Saving Savannah

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

List of Maps

Map of Savannah, Civil War Era

ANTEBELLUM

PROLOGUE: I Am in the Hands of Kidnappers

CHAPTER ONE: Sell and Buy and Sell and Buy

CHAPTER TWO: Our Common Master in Heaven

CHAPTER THREE: A Demon Ready with Knife and Torch

CHAPTER FOUR: Let’s See Her Face

IN BELLO

CHAPTER FIVE: An Abiding Hope in Every Breast

CHAPTER SIX: As Traitors, They Go Over to the Enemy

CHAPTER SEVEN: Are We Free?

CHAPTER EIGHT: We Have Dyed the Ground with Blood

POSTBELLUM

CHAPTER NINE: The Way We Can Best Take Care of Ourselves

CHAPTER TEN: For I Have a Great Deal to Do

CHAPTER ELEVEN: A Dream of the Past

CHAPTER TWELVE: To Have a Big Meeting, a Big Shooting, or Big Blood

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Present Deranged System of Labor

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: You Will See Them Studying

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: I Came to Do My Own Work

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: When You Leave Set Fire to All the Houses

EPILOGUE: Those Peaceful, Powerful Weapons

Appendices

Appendix One

Appendix Two

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Photo Insert

A Note About the Author

Also by Jacqueline Jones

Copyright

For my students

MAPS

Map of Savannah, Civil War Era

Lloyd’s Topographical Map of Georgia

Sketch of the Atlantic Coast of the United States

The Defense of Savannah

General Sherman’s Campaign War Map

I Am in the Hands of Kidnappers

ON FEBRUARY 21, 1851, a young enslaved bricklayer named Thomas Simms stowed away on a ship scheduled to set sail from Savannah, Georgia, the following morning. In planning the time and place of his liberation, Simms had calculated well. That Friday the docks were humming with the sights and sounds of the river port’s high season. Weary seafaring passengers disembarked, gingerly stepping onto dry land and marveling at the commotion around them. Tied up at the wharves were fourteen steamers and more than three times that many tall ships—barques, brigs, and schooners, their masts rising far above the muddy waters of the Savannah River. Clutching bills of lading, young clerks shouted out to ship captains, and invoked the names of the city’s prominent cotton factors and merchants. Along the docks, draymen positioned their heavy wooden two-wheeled carts laden with staples transported from the railroad depot on the west side of town. Enslaved laborers lifted their voices in the backbreaking rhythms of call-and-response work songs, punctuated with cries and groans—Hooray, ’o-ray! Together with white longshoremen, they strained to stow piles of wooden planks, bushels of rice, and bales of cotton into the holds of ships bound for ports as far away as England and France. Private conveyances, from simple hacks to resplendent carriages, awaited those new arrivals who could afford a ride up the steep cobblestone drayways to the city perched atop the bluff above. The weather was mild, delightful, and the docks were bustling—a perfect day for a fugitive bent on freedom.¹

In the midst of this busy Friday, a docked steamship was the site of a brief but novel ceremony. That afternoon, a preacher from the Mariner’s Church descended the bluff to the docks and boarded the Florida. There on deck the clergyman administered baptism to an infant who had been born on the ship en route from New York three days before. Using a miniature lifeboat as a baptismal basin, he christened the baby Florida, the name her parents had chosen for her. Of the child, one of the ship’s officers observed, she first opened her eyes to the light of heaven on the water, an emblem of purity, a sign that her voyage through life would be as successful as those of the noble steamship after which she was called, had thus far been.²

It was around this time that Thomas Simms furtively boarded the brig M. & J. C. Gilmore. The ship had been in port for eighteen days, and now it was fully loaded and ready to sail. The following day, Saturday, the vessel left for Boston; Thomas Simms had freed himself. The Gilmore would take him eighteen miles down the Savannah River, conduit of spirits and source of life for the Georgia lowcountry, and then bear him up the coast to Boston and free soil. Tucked away for two weeks, Simms had no chance to see the light of heaven on the water that had greeted the little white girl named Florida; but he had managed to embark on a new life, however short-lived his triumph.

Simms’s escape that day in February bore all the marks of shrewd planning, a long-standing plot to be executed at the precise time when conditions were right. Just a few days earlier had come initial, sketchy reports about the rescue of a fugitive slave in Boston by a group of daring abolitionists. In the columns of Savannah newspapers and on the city’s street corners, the late disgraceful proceedings in Boston vied for people’s attention with reports that a touring circus celebrity had been arrested recently by the local police. Tom Thumb, a fifteen-pound, twenty-eight-inch-high eighteen-year-old, had been drumming up business for his show by driving his miniature carriage around town. When he veered onto a city sidewalk, the police arrested him for violating local ordinances, much to the amusement of nearly everyone but the mayor and chief of police. For his part, Tom Thumb could not have hoped for better publicity.³

Of the seven ships that left Savannah and went to sea on Saturday the 22nd, others were bound for New York, Providence, and Baltimore. But clearly, Simms had chosen Boston as his destination for a reason. By this time all of Savannah was talking about the rescue of the black man Shadrach Minkins, as the local papers gave over increasing numbers of column inches to detailed reports of the incident and its political fallout. On Saturday, February 15, Boston authorities had arrested the runaway slave, now in violation of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, passed by Congress and designed to turn all Northerners into slave catchers. Later that day a group of black Bostonians had assumed the role of unruly liberators when they stormed the federal courthouse and, in the middle of a judicial hearing, seized Minkins and swiftly rushed him to safety. When Thomas Simms left Savannah one week later, Minkins was already in Canada. Savannah authorities condemned the Boston riot, with a negro mob flouting federal law and depriving law-abiding Southerners of their slave property. The editor of the Savannah Republican could hardly find the words, or the typeface, to express his outrage: "The City of Boston is a black speck on the map—disgraced! By the lowest—the meanest, THE BLACKEST kind of NULLIFICATION!!! Boston stood condemned for nullifying" a law of Congress.⁴

