fairly conquered and chained to our car, and Georgia restor-
ed to honor, prosperity and greatness.

But let me not run before my work. In due time, if
strength hold Out equal to my task, this great question,
which constantly looms up to view, will be reached and here
and there handled as I may best be able. It is, indeed, a
question of appalling magnitude and difficulty, but one,
nevertheless, from which we may not shrink, one towards
the auspicious solution of which, every son of Georgia, how-
ever humble, is bound to bring his mite of aid.



CHAJPTEH II.



MIDDLE GEORGIA (continued) AND THE NEGRO.

Besides the very superior character of the country and the
first colonists and their descendants, there were other causes
that lent their aid to the rapid peopling and improvement of
the several successive new Purchases, as they were called,
that from time to time accrued to Middle Georgia from its
beginning at the acquisition of the'original county of Wilkes,
down to its finishing enlargement by the second treaty of the
Indian Springs in 1825. Noticeable among these causes was
the lucky length of the intervals of time that elapsed be-
tween the different Purchases, sufficient to enable each new
Purchase to become well peopled, prosperous and solidified
before it had to encounter competition for settlers with other
subsequently acquired Indian lands. To which add the ad-
vantages each new Purchase enjoyed in its turn from its
immediate contiguity along its whole eastern side to older,
well advanced settlements ; also that each new acquisition



MIDDLE GEORGIA. 13

as it came in its order, although not very small, was yet not
larger than was wanted for the fresh tide of immigration that
was waiting to flow into it, and did flow into it at once
and fill it up with an excellent population from the very
outset.

Furthermore, whilst adverting to these favoring causes,
let us not forget that capital one the humble, laborious,
unpaid hands by which most of the harsh, heavy work was
done, and without which such celerity of reclamation and
improvement would have been impossible. Let not the
poor negro and the important part performed by him, be left
without special and in the phrase of the schools honorable
mention. Indeed not only in Middle Georgia in the several
installments of its early settlement, but everywhere and at
all times in the South, he was most useful arid assistant, and
justly acquired a hold more lasting than the relations out of
which it grew, on the kindly feelings of those whom he
served so long, so loyally and so well. How it is going to
be with Southern men and women a generation or two hence
and afterwards, cannot now be foreseen. It may be that
they will get to be quite as dead and unsympathetic towards
the negro as the negroes themselves were wont of old to feel
that Northern men and women were in comparison with
those of the South. This undesirable result is certainly that
to which the new order of things seems to tend. But as for
us, who were born and bred in a better day and under more
propitious relations and influences than now prevail, such
deadness and want of sympathy may be pronounced impos-
sible so long as the negro continues to deport himself in his
new state of freedom no worse than he has thus far done, in
Georgia at least. W would be narrow, nay ! even little in
soul, if we did not look with large charity on the demorali-
zation which the great shock and change through which he
has passed, have undoubtedly wrought in him. For alas !
are not the evidences thick around us of our having also un-
dergone a demoralization not less great and signal, from the
mighty shock and change, to which we likewise, have been



14 MIDDLE GEORGIA.

subjected. Verily, kindness for the negro, a humane and
friendly feeling towards him, a true indescribable sympathy
with him, began with the lives, imbued the infancy and
childhood, ran on with the growing years of the present
generation of Southern men and women, and became so in-
timately entwined with their very natures as to be ineradica-
ble except by his own egregious and incorrigible delinquency
and worthlessness. It is our true interest that he should do
well, and attain to a higher level in morals, merit and intel-
ligence. Never shall we be disposed to underrate him, or to
withhold from him a generous credit for all that he shall
deserve in the future, any more than a just remembrance of
all he has done in the past.

