrels of rum.

Oglethorpe subsequently prevailed on the trustees in England to ban slavery in Georgia, and Parliament enacted similar legislation in 1735. From the outset, the cornerstone of the trustees’ and Oglethorpe’s plan for Georgia was the prohibition of slavery — for military, moral, and social reasons. They knew that slave “rebellions” had occurred in other British colonies, and they did not want “insurrections” to lead to the “ruin and loss” of Georgia. Furthermore, they were convinced that slave labor would produce “idleness” and “luxury” among the white settlers, undermining their effectiveness as soldiers, farmers, and merchants. In the opinion of Oglethorpe and the trustees, banning slavery would encourage more whites to relocate to Georgia, since they would not face competition from slave labor.

Oglethorpe condemned black enslavement as “an abominable and destructive custom,” and on at least one occasion he quickly expelled Carolinians who brought slaves onto the Georgia side of the Savannah River to work a plantation. But Oglethorpe himself hired or borrowed hundreds of black slaves from Charles Town who worked under white guards to fell trees, build a ring of fortifications around the town, and lay out Savannah’s streets in a unique, grid-like pattern of public squares. Additionally, Oglethorpe was a stockholder and, briefly, director of England’s slave-trading Royal African Company. His antislavery beliefs were limited, at best, to this colony, which he hoped would be different from the others. But even he found it impossible to do without slavery in building Georgia.

On this point, Georgia’s proslavery faction agreed, repeatedly complaining in letters and petitions to the trustees and the British government that without slave labor the colony would never enjoy the prosperity of the South Carolinians. After Oglethorpe departed for England for the last time, in 1743, this faction became larger and more strident. By the end of the decade, the trustees recognized that their policy of excluding black slaves from Georgia faced defeat. Finally, on January 1, 1751, the British government legalized slavery in Georgia.

The importation of slaves surged. Within a few years, the population of Savannah and the Georgia Lowcountry had grown to four thousand whites and two thousand African American slaves. In 1755, years after Oglethorpe had returned to England, the Georgia Assembly passed a slave code designed to “keep slaves in due Subjection and Obedience.” A slaveholding, rice-producing planter elite was emerging. The colony no longer resembled the one James Edward Oglethorpe had envisioned. Rather, it had become more like its neighbor South Carolina.

In 1785, three years before his death, Oglethorpe met with John Adams in England. Though history is silent on their private conversations, we know that they shared the view that slavery was a heinous institution.

WALTER J. FRASER JR.

The trustees accomplished some of their goals. Oglethorpe maintained peaceful relations with the Creeks and Cherokees, and in 1742 he led British soldiers in a successful defense of the colony against a Spanish invasion. He founded and laid out Savannah, one of America’s most beautiful and well-designed cities. During the first ten years of colonization, the trustees sent eighteen hundred tradesmen and artisans from England and Scotland, and religious refugees from Switzerland and Germany, to Georgia. Another twelve hundred immigrants came to the colony at their own expense during the decade. But just about everything else went wrong. The trustees ran short of money and from time to time could not provide settlers with the food and supplies they had been promised. Oglethorpe was a poor administrator and, to some, overbearing. Settlers resented not having a voice in local government, as well as the land-ownership policies and the bans on rum and slaves. To make matters worse, the colonists produced only small amounts of silk and wine, and little else. Although the Lutheran Salzburgers who settled at New Ebenezer, inland on the Savannah River, prospered on a limited scale, many early immigrants either died or moved on. By 1751, of the three thousand whites who had migrated to the colony, only nineteen hundred remained.⁶

More than anything else, the trustees’ land and slave policies stymied economic growth and immigration. Each colonist sponsored by the trustees received fifty acres; those who paid their own way could acquire more, but individual ownership was limited to five hundred acres. The allotments could not be sold, and only male heirs could inherit land. Since most of the land around Savannah was unsuitable for small subsistence farms — much less for raising silk worms or grapes—many settlers were assigned land that they could neither farm nor sell. A shortage of labor and capital made matters worse. To clear land, make necessary improvements, and construct buildings, landowners needed capital and hardworking, affordable laborers. This was especially true for those who wanted to cultivate rice. Lacking capital, most settlers could not afford to pay free workers, who were in short supply. Once the land restrictions were lifted in the late 1730s and large quantities of inexpensive land became available, wage laborers became even scarcer. Like other North American colonists, Georgians preferred to work their own land rather than someone else’s.⁷

