The Carolinians met them at the threshold, and gave them refreshment
and substantial aid in laying out their city. The principal streets,
Bull, Whitaker, Drayton, St. Julian, and Bryan, were named for
prominent Carolina farmers who crossed the river with their servants
and helped the Georgians start life in the new world. The fact that
Carolina realized that she was building an outpost to protect her
against the Indians and Spanish does not detract from the cheerfulness
of this assistance. The early days of the enterprise were almost
Arcadian. Sir Robert Montgomery, who desired to erect an ideal
commonwealth upon this spot and call it “the Margravate of Azalia,”
could have conceived no more Utopian plan than that upon which the
colony actually commenced to grow. Land was divided into lots for each
freeholder under a strict agrarian law. The tracts were entailed,
preventing the estrangement of his holdings by an improvident man.
There was no chance for the rich to monopolize the country. The
landshark was unknown. Government bounty was prompt and liberal in
encouraging silk culture, and the seal of the colony contains the
altruistic motto, descriptive of the unselfish product of the silkworm,
_Non sibi, sed aliis_. The very land which Hernando De Soto and his
rapacious Spaniards had just ravished in their search for gold was now
claimed by these Christian socialists, who started the first work of
“benevolent assimilation” on this continent.
Eight years after the colony had been founded, a visitor to Savannah
described the progress made in a very clear way. Savannah was then
a mile and a quarter in circumference, situated upon a steep bluff
forty-five feet above the river. The houses were built of wood, Mr.
Oglethorpe’s being no finer than those of forty other freeholders.
Residences were good distances apart. To-day, Savannah is one of the
most closely constructed cities in the United States. Few houses
have gardens, and some of the streets present long rows of tenements
in maddening monotony. The squares designed by Oglethorpe for
market-places and assembly grounds are now good breathing-spots, which
serve in a measure to make up for the lack of private gardens. On one
of these squares stands the monument to General Nathanael Greene, of
Rhode Island, who, according to the historian, shared with Washington
the gratitude of the patriots of the Revolution. There are also shafts
to the memory of Sergeant William Jasper and Count Pulaski, who fell,
martyrs in the siege of Savannah, in 1779. The corner-stones of these
monuments were laid by no less a person than the Marquis de Lafayette.
[Illustration: THE JASPER MONUMENT.]
At the time of Mr. Francis Moore’s report there was a guardhouse along
the river where nineteen or twenty cannon were mounted, and continual
watch was kept by the freeholders. No lawyers were allowed to plead
for hire; no attorneys were licensed to make money; but, as in old
times in England, every man pleaded his own case. Where an orphan was
interested, or one could not speak for himself, there were persons “of
the best substance in town” appointed by the trustees to defend the
helpless, and that without fee or reward.
Silk culture was to be the principal industry of the young colony.
Italians were brought over from Piedmont to feed the worms and wind
the silk. Liberal bounty was given to encourage the Georgians. So
intent were the authorities upon this interest that they neglected the
cultivation of cotton, rice, indigo and more satisfactory crops. The
old filature was designed as a sort of normal school for instruction
in this art. This shed was built of rough boards, thirty-six feet long
and twenty feet wide, and had a loft, upon the flooring of which the
green cocoons were spread. Finally, the trustees, desiring to push this
industry, purchased the silk-balls from the growers and wound them at
their own expense. But all this outlay was for nothing. The Government
spent £1500 in machines, salaries, bounties and filatures, and raised
scarcely one thousand pounds of silk, and yet we are told that England
expected the experiment to realize five hundred thousand pounds and to
give employment to forty thousand people. To secure a high class of
skilful, self-reliant colonists, the trustees had barred out slavery
and rum. But the colony projected upon such lofty planes for some
reason did not prosper. The people clamored for slaves to cultivate
the rice fields, and for the West Indian traffic in sugar and rum to
build up their foreign trade. They fought the restricted land tenures;
in fine, they wanted to become plain, every-day colonists, like the
Carolinians and Virginians. They had been reinforced by the sturdy
Salzburgers, the canny Scots, the pious Moravians, and the thrifty
Hebrews, but still the humanitarian principles of the charter did not
insure them a thriving existence.