He is emphatically the child of the Sun, born of his most
burning rays, and happily framed to live and labor,
strengthen and exult under his fiercest glare, in the most
firery climes. He is also eminently submissive, cheerfully
servile in his nature, and apt and docile in a high degree in
things that hold rather of the hand than of the mind. In
all respects he met our Southern agricultural and domestic
needs most admirably ; and certainly among the great ser-
vices he rendered us, that in which he was most important,
was the conquest of the forest and the subjugation of rude
nature to the axe, the plow or the hoe. It is impossible to
look back on the immense amount of hard, heavy, valuable
work done by him in first opening the country for culture,
and afterwards as a life-long laborer in the very fields clear-
ed by him, and then reverse the picture and gaze upon the
widespread ruin he was subsequently made the involuntary,
unwitting cause, (for he was the cause of the war and all its
consequences) of bringing upon the scenes of his previous
useful industry, without being painfully impressed in rela-
tion to him. How strikingly has it been his lot to be forced
to be in the beginning, a blessing, in the end a curse to us
and our land ! Yes ! forced both in the one case and the
other. And now he has become a sore problem indeed ; a
warring, unnatural, morbific element in society, incapable of



MIDDLE GEORGIA. 15

assimilation with the body politic, upon which he has been
hitched, as it were, by sheer extraneous violence, and by
a tie quite as baleful and criminal as that by which the fa-
bled tyrant Mezentius. chained the bodies of the dead to
the living. Can the living ever impart life and health to
the dead through a bond so revolting ? Will not the dead
rather impart their own death and putrifaction to the living?
And do they who, on the horrid maxim that there can be
nothing wrong towards the vanquished, have inflicted this
monstrous wrong on us and on human nature itself, and who
are still exulting over their helpless victims, do they cheat
themselves with the idea that God is no longer just, and that
the terrible curse of bad, wicked Government which they
have vindictively fastened on us]and our posterity, will not
react in some way on themselves and make them and theirs
writhe in long retributive agony under the eventual conse-
quences of their unprecedented crime? For how can that
great mass of ignorance, depravity and shameless unfitness,
which they have clothed with the awful power of Government
throughout the South, be prevented from working its deadly
effects in National as well as in State affairs ; from sending
corruption and ruin through the body politic of the Union, as
well as through those of its oppressed and outraged Southern
members ?

Such is the appalling problem now before the whole coun-
try, and that must needs be worked out for everlasting weal
or woe in reference to the negro ; whose mission upon earth,
whether viewed as he is and always has been in Africa, or as he
was and is in America, is truly one of the dreariest and most
impenetrable of the mysteries of God. Nor is it rendered the
less dreary and impenetrable by recent events in this great
nation. In no age of the world has he ever emerged from
barbarism and slavery on his own continent. Hideous
land ! where children are the slaves of their parents, and
daily sold by them into slavery to others, without a pang !
where every subject is the slave of his Prince or Chief,
legally saleable by him to any purchaser that comes or can



16 MIDDLE GEORGIA.

be found, just like an ox or an elephant's tooth! Where
every man, woman and child is liahle at any moment to be
seized and sold into slavery, singly or in droves, by any horde
of robbers that can succeed in catching them by night or by
day, and where life is as little respected as liberty !

Such is the negro's immemorial normal condition in
Africa. And who shall say that Heaven in revealing the
American continent, did not design it as an asylum for him,
too, as well as for the European ? But what sort of asylum
and an asylum for him in what character ? Not certainly
in that of a freeman, a citizen, a voter, an office-holder or
legislator, for all which he was wretchedly unfit, but as
an asylum for him in the character or status, which attached
to him in his own country, and in which alone he could be
anything but a nuisance in ours. And if he did not escape
entirely from the miseries and debasement of his African
condition by being brought to these Southern States and
planted here in his African status, he at least escaped from
them in large part and as far as he was worthy of escaping,
or as it was for his good to escape. He exchanged a worse
and a barbarous for a better a civilized form of slavery, an
exchange which was at once a blessing to him, to us, and to
mankind, and to which he was not only indebted for a strik-
ing betterment of his condition, physical, moral, religious,
but for all of civilization and Christianity he has ever at-
tained. It is undeniable, that instead of being worsted and
debased by falling into our hands, his condition has been
ameliorated and his nature elevated. Under our beneficent
despotism, he was reclaimed from the grossest barbarism and
superstition and trained up to a degree of civilization and
religious culture from which it is yet uncertain whether the
gift of freedom will carry him up higher or drag him down lower.
Behold then what the Southern system of slavery has done
for the negro ! And yet Christendom has permitted itself to
be shocked and stultified in regard to it and to be kindled
into an insane rage against us because of our supposed in-
human and unchristian wrongs towards him. Strange



MIDDLE GEORGIA. 17

inhumanity, which betters the condition of its victims !
Strange unchristianess which christianizes those on whom it
is practiced !

