Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture

Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast

James Giesen, Paul Sutter, Paul Pressly

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780820351889
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

One of the unique features of the Georgia coast today is its thorough conservation. At first glance, it seems to be a place where nature reigns. But another distinctive feature of the coast is its deep and diverse human history. Indeed, few places that seem so natural hide so much human history. In Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture, editors Paul S. Sutter and Paul M. Pressly have brought together work from leading historians as well as environmental writers and activists that explores how nature and culture have coexisted and interacted across five millennia of human history along the Georgia coast, as well as how those interactions have shaped the coast as we know it today.

The essays in this volume examine how successive communities of Native Americans, Spanish missionaries, British imperialists and settlers, planters, enslaved Africans, lumbermen, pulp and paper industrialists, vacationing northerners, Gullah-Geechee, nature writers, environmental activists, and many others developed distinctive relationships with the environment and produced well- defined coastal landscapes. Together these histories suggest that contemporary efforts to preserve and protect the Georgia coast must be as respectful of the rich and multifaceted history of the coast as they are of natural landscapes, many of them restored, that now define so much of the region.

Contributors: William Boyd, S. Max Edelson, Edda L. Fields-Black, Christopher J. Manganiello, Tiya Miles, Janisse Ray, Mart A. Stewart, Drew A. Swanson, David Hurst Thomas, and Albert G. Way.

CHAPTER 1

Islands, Edges, and Globe

The Environmental History of the Georgia Coast

MART A. STEWART

What is “place,” and how was it created? Environmental historians and environmental storytellers in general have often sought to answer this question and see it as fundamental to the understanding of how humans have lived with nature. And why is it important? If you have to ask, the residents of a place suggest, you are not likely going to understand. But historians can identify the contours of a place, both as it has been lived in by residents and as it has been perceived by observers who visit or argue with the place rather than deeply root themselves in it. These are the first questions that need to be posed about coastal Georgia and its environmental history: what is this place, coastal Georgia, and why should we consider it a geographical and historical place of significance beyond our appreciation of it?

We know from cultural geographers that the physical characteristics of a place are always interwoven with how people live in it or even visit it. These features are not just shaped, and sometimes wrenched, into another form by agriculture, forest exploitation, or the manipulation of the place for leisure purposes (by causeways, roads, hotels, or water parks) but also by how people see and experience them and by the language they use to explain those perceptions and experiences. At the same time, environmental historians have never lost their grasp on the material and ecological reality of place, of how landforms encourage cultural possibilities or how soils and climate and the flow of water, for example, limit or define the human experiences with that place. There is a there there. And even if we are ultimately suspended in a web of our own creation and are limited by our own understandings and our language for expressing them, this there can be gotten at, at least in the outline. We can brush up against it if not clearly define it. And one of the best ways to do this is to look at a place in the long term, to see what emerges as relative constants in the experience of humans with that place. Looking at how humans historically used the soils of the coastal islands and river floodplains, how they extracted both ocean and freshwater resources from the tidal and estuary swirl of energy in the intercoastal waterways, and how they have explained both hurricanes and salt marsh sunrises, for example, tells us something enduring about this place.

Just what constitutes a temporal and spatial unit of meaning for the study of the history of place in the long term is not constant and uniform. Historical time does not tick off in exact and even units, and any moment of time intersects with other ones, as well as with undulating rhythms of meaning. As Michel Serres has observed about historical events, “[A historical] circumstance is thus polychromic, multitemporal, and reveals a time that is gathered together, and with multiple pleats.” One might say the same about place and how humans create different and often overlapping units of space in tandem with undulating pulses of time—and the study of both space and time together. Historians have to make choices about which moments of time will yield the most significant meaning and at the same time be aware of the “multiple pleats” that intersect in those moments. Although historians are time specialists, environmental historians have also had to take seriously the problem of spatial scale— with the understanding that meaningful historical space is also a combination of different spaces at different scales, each contributing to the meaning of the place at the core of them. Again, historians have to make choices about what units of time and space—and what places—will yield the most profound historical meaning.¹

So what is coastal Georgia? What is, in broad outlines, the environmental history of this place, and what choices might be the best ones for discerning this place in the long run? The essays in this volume collectively provide one answer. By way of introduction to all of these, we also might think about coastal Georgia in terms of islands, edges, and the globe and what they can tell us about the place that is coastal Georgia. Islands, interacting with them and thinking with them both, have been relative constants in the environmental history of this region. Edges, whether ecotones or meaningful geographical markers, have been particularly intense sites of meaning in this history and also yield useful clues about how to analyze that history. Human action has become increasingly global in the last half-century, and environmental changes in particular locales are often connected to changes on a much larger scale. By looking at the Georgia coast in a global context, we can not only see past connections with the Atlantic world or with global markets that have been important in driving environmental change in this particular region but also acquire insights into the future environmental history of coastal Georgia and some clues about how to tell stories about it.