The Minkins rescue no doubt inspired Thomas Simms with hope for a future in Boston as a free man. Too, it was likely that even before this he had heard of another slave fugitive—Henry, who escaped in December 1849 by securing the job of a French cook on board a brig that sailed between Savannah and Boston. In March of the following year, when the ship returned to the Georgia port, Henry was still on board; his subsequent capture represented a modest triumph for Savannah authorities and one that garnered headlines in the local papers. One published account of Henry’s recklessness suggested a larger conspiracy that made the water route between Savannah and Boston a surreptitious pathway to freedom. Noted a reporter: [Henry’s] return to Savannah can only be accounted for in his desire to carry off some of his comrades or relations. In a foreshadowing of the Simms incident, when arrested [Henry] affected to have no knowledge whatever of his master—We are informed that the Captain of the vessel was entirely unacquainted with the fact of the man being a slave.⁵

On the morning of Saturday, February 22, 1851, a local street celebration provided the diversion Thomas Simms needed to make good his waterborne escape from Savannah. The day after he had secreted himself aboard the Gilmore, virtually the whole city was basking in sunshine and watching the annual Washington’s Birthday parade. Simms could hear the sounds of gun salutes and the roar of the crowd not far away—up on the Bay (as the street was called), where throngs were lining the parade route in front of the three-story brick warehouses and offices called Factors’ Row. On display were the disciplined, smartly outfitted militias, including the Savannah Volunteer Guards, Chatham Artillery, Irish Jasper Greens, and German Volunteers, all paying tribute to Savannah’s martial tradition. A reporter later remarked upon the sweet sounds of national airs performed by the effective military bands composed of enslaved musicians who may or may not have been aware of the patriotic send-off they were at that moment giving one of their own. No one could deny that all of Savannah loved a parade, and that for now at least no one would be searching for a bricklayer gone missing.⁶

Still, Simms had put into motion a series of events he could not control. A little more than five weeks later, around 9 p.m. on the night of April 3, the flickering street lamps of Boston offered him no cover. Suddenly a group of white men emerged out of the shadows of Endicott Street and seized him, but not before he put up a fierce fight, stabbing one of them and calling out, I am in the hands of kidnappers! Yet his captors, a deputy United States marshal and several Boston police officers, had nabbed a rich prize—the twenty-seven-year-old slave owned by James Potter, one of the wealthiest rice planters in the Georgia lowcountry. Despite Simms’s effort to defend himself, the men pushed him into a carriage waiting nearby and drove him from the city’s North End to the federal courthouse, the site of Shadrach Minkins’s rescue two months before. Fearing more in the way of criminal theatrics from the Boston black community, local officials turned the courthouse into a jail; they incarcerated Simms on the third floor, and then encircled the whole building with a massive chain. Outside, abolitionists watched in horror as, one by one, eminent judges and lawyers bowed and stooped and bent and cringed and curled and crouched down, and crawled under the chain, in effect prostrating themselves before the slave South: a court of justice had become a cage for slaves.⁷

In the course of his life, Simms would prove himself a resilient man, an escape artist of uncommon courage and ingenuity. But on Friday, April 4, Thomas Simms, the runaway slave of slender build and delicate features, was in the process of becoming Thomas Sims, 7 Cushing 285 (Mass. 1851), a legal test case challenging the Fugitive Slave Act. (In Savannah, the Simms family spelled their name with two ms; authorities in Boston, and historians since, dropped one of them.) Charged with being a fugitive from service in the state of Georgia, Simms had no legal rights. And the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had no jurisdiction in the case, except to the extent that state and local officials were obliged to defer to a federal commissioner, bound to take the word of any white person who could present evidence, credible or not, that Simms was indeed his slave. Southern politicians demanded that the North recognize their unfettered right to hold human beings as property anywhere in the country—in other words, to eliminate the northern states as a haven for fugitive slaves, once and for all.⁸

In April 1851, Boston was gaining notoriety for just that reason. Six months earlier, soon after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, a warrant had been issued for an enslaved couple, William and Ellen Craft, who had escaped from Macon, Georgia, and found their way to Boston. The daughter of her owner, the light-skinned Ellen had disguised herself as a young white man—skin color was no sure sign of legal status—while her husband, William, posed as the personal servant of this gentleman. A newly formed anti-slavery group, the Boston Committee of Vigilance and Safety, launched a successful campaign of public harassment and legal intimidation aimed at the slave catchers sent to fetch the Crafts. By the time Thomas Simms arrived in Boston, the couple had fled to England; there, taunting slaveowners from afar, they spoke before mass audiences and condemned the United States for treating human beings like the beasts of the field, subject to be bought and sold, and separated from each other at any time, and at the mere will of their master. Even more humiliating to U.S. authorities was the startling rescue of Shadrach Minkins, a Virginia runaway who also sought refuge in Boston’s black community.⁹

Coming just a few weeks after the Minkins debacle—or triumph, depending on one’s point of view—the capture of Simms galvanized the full spectrum of Boston’s abolitionists, a small but committed group of black and white men and women. Together, they moved quickly, huddling behind closed doors and clustering on street corners to denounce the villains in the drama: the Boston police, U.S. Marshal Charles Devens and his deputies, U.S. Circuit Court commissioner George Ticknor Curtis, and justices of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Trembling with indignation, opponents of slavery congregated in Tremont Temple and on Boston Common to rail against the southern slavocracy, with its insatiable thirst for money and power, abetted by its craven minions on the Supreme Court and in Congress and the White House.¹⁰