The South has a stake incomparably greater than all the
world besides in the tremendous experiment that has been,
by mere force of hostile arms, set on foot on her soil and
is now proceeding in her midst and at her sole cost, yet un-
der a vindictive, unenlightened exterior guidance and direc-
tion. It will be the miracle of miracles if it succeeds. If by
the blessing of Heaven, overruling the crimes and folly of
men, such miracle should happen, our dear Southern land
may hope eventually to rise from her ruin, a new creation, a
veritable reconstruction, a true re-growth of order, strength,
virtue and prosperity. But should the experiment fail, St.
Domingo, Jamaica and sundry miserable, mestizo, anarchic
Republics of Spanish America have already supplied exam-
ples of what is to be our lasting doom. Moreover, if it fails,
the world will soon witness the beginning of a mighty reac-
tion on the whole subject of negro slavery. The demonstra-
tion will then be deemed perfect of the negro's congenital
and hopeless unsuitableness for freedom, and men will re-
lapse everywhere into the old and for ages uncontroverted
opinion that slavery is the best and therefore a just condition
for him, and that is by far the most useful disposition that
can be made of him in reference to the general interests of
mankind. Again, over-crowded Europe and North America
will be compelled, a century or two hence, by that necessity
which is its own and only law, to turn wistful eyes towards
the vast tropical and semi-tropical wilds of this continent,
and to ponder the question how they may best be made
available for the habitation and sustenance of their redun-
dant millions. And then in case the grand trial now proceed-
ing here of the fitness of the negro for freedom, shall result
against him in the judgment of an enlightened, catholic
public opinion, negro slavery will rise up stronger than ever
in men's minds, and the negro aid will be once more invok-
ed to solve the distressing problem of American and Europe-



18 MIDDLE GEORGIA.

an wants by a life of compulsory labor. Compulsory, but
not incompensated or unregulated, it is to be hoped. For
there is no condition in society more admitting of regulation
and modification than slavery. And surely an intelligent
and healthy philanthrophy, aided by the growing wisdom
and experience of Christendom, will be able to find means of
reconciling humanity and justice to the negro with his en-
forced civilization and usefulness in the world.

Why should nations have more bowels for the negro than
for their own people ? Is tenderness for their own citizens or
subjects a characteristic of Governments when it conflicts
with their policy, passions or ambition? Do they not
at their pleasure tear their own men of youthful and
middle age away from poor old parents, from dependant
wives and children, and drive them at the point of the bay-
onet, into a military slavery, compared with which, that of
our by-gone cotton and tobacco fields and rice and sugar
plantations might well be hailed as an Elysium ? And do
they not pitilessly force them into the front ranks of battle
as "food for gun powder/ 'whilst the magnates and leaders for
whom they are mangled and butchered, and to whom all the
fruits of their immolation are to enure, skulk at home or far
in the rear, safe contemplators of the scene? And if from
actual war and its perils they chance to come out with their
lives, what is then their fate ? They are either kept under
arms still as engines of tyranny over their own countrymen
in times of peace, or they are sent back to their homes and
beggared firesides to encounter squalid poverty and grinding
taxation. Such is the treatment by all nations of their own
people when, they chose to call for their service as soldiers.
With this more than analogous case, so unanswerable and
so suggestive, constantly before our eyes, it is certainly
not very illogical to suppose that the time will return when
the negro will be forced to work as well as the soldier to
fight, if he will network otherwise, particularly in climes
under whose fervid suns, he and he alone has been consti-
tuted by the Almighty capable of the perennial labor



MIDDLE GEORGIA. 19

which a state of civilization and civilized agriculture alike
require. How monstrous, that cultivated and Christian
men throughout all Christian nations should be continually
subjected, by millions on millions, to be sacrificed, brutalized
and demonized by a horrid sevitude in the bloody trade of
war, and that at the same time and in the same nations, the
slaves and savages of Africa should be the pets of a fatuous
philanthrophy which cries out against their being made to
submit to a system of labor and discipline humane and be-
neficent, civilizing and christianizing in its character and
effects ?