Thinking about coastal Georgia in terms of islands, edges, and globe also allows us to understand it in terms of different scales of time and space, of the fluid interaction between local, regional, national, transnational, and global and of the daily, diurnal, seasonal, yearly, or longue durée, depending on the question we are asking. Even natural processes that shape the Georgia coast have operated on larger scales beyond the immediate environments of the coast, as well as on scales more minute than those picked up by the historian’s radar—for example, climate patterns that are rooted in changes in the global atmosphere as well as the movements of sands up and down island coasts. Looking at how islands, edges, and the globe have structured the environmental history of this region allows us to peel back the layers of meaningful time and scale and understand the human actions that have created them. All in the interest of coming to an understanding, for those outside the region as well as those deeply rooted in it, of what this place called coastal Georgia might be.

ISLANDS

Coastal Georgia is, first of all, a string of islands—islands just off the coast and at the edge of a continent. These are islands of a particular kind; they are separated enough from the rest of the coast to be genuine islands but close enough to share an identity with the tidewater coast. Indeed, the tides that sweep up and into coastal rivers and define the tidewater are themselves shaped by these islands. But islands are always different than the main—they are bounded, discrete, easy to mark out, and separate. They are not only places that favor retreat and preservation but have also historically been good to dream with, to think with, to ask questions with. Coastal Georgia and its islands have had a material reality that has anchored human interactions with the region, but they have also inspired and continue to inspire island dreams.

We do not know enough about the Natives who lived there when Europeans first arrived to easily speculate about how they perceived and reckoned with the coastal islands, except in material terms. The Guale and Timucuan people left shell middens on many of the islands, some of them extensive enough to be woven into the subsequent material life of the area, in the tabby houses that island planters later built for their slaves. These speak to a history of oyster feeds that in sheer volume alone tell us something about how the Guale used the islands. But the records archaeologists and historians have uncovered or re-created tell us little about whether their geography of islands had any relationship to ours—aside from a shred of information here and there in the historical record, which is more an elaboration of European cultural mores and perceptions than of Native ones. The Europeans who began to establish beachheads along the Georgia coast in the sixteenth century were another matter. As many scholars have pointed out, the idea of islands as well as the fact of them, as Europeans moved around the globe (always by water, of course), has had a powerful history.

Though the Franciscans who established missions on Georgia’s barrier islands appreciated the strategic value of island locations, these locations reinforced their insular millenarianism. An ideology that they hoped would eventually transform not just collected legions of unbaptized souls but indeed the world and create a new Christian paradise on earth was also served well and realized in earthly terms by the island missions on which they hoped to “reduce” Natives to better versions of humans. These missions, beginning with a settlement at St. Augustine in 1565, collected the Natives of Florida and up the coast in what is now Georgia into communities that were themselves islands in the wilderness. The Franciscans’ intent was not only ultimately to make good Catholics out of them but also to settle them into established communities supported by agriculture and to reduce them to images of the missionaries themselves. The Spanish relationship with Natives up and down the coast was one fraught with complex reciprocity, but it began with a colonizing vision for the development of insular integrity. We know more about the complexities of this relationship and about the reciprocity that was required of both parties than about the persistence of the original vision of islands of Christian “reduction.” But this was the first time Europeans used islands to think with in the history of this region.²

For Robert Montgomery, the Scottish nobleman who in the early eighteenth century conceived and promoted the Margravate of Azilia, an over-determined design for a perfect community in Georgia, the coastal islands were “Golden Islands,” lodestars for social perfection. In 1717 Montgomery proposed a colony of some four hundred square miles between the Savannah River and the Altamaha River in a tract titled A Discourse concerning the Design’d Establishment of a New Colony to the South of Carolina, in the Most Delightful Country of the Universe. The tract was a prospectus, but also served as an application for a grant of land from the Lords Proprietors of Carolina. Montgomery’s fanciful description of the land is as enthusiastic as his plans for a colony:

That nature has not blessed the world with any tract which can be preferable to it; that Paradise, with all her virgin beauties, may be modestly supposed at most but equal to its native excellencies. It lies in the same latitude with Palestine herself, that promised Canaan, which was pointed out by God’s own choice, to bless the labors of a favorite people. It abounds with rivers, woods and meadows. Its iron, and even gentle hills are full of mines, lead, copper, some of silver. ’Tis beautiful with odoriferous plants, green all the year. Pine, cedar, cypress, oak, elm, ash or walnut with innumerable other sorts, both fruit or timber trees, grow every where so pleasantly, that though they meet at top, and shade the traveller, they are, at the same time, so distant in their bodies, and so free from underwood or bushes, that the deer and other game, which feed in droves along these forests, may be often seen near half a mile between them.³

Montgomery got nowhere with his plan, and it was largely forgotten until historians recovered it in the nineteenth century and proclaimed it a curiosity (noted in the Savannah Republican and then the New York Times in 1869). But the plan for the Margravate of Azilia was just an initial exhalation of tidy English enthusiasm for islands of social perfection in this part of the world. Montgomery’s appellation “Golden Islands” has since then been preserved by way of three centuries of island wilderness exaltation.⁴

In the meantime, the British Trustees who founded the first colony of Georgia in 1732 took a larger step onto the mainland, with an enterprise that was more at the edge of a sea than the edge of a continent. In their vision, the islands were important for strategic purposes, as barriers against threats from the Atlantic. But in fact the Georgia Plan itself was an expression of insularism and was rooted in some of the same idealism that had inspired Montgomery’s proposal. Much has been written about this, but the characterization of colonial schemes in Georgia by historian Daniel Boorstin about a half-century ago is still the best general one: “Something about the fabled lushness and tropical wealth of Georgia inspired both extravagance and rigidity in the plans of those who wished to develop it. The supposed prodigality of the land seduced men to believe that they could cut the colony to their own pattern. These early planners combined a haziness about the facts of life in Georgia with a precision in their schemes for that life.”⁵

This mix of haziness and precision also had a utopian component, where dreams that required insularity and clearly marked boundaries found a geography with which they meshed. And this reinforced what historian John Phelan has called “romantic insularism” among European colonizers, “a drive for control, a European imperium, a universalizing Christian cosmology and a planetary geo-strategic discourse.” Europeans sought the kind of control that would strengthen ideological impositions and also secure their colonies. Island geography gave them this. At the same time, Europeans dreamed with islands. Phelan explains: “From the thirteenth century on, it was commonly believed that the most spectacular marvels and the most exotic lands were on far-off and mysterious islands.” As Europeans began to establish colonies, islands retained an otherworldly character as potential terrestrial paradises, but they also became places where Europeans imagined societies that were perfect alternatives to the troubled ones in which they lived. The most famous ideal commonwealths of the Renaissance, it is sufficient to note—those of More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis—were envisaged as mythical islands.⁶

Insular dreams about the potential of the Georgia coast faltered when they came up against the physical reality of coastal geography. The Georgia Plan failed partly because it was an unrealistic imposition on the geography of the region—the soils and climate did not turn out to be the blank but prodigiously productive slate that Oglethorpe and the Georgia planners believed it was. The first years of the colony were never as substantive as the Trustees dreamed they would be. As Paul Pressly has pointed out, Georgia in its first two decades was not an integrated colony with Savannah as its capital. It was a fragile archipelago of three small outposts—Savannah, Frederica, and Augusta—subsisting separately while connected to different parts of the larger Atlantic economy and to different imperial aims.⁷

The Georgia coast continued to be attractive to dreamers. Coastal geography provided a footing for the attempts of early nineteenth-century planters to assert control over people and place on coastal plantations. Even those residents who had to tangle regularly with the un-dreamlike realities of changing weather and difficult soils were encouraged by coastal Georgia geography in social visions that emphasized bounded communities of enduring balance. The plantation, one of the most significant social and economic units in the antebellum South, was conceived in general by planters as insular at the same time that plantations relied upon a larger capitalist economy for their survival and success. Plantations were small dominions for planters and intense nuclei of surveillance in the larger carceral system of slaveholding in the American South. Sea Island cotton planters on the islands and rice planters in the tide-water all sought control and more control—over the humans who labored for them, over wind and water and weather—in visions of absolutism on the one hand or of beneficent ...