Commissioner Curtis intended to dispatch Simms south to his owner as soon as possible—in the parlance of the day, to effect a slave rendition. On April 4, Curtis initiated hearings into the circumstances of Simms’s escape aboard the M. & J. C. Gilmore and, more generally, into this crime against the property of James Potter. In an effort to prove that Simms was indeed his slave, Potter had sent north from Savannah a delegation of white men, including his personal agents and a white bricklayer named Edward Barnett, age twenty-four. Barnett testified that he knew Simms well; recently the two men had worked together, sharing the same bricklayer’s scaffold. Barnett said he had first laid eyes on the black man ten months earlier, at a fancy ball where Simms appeared (according to one transcription, in the character of a sailor, but according to another, he was there as a waiter). The fancy ball, or blow-out, was a popular form of entertainment in Savannah, a masquerade with guests costumed as exotic peoples: The dark Peruvian, and the Naples Maid / Fly through the waltz or down the gallopade / Spain’s haughty Grandee seeks the Gipsey Girl / and Greek and Moslem join the airy whirl. Regardless of whether Thomas Simms was there in disguise or serving food and wine, Barnett could credibly claim to have encountered the slave in the normal course of both his workdays and his evenings.¹¹

Although Barnett did not know all the details, Thomas Simms was in fact the son of James Simms and Minda Campbell. Minda was born in 1793 and owned by James Potter, a planter who presided over vast holdings in slaves and land north of Savannah. She had once belonged to the grandmother of Potter’s wife, Sarah Grimes Potter. At some point, after the enslaved woman became the property of the Potter family, she managed to negotiate relatively favorable treatment for her sons. Accordingly, James Potter arranged for Thomas Simms (born in 1824) and his older brother James Meriles Simms (born in 1823) to be trained as skilled artisans, Thomas as a bricklayer and James as a carpenter. The two young men were allowed to live with or near their mother in Savannah, but they were required to turn over their wages to her so that she could give the money to Potter. Yet Thomas apparently defied this arrangement and kept his earnings for himself. Apprenticed to a master builder in Savannah, he was making a decent wage, an estimated $1.50 to $2.50 a week, before he fled north.¹²

During the hearings in Boston, the captain of the Gilmore and two of the ship’s seamen offered their version of the events leading to the capture of the fugitive. According to their testimony, sometime after the ship docked in Savannah on February 3, the young black man had approached John Ball, a sailor on board, and asked him if the cook needed an assistant. When Ball replied in the negative, Simms disappeared, but returned to stow away on February 21, the day before the ship set sail. Another seaman, Cephas J. Ames, testified that it was he who discovered Simms two weeks later, near the end of the trip, just as the ship was about to enter Boston harbor. Ames claimed that on March 6 he found Simms in the ship’s forecastle, hiding under a bed in the wedge-shaped compartment that served as the crew’s quarters. Ames alerted Captain Kimball Eldridge, who ordered that Simms be held overnight in a locked stateroom, with two men posted outside the door. But the guards either fell asleep or were out of the way, because apparently Simms made off with the ship’s rowboat that night or early the next morning.¹³

This story was no doubt a fiction concocted by white men bent on avoiding criminal prosecution for any part they might have played in Simms’s successful getaway. In all likelihood, Simms had bribed one or more of the Gilmore’s crew members to help him escape. Certainly he had enough money to ensure the full cooperation of his coconspirators. It was his wages then that financed the clandestine sea voyage, covering bribes for men who fed him, watched out for him—in their own quarters, no less—and ultimately unlocked the stateroom door and helped lower the rowboat into the water. The deeply mortified Captain Eldridge failed to state the obvious: that, in the words of a Savannah reporter, Simms had required the connivance of someone on board.¹⁴

For elites both northern and southern, the image of white laborers sheltering runaway slaves was a frightening one. Yet Savannah, city of enterprise, had a hard time keeping track of the whereabouts of its workers regardless of their color or legal status. Situated forty feet above the Savannah River, the city was small by today’s standards, with a population of 15,312 in 1850. That number included 7,000 slaves and 686 free people of color. Yet these relatively modest numbers belied the river port’s vibrant commercial economy. To reach the docks, Thomas Simms would have left his home on the fringe of the city, one of the congested neighborhoods of low-lying wooden tenements, and set out through streets arranged in a tight grid pattern. Founded in 1733, Savannah was meant to serve as a buffer between the English colony of Carolina to the north and its Spanish enemy, the colony of Florida, to the south; the city’s defensive role gave shape to the grid plan, which resembled nothing so much as a military encampment. The outpost, planted in the Georgia woods, was soon dubbed Forest City, notable for its uniform house lots and its twenty-four parklike public squares. Inscribed in this plan were the ideals of the colony’s founder, James Oglethorpe—to ensure equality among its homesteaders of modest means, and thereby carve social order out of a forested wilderness. To that end, the founders were determined to ban liquor, slaves, and lawyers from the young colony.¹⁵

Nevertheless, the Savannah of 1851 was no all-white utopia of sober family farmers. When Simms descended the bluff to the river that day in February, he saw men and women of all colors and statuses mingling in profusion. Nearly 80 percent of the city’s export economy relied on cotton, some of it grown as far away as Tennessee and Alabama, and much of it transported by the Central of Georgia Railroad, and then compressed into bales for shipment to the North and Europe. On River Street he brushed past black women balancing immense burdens of firewood and laundry on their heads, and dodged black teamsters urging on mules winded from pulling a ton of wagon and rice through the city’s sandy streets. On the docks, the ranks of black longshoremen included slaves owned or hired by white contractors, and a small number of free men who worked for wages. The whites were mostly Irish (and some French Canadian) immigrants who came to Savannah for the busy season, from November through May, and then returned home to New York City (and Quebec). Waterfront warehouses, cotton presses, and rice mills brought together bookkeepers, sailors, teamsters, and loaders, all doing their work, or rather the work of their masters and employers. Coming and going were rough crews of black and white men who had guided rafts made of lumber down the river from the interior, and enslaved pilots who had brought in flatboats laden with rice from the surrounding creeks and canals. Schooners that plied coastal waters disgorged loads of raw, long-staple cotton from the Georgia Sea Islands. Steamships from the North deposited hats, shoes, and calico fabric, along with invalids seeking to luxuriate in Savannah’s mild winter climate.¹⁶