For the present, however, and for a long time to come, if
ever, it is quite impossible to hope that the negro's useful-
ness among us, as compared with former times, can be re-
stored. His future, as well as our own, is involved in dark-
ness and anxiety. Fortunate will it be for his posterity
and ours, if any length of years shall ever bring about mu-
tual relations as favorable for both sides as those which war
has destroyed. The same state of relations can never,
should never be attempted to be established again. Their
attempted re-establishment would lead to a shock and ruin
even worse than that which has been the result of their sud-
den and forcible destruction. All we can do is to wait for
time and circumstances, to enable us from the present
ruin to work out the best possible reconstruction for the
remote future. In the meantime, the mind cannot help re-
curring often, especially when in its mournful moods, to our
never-to-be-repeated Past, a Past that was in its day griev-
ously misunderstood by the outside world, and which
abounded in many things that will long be cherished as
pleasant remembrances, as well by the negro as by the white
man, among which there will be none more pleasant than
those connected with their commingled life and labors in the
several new settlements, by which from time to time Middle
Georgia was by successive leaps expanded and developed
into her full richness and beauty.



20 MIDDLE GEORGIA AND LAND LOTTERY.



CHAPTER III.



MIDDLE GEORGIA (continued) AND THE LAND
LOTTERY SYSTEM.

But not only was it the negro and the other causes I have
noticed that imparted extraordinary animation and impulse
to the new settlements in Middle Georgia in their infancy.
Nay, say not in their infancy, for infancy except in its better
and lovelier sense, they never had. They burst forth full
grown, panoplied and almost perfect from their very birth.
This interesting truth I had long and large opportunities of
personally observing and knowing. From the time I was
a small boy, I was much in Putnam county on visits to rela-
tions, who had moved thither from Hancock. Putnam was
then but a few years old and I continued to be a frequent
visitor there throughout my boyhood, youth and early man-
hood, enjoying all the time the best means of seeing and
observing. Indeed, the last half of the year 1818, I lived
in Eatonton, then one of the most beautiful, flourishing and
refined up-country towns the State ever boasted, with a clas-
sical Academy of the highest order and an overwhelming
patronage, at the head of which was Dr. Alonzo Church,
subsequently for many years President of Franklin College.
At the same time there was a Young Ladies Academy of not
less repute and merit. As a seat of education Eatonton was
at that date second only to Mt. Zion in Hancock, the re-
nowned Seminary of that extraordinary man, the Elder Be-
man Franklin College, which had gone down during the
war of 1812, under the Presidency of Dr. Brown, being now
again in a state of utter collapse, which lasted some two
years, consequent upon the death, in 1817, of the new Pres-.



MIDDLE GEORGIA AND LAND LOTTERY. 2 1

ident, the long and deeply lamented Dr. Finley. In my
after years I have often thoughtfully recalled all I ever saw
or knew of Putnam county, from my earliest to my latest
acquaintance and observation there, and compared the coun-
ty and people as known to me from first to last with what I
have seen and known of the best agricultural districts and
I populations in and out of Georgia, and I can aver that if in
all the characteristics of a sterling civilization, Putnam
county ever had a novitiate or minority, it had passed away
and all traces of it had vanished before my knowledge of her
commenced. And what was true of Putnam was equally so
of much the larger portions of Baldwin, Jones, Jasper and
Morgan, for they had like advantages of soil, climate, &c.,
with Putnam and a like superior population of first settlers.
Again, the settlement of Monroe county and the country be-
tween the Ocmulgee and Flint rivers, began in 1822, having
been acquired from the Indians the year before by the first
treaty at the Indian Springs. In the beginning of 1827, I
transferred my residence to Monroe, as a centre for the prac-
tice of my profession, and soon became well acquainted with
the people, the county and all pertaining to them. I was
greatly struck. I had seen by this time a good deal of the
world, both in the North and the South, and was qualified
to make comparisons and I could not get over my admiration
of the growth and advancement of Monroe county. Such,
indeed, was already her advancment that there was no room
left for further progress except in clearing more land and
gradually substituting fine framed and painted houses for
the not less commodious log structures, which are necessari-
ly the earliest style of building in all new countries. She
had already a very dense population of the very best charac-
ter, with the smallest possible admixture of bad or inferior
elements. She had, too, plenty of well built churches of
ample size, at convenient points throughout the county, and
a stated ministry and regular services and a full attendance
of worshipers in every church. Good schools, likewise, she
had in every neighborhood, and he who attended the gath-