If silk culture failed, it is not a little remarkable that in the
ranks of this same people, one hundred years later, an invention was
perfected which gave rise to a new empire and enthroned as king the
best fibre of the field. The filature on St. Julian Street lost its
distinctive character, and became an assembly hall for the town meeting
and the militia muster; but upon the Savannah River, a few miles above
the city, Eli Whitney, the shrewd Connecticut contriver, worked out the
secret saws of the cotton-gin, and made Georgia and the whole South
opulent and powerful. The Piedmontese still spin their silk under their
own trees at home; but ten million bales of cotton annually whiten in
the suns and frosts, and to-day more than one million bales each year
are exported from Savannah alone. So two New England heroes, Nathanael
Greene and Eli Whitney, aided in protecting the people of Georgia from
a foreign foe and in building up their commercial supremacy.
No sketch of colonial Georgia is adequate which omits the name of
Tomochichi. This aged Creek was over ninety years old when he welcomed
Oglethorpe to his demesne. The loyalty of the venerable mico to his
white friends never faltered. He hailed them with all the grace and
amity of Montezuma, and guarded them against attacks from the tribes of
the interior. In his youth a great warrior, Tomochichi in the evening
of his life was noted for his wit, perception and generosity. When
he died, the colonists buried him with military honors in the public
square. Oglethorpe ordered a pyramid of stones to be erected over
his grave as a testimony of gratitude. It was only during the last
year that the Georgia Society of Colonial Dames of America caused a
granite boulder, rough-hewn from a Georgia quarry, to be placed in the
square where his remains are supposed to lie, commemorating his noble
character and heroic virtues.
[Illustration: THE BURIAL PLACE OF TOMOCHICHI.]
Hon. Walter G. Carlton, in speaking of the history of this city,
exclaimed:
“Beyond the clouds of furnace smoke and back of piers of cotton
bales arise the visions of old Savannah. What glories cluster about
her honored name! From out her past appears the noble form of him
who from the brilliant old world light and the gay splendor of the
English Court sought these untried shores, an exile in fair mercy’s
sake, and lent to the struggle of his fellow-men the strength of
that genius which sped his fame through all the fields of Europe;
and with him through the shadows of that far-off time comes a
dusky figure, a Christian who has never heard of God, a gentleman
into whose guiltless life had never come the influence of court or
fashion; brave with a conscience of honest aim; kindly with the
innate tendency of a noble nature; regal in that charity which loves
to give; a hero to whose virtues no tablet speaks; a Georgian in
whose memory no marble shaft lifts up its polished line; forgotten
of those he served; asleep in his nameless grave; but blessed be the
soil which has mingled with Tomochichi’s dust, the first of the great
Savannahians!”
On the original spot where the colonists established a house of worship
stands to-day the beautiful and classic proportions of Christ Church.
Here Wesley preached and Whitefield exhorted,--the most gifted and
erratic characters in the early settlement of Georgia. Wesley came
to the Georgia shores with a fervor amounting almost to religious
mysticism. He thought his mission was to Christianize the Indians.
No priest from Spain ever carried the Cross among the Aztecs and
Incas of Mexico and Peru with more zeal than the sanguine Wesley.
His career in Georgia was checkered and unfruitful. A man of great
ability and undoubted piety, he suspended his missionary work among the
Indians because he could not learn the language and never understood
their temperament. His ministry among the whites was marked by a
severity which made him unpopular. He seems to have been a martinet
in the pulpit,--as Colonel Jones calls him, “a _censor morum_ in the
community.” He became embroiled with his parishioners and left Savannah
between the suns. And yet Bishop Chandler of Georgia probably spoke
the words of truth from the pulpit of Wesley Monumental Church in
Savannah, in November, 1899, when he said that “no grander man ever
walked these historic streets than John Wesley.”
[Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH.]
[Illustration: OAKS AT BETHESDA ORPHANAGE, UNDER WHICH WHITEFIELD
PREACHED.]
George Whitefield was a preacher of such talent that Chesterfield
said he had never listened to so eloquent a man. Benjamin Franklin
regarded him as a model of logic and power. This good Oxford graduate
was actuated, like Oglethorpe, by the broadest benevolence when he
established an orphan home at Bethesda; but his zeal outran his slender
resources. He incurred heavy debts, mismanaged his laudable enterprise
until his spirit gave way under the discouraging situation. He died
in Newburyport, Massachusetts, while he was soliciting aid for his
cherished project. Whitefield desired to broaden the lines of his
Bethesda work, and to found a college for the Province of Georgia.