Simms could assume that no white person would take notice of a black man casually—nervously?—sauntering up to a sailing ship, especially a black man so familiar with city ways. He counted on finding at least a couple of seamen whose scruples could easily be compromised by the flash of bills or the jingle of coins. When he arrived in Boston in March, he paid for lodgings in a seamen’s boardinghouse, on Ann Street in the southern part of the city. When he was caught on the night of April 3, he was walking the streets of the city’s North End, where workers made their living on or near the docks. Many other fugitive slaves also took their leave from the slave South by water, out of Baltimore or Charleston or Savannah. The most famous runaway of all, Frederick Douglass, eluded officials by disguising himself as a seaman; a Baltimore ship caulker, he adopted the lingo and dress of a sailor.¹⁷

Still, neither Commissioner Curtis nor any of the other officials at the Boston hearings chose to pursue the obvious fabrications of the Gilmore captain and crew members. At some point in March an unknown informant had tipped off Potter about Simms’s whereabouts. The planter in turn alerted Boston authorities. Now the compelling issue was not how Thomas Simms got to Boston, but rather how quickly he could be sent back.

Over the nine days that Simms was held in Boston’s federal courthouse, the efforts to free him emerged as overlapping strategies pursued by the runaway himself, his attorneys, and members of the Vigilance Committee. Simms attempted to devise an alternative identity, first by claiming that he was a free man named Joseph Santina; that he was born in St. Augustine, Florida, the son of a Spaniard and an enslaved woman; and that his father had purchased his freedom when he was a child. He said he had never heard of James Potter: He had traveled to Savannah and remained there for a year, in order to see a certain young woman; but as a free person of color, he was liable for a fine of $100 for entering the state (and indeed, this would have been the case had this story been true). Simms further maintained that, when the woman’s jealous lover threatened to report him, he fled north.¹⁸

This tale and variations on it reappeared in a Petition of Thomas Sims submitted to the Massachusetts legislature, and in an affidavit submitted to Commissioner Curtis, both documents prepared by Simms’s attorneys on his behalf. Indeed, the young man had the benefit of Boston lawyers outspoken in their abolitionist sympathies and resourceful in manipulating local, state, and federal law. Besides promoting the Santina story, they argued that the black man could not be sent south because Boston police needed him to appear in criminal court to answer assault charges for stabbing the Boston police officer the night of his capture. The attorneys also managed to have two of Potter’s emissaries—his lawyer, John E. Bacon, and a Savannah police officer, M. S. DeLyon—arrested on kidnapping charges.¹⁹

Using a scattershot approach, the lawyers argued that Simms was entitled to a trial by jury, presided over by a judge; and they petitioned the Massachusetts Supreme Court to issue a writ of habeas corpus in order to safeguard what they claimed were Simms’s basic rights as a resident of the commonwealth. The Fugitive Slave Act was unconstitutional, they held, because it gave judicial power to a federal commissioner who was not a judge. Further, the law abrogated the rights of all citizens of the northern states, any of whom could be torn from their families and dragged south into slavery on the word of men or women who need undergo no cross-examination in a court of law. With grudging admiration, one New York journalist noted, The abolitionists certainly leave no stone unturned to achieve [their] object, and the same energy in a better cause would be highly commendable.²⁰

Outside the Boston federal courthouse, other schemes surfaced, and then went awry. A dozen members of the Boston Vigilance Committee plotted to free Simms by violent means if necessary. Leading the way was the clothier Lewis Hayden, himself a fugitive slave (from Kentucky) and one of the militant masterminds who had protected the Crafts and rescued Minkins. (For the latter effort Hayden was arrested, tried, and acquitted.) Convinced that direct action was the only meaningful anti slavery strategy, Hayden and others arranged to have the Reverend William Grimes, also a runaway, visit Simms in his third-story cell on the evening of Friday, April 11. At the appointed time, Grimes was to encourage Simms to take a literal leap of faith—to cross the room and jump out of a window onto mattresses that committee members had placed on the sidewalk below. But at dusk, a few hours before the plan was to be set in motion, a group of workmen began to fit Simms’s window with iron bars. Wrote a bitterly disappointed conspirator, the young Unitarian minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Whether we had been betrayed, or whether it was simply a bit of extraordinary precaution, we never knew.²¹

By this time, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had rendered its decision that the Fugitive Slave Act was legal and that all officers of the commonwealth were compelled to obey it. The court held that the law was a legitimate effort on the part of Congress to contain the slave question within legislative and judicial bounds. For the most part, both of the national political parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, preferred to ignore the issue in an effort to retain constituencies in the North as well as the South. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw wrote, In this spirit [of compromise], and with these views steadily in prospect, it seems to be the duty of all judges and magistrates to expound and apply these provisions in the Constitution and laws of the United States. Most whites in Boston, and throughout the United States, agreed with this view; and in fact, in 1851, the majority of free white citizens either acquiesced in or actively supported the oppression of slaves.²²

Although Simms’s supporters were relatively small in number, his case highlighted the ability of Boston-area abolitionists to force a national debate over slavery; it was these Northerners who documented, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, this moral earthquake. From outdoor platforms, church pulpits, and editorial offices came a rhetorical cascade of outrage on the part of anti-slavery activists. The enemy of justice was silence, according to the lawyer Richard Henry Dana: Our officers are slave-hunters, and the voice of the old law of the state is hushed into silence before this fearful slave-power which has got such entire control of the Union. In the space of one week, preachers, lawyers, writers, and ordinary citizens offered up speeches and resolutions, prayers, hymns, sermons, newspaper articles and editorials, legal briefs, petitions to the state legislature, and street-corner harangues. The court hearing itself covered four days and consisted of more than forty thousand words spoken by Commissioner Curtis and the lawyers for Simms and Potter.²³