MIDDLE GEORGIA AND LAND LOTTERY.

erings of her people at churches, military reviews, elections
and other public occasions, or saw them as a friend, visitor
or stranger, in the sacred precincts of their homes, could not
help being impressed with their moral worth and tone, their
manifest respectability and intelligence, as well as their ob-
vious worldly thrift, industry and prosperity. What is thus
said of Monroe was applicable also to the surrounding new
counties though not in altogether so strong a degree. For
Monroe was considered the crack county of that Purchase.
And now lastly, 1827 was the first year of the settlement of
the then new territory between the Flint and Chattahoochee,
and from that time I took my semi-annual rounds for several
years in the practice of law through a number of new coun-
ties and I can affirm from thorough personal observation
that Troup, Meriwether, Coweta, Harris, Talbot and Musco-
gee never knew a low, coarse, or rude state of society. They
stood from the very outset fully abreast with the best por-
tions of the State in all those things which constitute the
pride and glory, the lovliness and charm of virtuous and
flourishing agricultural communities. How could it have
been otherwise? Their immigration was mainly from the
finest parts of the State, homogeneous, and composed of peo-
ple equal in wealth, culture and all other advantages to the
best whom they left behind, just as had been the case with
the first settlers of the several preceding new Purchases fur-
ther East. Families of substance and even of affluence, of
the highest standing, accustomed to all that is desirable in
life, to all that wealth, education and their adjuncts could
bring, sold out and quit their old homes and hied to the
new virgin wilds with absolute alacrity and enjoyment.
And why? Because they knew beforehand amongst what
sort and how superior a sort of people they would at once
find themselves in their new locations, and that all the ad-
vantages and blessings of the older settlements they were
leaving would be without delay transplanted along with
them. Moreover, and it was an important item in the case,
they went attended by their happy gangs of hardy negroes,



MIDDLE GEORGIA AND LAND LOTTERY. 23

their faithful, trained servants of the field and fireside, who
quite unconscious themselves of the much exaggerated hard-
ships and discomforts of a new country, were certainly a
means of making them unfelt by their masters and mis-
tresses and hy those whom they were apt to love still more,
their young masters and young mistresses.

But I must hid adieu to this seductive digression into
which I have rather abruptly fallen at the moment when I
was approaching another topic of a very different nature and
which I must not allow myself to neglect. I allude to the
Land Lottery System, a device ior converting public lands
into private ownership, so novel, peculiar and curious and
so full, besides, of practical consequences, that it would be
a capital omission not to notice it treating of the original
peopling of the trans-Oconee country. For it was there the
system had its origin early in the present century, being
first applied by an Act of the Legislature in the year 1803 to
the then new Purchase, being the first beyond the Oconee,
from whence it was afterwards extended to all our subse-
quent territorial acquisitions wherever situated, as they from
time to time came to hand. And, as it so happened that
none of them were East of the Oconee, that river thus be-
came, in addition to its other historical pretensions, the
dividing line forever along its whole length between the
portions of the State organized and settled under this new
system and those peopled under the old Head Right mode.
All East of the Oconee is Head Right, all West Land Lottery.
Why the old mode so long in use in Geor'giaand everywhere
else in Anglo-America, was abandoned by our fathers and
the plan of the Land Lottery adopted in its stead, is cer-