Soon after they arrived in Georgia, settlers began complaining about the trustees’ policies, especially the slavery ban. A group of Savannah settlers who became known as the Malcontents bombarded the trustees with letters, petitions, and pamphlets demanding slaves.⁸ Aware that slave-produced rice and indigo were bringing great wealth to planters just across the Savannah River in South Carolina, the Malcontents persistently argued that the semitropical climate and the scarcity of affordable labor made black slaves “essentially necessary” to the economic success of the colony.⁹ Oglethorpe and his fellow trustees vigorously opposed the Malcontents in the late 1730s and early 1740s, but the trustees themselves were not antislavery activists. Indeed, Oglethorpe had participated in the British slave-trading Royal African Company. And even during the time of the ban, slaves came to the colony. The trustees themselves had brought in slaves to assist with the building of Savannah. Other slaves were imported illegally, often from South Carolina.¹⁰ Still, Oglethorpe and his fellow trustees insisted that legalizing slavery would undermine their carefully designed, idealistic plan for Georgia and that eventually the colony would become merely an extension of South Carolina. It would also, as Oglethorpe accurately predicted, “occasion the misery of thousands in Africa … and bring into perpetual Slavery the poor people who now live there free.”¹¹

Africans and Indians in Colonial Georgia

By 1733, the year of Georgia’s settlement by the British, slavery had already profoundly shaped the region between Charleston and St. Augustine. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Spanish and French colonialism exposed Native populations to devastating new diseases, and the British settlers who established the Carolina colony in 1670 demonstrated an insatiable demand for slave labor. In intertribal wars, Indians traditionally captured enemies, but South Carolina planters and traders encouraged Native societies to take unprecedented numbers of them and amplified the violence of warfare by offering firearms in return for Indian slaves. As a result, the Savannah River Valley became home to a succession of slave-raiding Indian societies, including the Westos, Savannahs, and Yamasees. Between 1670 and 1715, southern colonists acquired at least twenty-five thousand and perhaps as many as fifty thousand Indian slaves: some remained in South Carolina, toiling alongside African slaves, but most were exported to British colonies in New England or the Caribbean. Disease and slave raiding exacted a terrible toll on Indian populations across the Southeast, threatening to destroy even those allied with South Carolina.

Responding to the threats that the Indian slave trade posed, a coalition of Indian nations led by the Yamasees declared war on South Carolina in 1715. The Yamasee War transformed the colonial South and later became a critical factor in the decision to establish the Georgia colony. Native warriors killed about 7 percent of South Carolina’s white population, drove the remaining settlers and their African and Indian slaves to seek refuge in fortified Charles Town, and terrified colonial officials into reconsidering the wisdom of enslaving Indians in a region where Native power was so considerable. After the final peace was brokered in 1718, Native people restructured their societies. Survivors of formerly independent chiefdoms banded together, creating new confederacies, which were multiethnic and sometimes multilingual. Dynamic and populous, nations like the Creeks and Cherokees emerged as power players in the colonial South, negotiating more favorable alliances with Britain, France, and Spain. South Carolinians, fearful of another Native revolt, turned almost exclusively to African slave...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Sidebars
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Transatlantic Slave Trade Comes to Georgia
• Chapter 2 “The King of England’s Soldiers”: Armed Blacks in Savannah and Its Hinterlands during the Revolutionary War Era, 1778–1787
• Chapter 3 At the Intersection of Cotton and Commerce: Antebellum Savannah and Its Slaves
• Chapter 4 To “Venerate the Spot” of “Airy Visions”: Slavery and the Romantic Conception of Place in Mary Telfair’s Savannah
• Chapter 5 Slave Life in Savannah: Geographies of Autonomy and Control
• Chapter 6 Free Black Life in Savannah
• Chapter 7 Wartime Workers, Moneymakers: Black Labor in Civil War–Era Savannah
• Chapter 8 “We Defy You!”: Politics and Violence in Reconstruction Savannah
• Chapter 9 “The Fighting Has Not Been in Vain”: African American Intellectuals in Jim Crow Savannah
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Contributors
• Index