But in truth, many abolitionists felt constrained by vocabularies they considered unequal to the task of condemning slavery, a practice that seemed to originate in some fiendish netherworld, a practice nourished by mysterious and unspeakable evil. Upon hearing of the Simms rendition, Frederick Douglass cried, Let the Heavens weep and let Hell be merry! The captured slave was but a human sacrifice to the most infernal propensities of man’s malicious heart. The Reverend Theodore Parker exclaimed that in order to understand slaveowners, this brood of monsters, he must open the graves, and bring up the most hideous tyrants from the dead! According to the common-school reformer Horace Mann, The southern planter seems to possess some wizard art, unknown to the demonology of former times. In response, supporters of slavery tried without much success to block out a cacophony of insults, catcalls, songs, and ringing church bells. Thoreau condemned the speech of slavery’s supporters; he said such speech percolated through the mainstream Boston press with the gurgling of the sewer through every column.²⁴

These anti-Simms newspapers were giving voice to Boston elites who did business with southern planters and merchants, and to the white laboring classes eager to keep slaves in the South and northern blacks out of paid jobs. John H. Pearson, the owner of the Gilmore and a fleet of packet ships that made regular runs between Savannah and Boston, put up $8,000 in bail money for the Savannahians DeLyon and Bacon when they were arraigned on kidnapping charges. Contemplating the commercial links between port cities, North and South, William Lloyd Garrison, a founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and the editor of the Liberator, claimed that "the Boston of 1851 is not the Boston of 1775. Boston has now become a mere shop—a place for buying and selling goods; and I suppose, also, of buying and selling men."²⁵

Not all who wanted to speak about the Simms case had their say. The young black man himself lacked a public voice of his own. Indeed, the Fugitive Slave Act expressly prohibited the alleged runaway from testifying in his or her own behalf, on the assumption that no black person should be allowed to directly contradict the word of a white person: In no trial or hearing under this Act shall the testimony of such alleged Fugitive be admitted as evidence. In newspaper accounts of the controversy, Simms spoke only through other people. The seaman Cephas Ames of the Gilmore testified that the fugitive had cried, Have we got up? [Have we arrived?] when Ames pulled him out of the forecastle. The Liberator reported that, on the night of his arrest, Simms’s transfer was performed too speedily to afford him an opportunity to make much of a speech.²⁶

Before dawn on the morning of Saturday, April 12, a force estimated at 150 men marched into Boston’s Court Square and assembled in the shape of a hollow square. Among them were U.S. Marshal Charles Devens and his deputies; members of the city watch, armed with clubs and hooks; and police shouldering swords. Simms was roused from his cell, brought outside, and placed in the middle of the square, which then proceeded to move forward, toward Long Wharf and a waiting ship, the brig Acorn. Gathering at the site of the Boston Tea Party seventy-eight years before, the early morning crowd became increasingly angry. Someone called out to the departing fugitive, Sims, preach Liberty to the slaves! In honor of the occasion, the Acorn had been outfitted with two cannon—a necessary precaution considering the Vigilance Committee had debated sending one of its own members, a Cape Cod sea captain, to capture the ship on the high seas. Eager to protect his own good name, John Pearson, the owner of the Gilmore, had agreed to pay all expenses incurred in returning Thomas Simms to his owner.²⁷

Back in Savannah, members of the city council pointedly refrained from making a public statement about the case; they busied themselves with long-winded debates over building a new waterworks, draining the swamplands surrounding the city, attaching a workhouse to the jail, and cracking down on thefts of loose cotton by establishing a wharf police. Still, no one could deny that the escapes of Simms and the Crafts had proved embarrassing for the state of Georgia. In referring to Simms, the city newspapers only belatedly used his last name, breaking with a custom that decreed slaves should be identified by their first name exclusively. Yet politicians and newspaper editors could look forward to the day when the young bricklayer would once more stand on the docks of Savannah, this time in shackles.²⁸

By mid-April, the Daily Morning News could smugly report, The fiery denunciations, the fanatical appeals, and the insane ravings of the orators, have fallen coldly upon the ears of the people at large, and resistance to the law is evidently an unpopular doctrine. The editors expressed disgust with the stench of abolitionists’ words, gas let off by these tongue-valiant agitators. Meanwhile, the city’s whites were mightily impressed by the fact that James Potter expressed no interest in Simms the slave, but keen interest in Simms the legal test case: indeed, Potter told an editor, he had not been influenced by pecuniary considerations in his pursuit of the slave, but [had] been actuated by principle alone, determined to test the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law. The planter even had to fend off rumors that he had staged Simms’s escape himself in order to set the legal process in motion and reaffirm Southerners’ rights.²⁹

Potter could well afford to profess no interest in Thomas Simms the slave. As one of the lords of the lowcountry Georgia Rice Kingdom, he owned hundreds of human beings and thousands of acres of land. Rice lands were among the most valuable kinds of real estate in the antebellum South, for they were the result of the arduous labors and considerable engineering skills of enslaved workers. And by 1850, planters on the lower Savannah River had developed a form of rice cultivation that proved extraordinarily profitable.³⁰

The founders of the new colony of Georgia had banned slavery on the theory that reliance on the labor of people of African descent would discourage English settlers from working hard themselves. In 1736, William Byrd II, a wealthy Virginia tobacco planter, went further and warned leaders of the colony that slaves posed an inherent threat to any community that aspired to harmony and industry: They blow up the pride, & ruin the industry of our white people, who seeing a rank of poor creatures below them, detest work for fear it should make them look like slaves. The neighboring colony of South Carolina, which early on relied heavily on slave labor, presumably placed itself in mortal danger, for a black man of desperate courage could easily kindle a servile war…before any opposition could be formed against him, and tinge our rivers as wide as they are with blood.³¹

Despite these warnings, most Georgia colonists wholeheartedly embraced slavery, convinced that the swamps were impossible for any white householder and his family to clear and cultivate, especially in the heat and humidity of a lowcountry summer. The colony legalized bondage in 1750, seventeen years after its founding. About this time, rice growers along the Georgia coastal riverways, in the Ogeechee region west of Savannah and the Altamaha Delta near the border with Florida, began to rely on enslaved workers to perfect a hydraulic system of irrigation. This system used river and marshland tidal flows to flood rice fields with fresh water, flows regulated by intricate systems of dikes, trunks, and canals. Lowcountry planters favored slaves imported from Sierra Leone, men and women familiar with rice cultivation in a way that Europeans were not. By 1849, the 550 great rice planters of the Georgia lowcountry were profiting from 25 million pounds of clean rice each year; that figure would double over the next ten years.