Had the colony given its revenues to such a plan as the people of
Massachusetts gave to the support of Harvard, Georgia might have
founded a great educational institution fifty years before Jefferson
started his work at Monticello, and a full century before Governor
Milledge established Franklin College in this State.
After twenty years, Georgia ceased to be a province under the trustees,
and became a colony under the King. As originally projected, the
enterprise was expensive. The great Oglethorpe returned to England and
spent his old age in peace. The trustees surrendered their charter, but
the old country had been good to the people. Ties with the motherland
were hard to break. This accounted for the fact that Georgia, the
youngest of the thirteen, was the last to sever her relations with
England and join in the Revolutionary movement. Her most prominent
men, James Habersham and Noble Jones, through their influence with
the Royalists and the popular Governor, Sir James Wright, held the
people down at least to a show of allegiance to the British Crown.
“It excites small wonder,” writes Col. Charles C. Jones, “that many
of the wealthiest and most influential citizens of Georgia should
have tenaciously clung to the fortunes of the Crown, and sincerely
deprecated all ideas of separation. Of all the American colonies, this
province had subsisted most generously upon royal bounty, and had been
the recipient of favors far beyond those extended to sister States.”
But if the old families were still faithful to England, there was one
spot where Republicanism was aflame. The parish of St. John had been
settled by New England people who had moved first to South Carolina
and then to Dorchester and Sunbury in Georgia. They were Puritans
with no sympathy for the Established Church or for the divine right of
kings. They loved liberty, and hated royalty. They were brave, resolute
and anxious to form a league against English oppression. Led by Dr.
Lyman Hall, a sturdy rice planter and prominent physician of Sunbury,
they responded with alacrity to the call from Boston. He went to the
Continental Congress in Philadelphia, May 13, 1775, and was admitted
to a seat as a delegate, not from the colony, but from the parish of
St. John. Until Georgia was fully represented Dr. Hall declined to vote
upon questions which were to be decided by the colonies. He, however,
participated in the debates, and predicted that the example shown by
his parish would soon be followed. A native of Connecticut, Dr. Hall
was a member of the Midway Congregation, where many patriots worshipped
liberty as a part of their religion. The rebel spirit of St. John, in
advance of the other parishes, received special recognition when the
Legislature afterwards conferred the name “Liberty County” upon this
section, where dwelt the descendants of New England people and the
Puritan independent sect.
[Illustration: GREAT SEAL OF GEORGIA IN COLONIAL DAYS.]
[Illustration: OLD FORT, WHERE POWDER MAGAZINE WAS SEIZED IN 1775.]
Dr. Hall’s prediction that the example of St. John’s would soon be
followed, was rapidly fulfilled. Events moved beyond the control of
the old Royalists. The elder Jones and the knightly Habersham about
this time passed away, and their impetuous young sons had already
made vigorous progress in the gathering struggle for independence.
The first liberty pole was elevated in Savannah, June 5, 1775. The
loyal men were even then celebrating the King’s birthday; but “the
Liberty Boys” spiked the cannon which were ready to be fired on this
royal anniversary, and rolled the dismantled guns to the bottom of
the bluff. About this time the powder magazine in the eastern part
of the city was seized and some of the ammunition shipped to Boston,
where it was used at the battle of Bunker Hill. In June, 1776, Major
Joseph Habersham, acting under the authority of the Council of Safety,
proceeded to the residence of the chief magistrate, General Wright. He
passed the sentinel at the door, and advancing to the Governor placed
his hand upon his shoulder and said, “Sir James, you are my prisoner.”
Georgia now plunged boldly into the Revolution. Her sufferings and
struggles, her prolonged captivity and final issuance from British
occupation in July, 1782, are familiar chapters of Revolutionary
history.