Among these men were the brothers James and Thomas Potter and their neighbors, father and son Charles and Louis Manigault. Both extended families owned rice plantations a few miles upriver from Savannah. It was the intense, hardheaded ambition of these men that helped fuel the boom in rice culture during the 1850s. Both families sought to enlarge and consolidate their holdings, buying up the lands of smaller neighboring planters through outright sales as well as through foreclosure proceedings. The slave-labor equation seemed straightforward enough: each able-bodied man or woman could produce 240 bushels of rice a year, and so each slave could earn the master $324 a year. The most successful planters were constantly buying more slaves, both to expand crop production and to replace the large number of laborers who died from disease and overwork each year. Within six years of the Thomas Simms affair, James Potter would own between 400 and 500 slaves and 5,257 acres, 1,253 in rice, and would build one of the Rice Kingdom’s most magnificent mansions on his Colerain plantation. At the same time, Savannah was exporting nearly 400,000 bales of cotton (worth $8 million) a year, and serving as the center of Georgia’s domestic slave trade.³²

In siding with principle, Potter eventually relinquished a bricklayer who was bound to become even more valuable in the coming years. When Thomas Simms ran away, Savannah was entering a period of explosive growth that was highly unusual compared to other southern cities at the time. Between 1850 and 1860, the city’s population grew by 50 percent, to 22,292 residents, driven by the completion of three railroad lines that linked the port to the state’s interior and diverted trainloads of upcountry cotton away from its archrival, Charleston. And in fact, the economic prosperity of the Georgia Rice Kingdom found expression in the region’s newly built landscape during the 1850s. Lowcountry planters needed engineers and artisans to construct steam threshing mills, slave quarters, stables, storage barns, smokehouses, and grand residences, as well as complex irrigation systems. Savannah’s own building spree included an extensive railroad depot complex (rendered in a combination of Gothic Revival, Classical Revival, and Italianate styles), new waterworks, schools, churches, firemen’s halls, army and police barracks, boardinghouses for workers, and stately mansions of brick and stucco. Among the grandest of these residences was the one built by British-born merchant Charles Green, beginning in 1851. (An admiring reporter described the imposing structure, with its Gothic and Italianate elements, as very rich in details, but simple and chaste, yet imposing.) The high demand for skilled construction workers indicated that the lower Savannah River, together with the six coastal counties—which included the Georgia Sea Islands—made up a unified regional economy fueled by the production and distribution of cotton, rice, and lumber.³³

On Saturday, April 19, the Acorn entered the mouth of the Savannah River at Tybee Lighthouse, and then proceeded northwestward, past the formidable brick octagon Fort Pulaski, and on toward Savannah. Aboard the boat were four deputy U.S. marshals and four other special officers and assistants, an official entourage designed, in the words of one Savannah paper, to satisfy the southern mind, that this particular [Fugitive Slave] law shall be maintained and carried out with all the power and dignity of the Government. As the Acorn navigated the shallow river and avoided perilous mudflats and sandbars, the several native New Englanders on board were no doubt struck by the beauty of the flat, expansive green marshlands that stretched to the horizon.³⁴

Anticipating an audience with James Potter himself, the officials could expect to find much to admire, and much that was familiar, in the planter. Not only did he possess the kind of acquisitive spirit that also animated the lords of industry in the New England and Mid-Atlantic states, he was part of a lowcountry elite that maintained close ties with many concentric groups of Northerners—college classmates and former professors, steamship company owners, merchants and creditors, fellow politicians, friends and extended kin. For the Massachusetts visitors then, the trip to Georgia was not so much a voyage into a foreign place as a trip to an exotic climate that showcased the achievements of a distinctive group of prosperous and thoroughly American men.

In contrast, for lowcountry blacks, the lower Savannah River was a sacred landscape that formed the heart of Africa-America, the Gullah-Geechee culture of the South Carolina and Georgia coastal and Sea Island region. (Gullah usually refers to West African traditions in South Carolina, Geechee to those traditions in Georgia; however, regardless of these artificial state boundaries, Africans and their descendants throughout the region shared many cultural beliefs and practices.) Linking the profane and spiritual worlds of the slaves were the waterways that laced the lowcountry. The river of life-giving properties had carried Simms away, but the river of death and disease had returned him to Savannah; for the rice swamps spawned gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases that regularly killed horrific numbers of black men, women, and children. Toiling in standing water during the spring planting season and drinking water polluted by ocean tides and nearby privies, rice slaves paid for the fabulous wealth of their masters and mistresses with their lives.

Gullah-Geechee people shared an intimate relation with land and water. The natural surroundings evoked their ancestral homelands in West Africa and in the process helped to create and reinforce an emerging African-American culture that shaped patterns of work, family feeling, and religious faith. Together black men and women slogged around in the muck-filled rice fields; tended the cattle that ranged freely through isolated hammocks of dark cedars, live oaks, and myrtle trees; contended daily with the insect pests and snakes that lived in the marshes; fished and gathered crabs, shrimp, and oysters; and used plants and wood to make all manner of useful things, from medicines to furniture and canoes. Runaways who had managed to survive for weeks at a time in the marshlands, and pilots who had guided canoes, flatboats, and skiffs through the maze of creeks, canals, and cuts, could map wide swaths of the lowcountry. And waterways not only nourished the crops, offered up food, and provided escape routes for fugitives and haunts for nighttime revelers; according to West African tradition, rivers and streams hosted spirits, and enabled the dead to circulate among the living. The Christian rite of baptism reinforced African beliefs that water was all-powerful, nourishing the soul as well as the body.³⁵

Enslaved men and women thus folded their spirituality into the natural contours of the landscape, where the cosmic and material worlds were fused, the line between them blurred. African rituals marked the change of seasons and stages of rice and cotton crops; the annual harvest was celebrated with ring shouts of dance and prayer. African folktales about crocodiles took root and became African-American trickster tales pitting crafty rabbits against gullible alligators, tales limned with violence, cruelty, and deceit. Traditional African stories—about people who could fly away from suffering and pain, and about the magic hoe that "goes ahead and cultivates the gahden [sic] without anyone touching it"—took on a new life in the lowcountry slave quarters. Enslaved men and women, then, found the coastal soil to be fertile ground for transplanting not only specific crops, herbs, and medicinal plants native to West Africa, but also distinctive ways of looking at the world. In the process they challenged whites’ contention that the land was primarily a commodity to be bought and sold, a place of profit making only.³⁶

Potter’s economic interests and the burdens shouldered by his slaves intersected in the rice fields, where the task system of labor prevailed. This system mandated that each person complete a daily task: one quarter acre per day per man, slightly less per woman (although age and strength could trump male-female distinctions). The system also provided that workers could labor on behalf of themselves and their families after their task was completed. At the same time, task completion often required heroic exertions on the part of individual slaves, many of them ill or incapacitated from overwork; after ten hours of field labor, only the strongest had energy to work for themselves and their families. On Potter’s Colerain and Tweedside plantations, the slaves were allowed to trade among themselves and market their wares in Savannah; and also, as one former slave recalled later, by industry and economy they could accumulate cows, chickens, mules, turkey, hogs, horses, and even race-horses. Thomas Butler, a cooper and miller in charge of the Colerain water-powered rice mill, stockpiled rice and honey; he and his wife kept their own flatboat and tended 300 fowl, which they fed waste from the mill. They also planted corn and potatoes. By giving a slave the liberty of trading and trafficking for himself, planters such as Potter lessened their own obligation to provide their workers with food and other necessities, thus forcing black men and women to rely more on themselves, and on each other. Though he lived and worked in the city, Thomas Simms revealed the contradictions embedded in this system. James Potter’s task system and hiring-out policies did not soften Thomas Simms’s determination to be free.³⁷

Wealthy slaveowners and overworked, malnourished slaves represent seemingly polar opposites not only in political power and economic and physical well-being, but also in cultural sensibilities. In this view, James Potter saw the lowcountry mainly as a vast water-driven machine to make rice, and he trafficked in the currency of money, slaves, and land. His language was English, literal and direct, his worldview scientific, rational. In contrast, the field hands spoke Geechee, a pidgin of English and West African languages, and they communicated through metaphors and indirection. Their currency came in the form of mediation between the spiritual and material worlds. Where the planters were individualistic and ambitious, the slaves valued collective effort and the preservation of African traditions.

Yet cultures rarely exist in relation to each other as polarities. Consider, for example, the wide spectrum of beliefs and practices among slaves and free people, black people and white, poor people and rich. In the city, many slaves and free people of color labored, ate, fought, and slept with white workingmen and-women. A few free blacks owned slaves, in some cases at least suggesting that people of enterprise regardless of skin color could see human bondage as a means of running a profitable business. Throughout the lowcountry, enslaved men and women struggled to grow and accumulate small surpluses that could then be marketed in the city; they valued the money they could earn through hard work. Although some black preachers eschewed the African beliefs and practices that informed the religious faith of many slaves, in fact their Christianity represented a blend of West African and European elements. Many blacks in Savannah as well as in the countryside lived in a world populated by spirits and ghosts, a world interpreted by conjurers and root doctors; but then, so too did some poor whites. And finally, many blacks and whites were related by blood, though these most fundamental of human ties were rarely acknowledged in public, and never acknowledged in law. Thus lowcountry cultures defied urban-rural, black-white, enslaved-free distinctions.

There exists no record of the means by which Simms was conveyed from the Savannah docks to the Chatham County jail. Savannahians delighted in processions of all kinds, but apparently city officials were reluctant to turn the young man’s enforced homecoming into a provocation. He spent the next few weeks lodged in the Chatham County jail, a forbidding two-story structure; built five years before, it resembled a medieval fortress, with its crenellated parapets and thick brick walls. Here languished Savannah’s most vulnerable people, men and women destined to serve out sentences in fetid, cramped quarters—black seamen required by law to remain imprisoned while their ships were docked at the city’s wharves; recalcitrant slaves sent in from plantations to be whipped; and fugitives awaiting punishment, and, in all likelihood, sale. Here too were large numbers of white laborers, mostly Irish immigrants arrested for public drunkenness and fighting, for stealing and for cavorting with slaves. For his treachery, Simms received thirty-nine stripes of the lash, the maximum allowed by the law at any one time. He later told a reporter that he would have been more severely punished but for the sympathy manifested for him at the North.³⁸

IT WAS AROUND this time that Simms’s older brother, twenty-eight-year-old James, was in the process of earning for himself a mixed reputation as a skilled carpenter and a headstrong young man. Small and slender, James apparently resembled his brother in physical appearance. He was known as quick-witted and verbally dexterous; an admirer would call him a son of Boanerges, the god of thunder—quick, brainy, shrewd, brilliant at repartee. Soon after he was baptized as a member of Savannah’s independent First African Baptist Church, the leaders of the church excommunicated the seventeen-year-old for (in the words of one preacher) continued neglect of Christian duties and his very presumptuous and defiant demeanor. Embracing a life of music and conviviality, James had refused to give up playing the fiddle at exuberant city blow-outs, where he and the members of his band were fixtures for many years. In the process James ran up against church elders, stern enforcers of morality among the members of their congregation. By 1851 James was still outside the church, but he was now the husband of Margaret, age twenty-seven, and the father of Susan, age two. Whether he admired, resented, or pitied his younger brother that spring remains a mystery.³⁹

Before they left for home, the Boston marshals enjoyed a lavish dinner hosted by James Potter. Together they all hoisted their glasses in a toast: "The North and the South—May the links of the chain that binds their union be stronger than ever—the abolitionists pitched into h——l, and Bunker Hill monument rolled against the gate. The Bostonians left Savannah in late April and thus avoided the giant biting insects called gallinippers, and the deadly lowcountry summer vapors so feared by the white population. With the departure of its honored guests, Savannah directed its attention to other amusements that week, including a mesmerist who could convince a subject that he was tormented by fleas and mosquitoes."⁴⁰