It is entirely creditable to James Edward Oglethorpe that he should
have refused to take control of the British armies against the American
people. The great soldier, who had fought under Prince Eugene of Savoy
and John of Argyle, declined to draw his sword to strike down the
young colonies he had done so much to build up. If England was his
mother, Georgia he considered his offspring. He had founded it and
protected it, and from the ramparts of Frederica had beaten back the
invading Spaniards at “Bloody Marsh.” He had sought no reward. The
highest philanthropy brought him to these shores to share the lot of
the emigrant. The friend of Hannah More, the companion of Pope, the
patron of Sothern, Dr. Johnson wished to write his life, and Edmund
Burke regarded him as the most extraordinary person of whom he had
ever read. There is no specific monument to Oglethorpe in Georgia. Why
should there be? A tablet in Cranham Church in England proclaims his
excellence; but here, in the language of Chas. C. Jones, “The Savannah
repeats to the Altamaha the stories of his virtues and his valor.”
[Illustration: GENERAL OGLETHORPE.]
Savannah during the Revolution recalls a story of blood and suffering.
If her people delayed in severing the bonds which united them to
the mother country, they struck promptly and boldly when the issue
came, and were zealous throughout their long period of captivity in
opposing the forces of his Majesty’s government. After the colonists
had seized the powder from the royal magazine, and had erected the
liberty pole on King George’s birthday, they went actively to work in
fortifying the city against the British troops. In February, 1776,
when the English war-ships and transports sailed up the river, they
were met by the patriots with a galling volley, and their fleet was
afterwards scattered by a fire-ship set adrift from the American shore,
communicating the flames to the British boats and sending their men and
sailors through the marshes in flight. On the 29th of December, 1778,
General Howe, the commander of the Americans, was defeated by Colonel
Campbell. The English and Hessian soldiers marched through a small
path in the swamp, and fell suddenly upon the flank and rear of the
Americans, consisting of but nine hundred men, while Colonel Campbell’s
forces, which had been landed at Tybee Island, numbered three thousand
five hundred. The remainder of General Howe’s army escaped into South
Carolina, and the British took possession of Savannah, which they held
for three years and a half. In October, 1779, a bloody battle was
fought at Savannah, but the British again triumphed over the allied
forces of the French and Americans. Count D’Estaing arrived off Tybee
with thirty-five ships and five thousand men. General Lachlan McIntosh
and Count Casimir Pulaski marched down from Augusta and formed a
junction with D’Estaing. The engagement took place at Spring Hill
redoubt, now the site of the Georgia Railway. Count D’Estaing was shot,
the noble Pulaski was killed, and the gallant Jasper, who endeavored
to plant the American flag upon the redoubt, fell mortally wounded.
Shortly afterwards, the French fleet sailed away, and the American
forces were left to harass the enemy from time to time. This was done
in splendid style by General Anthony Wayne, the Rough Rider of the
Revolution, who dashed into the British with his flying columns and
inflicted damage day by day. Finally, on the 11th of July, 1782, the
English surrendered to General Wayne, who entered the city and rescued
it from its long captivity. A memorial tablet, placed in position
at the old site of Tondee’s tavern, marks the spot where the early
patriots, braving violence abroad, and even derision at home, erected
their liberty pole, while the frowning battlements of a model bastion
commemorate the name of Pulaski.
[Illustration: COUNT CASIMIR PULASKI.]
At the siege of Savannah the city held only about four hundred houses
and less than one thousand people. George Washington, who visited
the city in 1790, writes in his diary that the place was “high and
sandy,” that the town was surrounded with “rich and luxuriant rice
fields,” that the harbor was “filled with square-rigged vessels,” and
that the chief trade was tobacco, indigo, hemp, lumber and cotton.
General Washington was received with every evidence of honor, and
the Chatham Artillery was by him presented with handsome guns. This
memorable organization, second only to the Ancient and Honorables, of
Hartford, fired a salute to George Washington, as they afterwards did
to Presidents Monroe, Arthur, Cleveland and McKinley upon their visits
to this city. The Chathams served in the Civil War and in the late
Spanish-American struggle.
The first steamship ever built in the United States was projected
and owned in this city. It was named the _Savannah_, and in April,
1819, sailed for Liverpool, completing the voyage across the sea in
twenty-two days. Off Cape Clear the _Savannah_ was signalled as a
vessel on fire, and a cutter was sent to Cork for her relief. Thus
Savannah perfected not only the cotton-gin, but steam navigation,
which revolutionized the industry and commerce of the world. Savannah
continued to prosper down to the period of the Civil War, having
completed the Georgia Central Railway, the longest and most important
line in the South and built up large foreign and domestic commerce at
her port.
[Illustration: FORT PULASKI.]
When the troubles leading up to the Civil War opened, Savannah did not
wait for the State of Georgia to secede, but, true to the traditions
of Revolutionary ancestry, seized Fort Pulaski on the 3d of January,
1861. The State convention, which framed a new constitution for
Georgia, assembled in Savannah on the 7th of March, and the flag
of the Confederacy was thrown to the breeze from the United States
Custom-House with a salute of seven guns, one for each State of the
young nation. The moving spirit of secession in Savannah, the “Mad
Anthony Wayne” of the State, was Francis S. Bartow, a young man
who, failing to receive permission from the State authorities to go
to Virginia, summoned his company and went without orders, sending
back in defiance the message to Governor Brown: “I go to illustrate
Georgia.” He was killed with several of his command at the first battle
of Manassas, so that Savannah received the baptism of blood at the
very beginning of the Civil War. In November, 1861, General Robert E.
Lee made his headquarters in Savannah and inspected its defences. He
pronounced Fort Pulaski impregnable, and said its walls, which were
seven and a half feet thick, would withstand the heaviest cannon. The
rifled guns of large calibre, however, had not then been tested, and
their penetrating power was unknown. As a matter of fact, the fort was
breached by Union batteries from Tybee Island in one day. On the 11th
of April, 1862, General Gillmore, who had constructed the fort for
the Government at a cost of $500,000, reduced it at a range of from
two thousand to three thousand five hundred yards. One remarkable fact
about the defence of Fort Pulaski was that the Confederates allowed
the Northern fleet to sail back of the fort through Wall’s Cut, and
interrupt communication with the city. It was through this identical
channel that the British reinforced their troops in 1779, the French
fleet failing to guard the narrow pass. In July, 1863, the Confederate
ironclad ship _Atlanta_, fitted out in Savannah, sailed for Warsaw
Sound to meet the monitors _Weehawken_ and _Nahant_. The _Atlanta_
ran aground, and was shot to pieces by her antagonists. On December
26, 1864, General Sherman’s army captured the city, eighty-six years,
almost to the day, after the British captured it from General Howe.
Savannah then contained about twenty thousand people. To-day it has
over sixty thousand, is the largest and busiest seaport on the South
Atlantic, ships more than a million bales of cotton a year, and handles
more than a million packages of naval stores. At Tybee Roads, where
Oglethorpe first anchored his good ship _Ann_; where the English
fleet halted before attacking the town; where D’Estaing moored his
French frigates and waited for the Americans to join him; where the
colonists captured the powder ship from the English, the first naval
engagement of the Revolution; where the sturdy Southern ironclad met
the invulnerable monitors of the Union, ships of every flag now ride
and rest. Not alone the little “square-rigged vessels” which Washington
saw, but big ocean steamships, of which the _Savannah_ was the pioneer,
now plow their way to foreign and domestic ports. The shipping of
Savannah exceeds that of all the South Atlantic and Gulf ports from
Baltimore to Mobile.
[Illustration: R. M. CHARLTON, POET, JURIST, U. S. SENATOR.]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
MOBILE
“THE GULF CITY”
BY PETER J. HAMILTON
Perhaps Mobile is the only American city which has seen five flags wave
as emblems of the peaceful rule of as many civilized powers. She has
been French, English, Spanish, American and Confederate by turn, and
her street names perpetuate her varied story. In the original Creole
limits, we find Dauphin and Royal, of the French era; Government,
St. Joseph, and Conception, of the Spanish; just without, come many
American names like Jackson, Franklin, Monroe, and Congress; and
the Mexican War produced Monterey; while Beauregard, Davis Avenue,
and Charleston Street, among others, point to Confederate times and
feelings. The Latin element is merged in the Teutonic, but it is still
shown by the narrow thoroughfares, in the character of the people,
and in some of their institutions and diversions. Steam, electricity,
sewers, waterworks, shell roads and handsome buildings have caused a
long and romantic history to be half forgotten. Let us recall its chief
events.
The region had a story even back of the European. Not only are Dauphine
Island and the Portersville coast at the mouth of the bay fringed with
banks of oyster-shell, but on the marsh islands of the Mobile delta,
and in the swamps adjoining, one often finds huge piles of clam-shells
and high mounds of earth. These sometimes contain human bones and
ornaments, and point to a large native population before the white man
came.