The Simms case reverberated throughout the North and South. In Boston, the Vigilance Committee tightened its organization, enlisting dozens of black men and women to assist sixty-nine runaways in the year 1851 alone. Within the next few weeks, in Pennsylvania and upstate New York, bold rescues of fugitive slaves confirmed that the fight against slavery was entering a new and violent phase. Runaway slaves and free blacks alike felt vulnerable. In New York City, a young woman named Harriet Jacobs feared showing her face outside; springtime might bring mild weather, but that was also when snakes and slaveholders make their appearance, she noted. Jacobs’s own daring escape from bondage would become legendary; beginning in 1835, for seven long years she had hidden in an Edenton, North Carolina, attic, a tiny space seven feet wide, nine feet long, and three feet high, before making her way north on a Philadelphia-bound schooner. In 1851 the thirty-eight-year-old was living in New York City and working as a governess for a white family. Since the burden of proof fell on black people to document their freedom, Jacobs noted, many a poor washerwoman, who, by hard labor, had made herself a comfortable home, was obliged to sacrifice her furniture, bid a hurried farewell to friends, and seek her fortune among strangers in Canada. And so the northern free family shared with the southern enslaved family a terrible uncertainty—that at any moment parents might be separated from children, husbands from wives.⁴¹

The Simms controversy prompted Georgia politicians of all stripes to ponder the viability of the Union itself: what future for the land-hungry system of slavery? In Savannah, Union supporters sparred with extremists who favored non-intercourse with the North. Irish immigrants tended to side with the Unionists, and so did those elites who profited from the economic ties between Savannah and Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Among Savannah’s most vocal Union Democrats was the ambitious northern-educated physician Richard D. Arnold, who believed the Compromise of 1850 would hold: My ardent desire was to see the nationality of the Democratic Party preserved. The Simms rendition seemed to prove the strength of that nationality, and, at least for now, to vindicate Arnold and other Union Democrats. At the same time, Arnold believed, correctly, that the old party lines between Whigs and Democrats were insufficient to contain the explosive issue of slavery.⁴²

Within a matter of weeks of his return to Savannah, Thomas Simms was sold away to Vicksburg, Mississippi. At the time he could not have known that his own desperate bid for freedom had deeply touched many black and white men and women, some of whom would reappear in his life, and in the life of his brother James, over the next quarter century. A dozen years after his first attempt, Thomas would manage another remarkable escape from slavery. In the meantime, James remained in Savannah, biding his time until he too seized the chance to flee the South. But unlike his brother, James would soon return to Savannah and cast his lot permanently with the black people living and working there. And in time James would break his own silence, claiming that the white race had never understood or known us perfectly; because we have always dissimulated. This was a natural result of tyranny—of the tyranny of slavery. Over the course of his lifetime (he died in 1912) James would work as a preacher, missionary, labor agent, attorney, judge, leader of Freemasons, publisher, and politician. Though a product of the city, he became a forceful advocate for the lowcountry rice hands freed from slavery; these were men and women Loath to Leave their old Homes and [who] often Speak of their Relations for the Lands…their Fathers and Mothers cleared these Swamps and Marshes, and made them the Fruitful Rice Fields they are. When he finally had an opportunity to declaim in public, Simms took nearly everyone by surprise. Remarked one awestruck listener, His clear, musical voice, distinct enunciation, and elegant and beautiful style of delivery impressed every one, and greatly astonished those who had never heard him speak before.⁴³

THIS BOOK is about the conflict over slavery that claimed almost 700,000 lives, and in the process transformed forever the world inhabited by Sarah and James Potter, Richard Arnold, Edward Barnett, and Minda Campbell and her sons Thomas and James. Above all, it is a story about the larger African-American freedom struggle, and about the way that struggle shaped the streets and households of Savannah and the rice and cotton fields of lowcountry Georgia. I first encountered some of the people in this book more than thirty years ago, when I began researching the history of the northern teachers of the Georgia freedpeople in the eight years after the Civil War.⁴⁴ At the time I was struck by the speed with which Savannah’s black leaders organized a system of schools right after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman captured the city in December 1864; the success of their efforts was no doubt due to the fact that the antebellum community possessed independent black institutions such as mutual aid societies and self-governing Baptist churches. The Savannah case seemed emblematic of a larger story about the former slaves’ fight to integrate themselves fully into the nation’s body politic, and also to win for themselves some measure of self-determination in their homes, workplaces, churches, and schools. Throughout the South, blacks’ religious faith offered a compelling narrative of liberation and redemption, a narrative promoted by strong-willed preachers and teachers in both public and surreptitious settings. The Reverend Andrew Bryan, founder of First African Baptist Church (in 1788), assured his congregants, God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that feareth him and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.⁴⁵

In the months and years immediately following emancipation, the former slaves and free people of color in Savannah and the Georgia lowcountry aggressively pressed for full citizenship rights; they educated themselves, petitioned the federal government for protection, and eagerly entered the fray of partisan politics. Yet seven years after the end of the Civil War, they lacked political power in any meaningful sense of the word. As a group, they remained impoverished, disenfranchised, and excluded from jury service, the judiciary, the police force, and local elective offices of all kinds. This book seeks to tell the story of why that was so.

In the two decades after the capture of Thomas Simms, wealthy white men of Savannah sought to save the city from economic depression, pestilence, war, occupation by a hated enemy army, and the destruction of slavery. But the most compelling challenge faced by these men was to stave off the forces of equality and democracy sweeping through their region. To maintain a brutal form of white supremacy, planters, bankers, cotton factors, merchants, and clergymen were forced to act creatively and violently, in the process enlisting the support of whites of modest means. This project was complicated by the fact that Savannah lacked a white middle class, men and women who might lend respectability to institutionalized discrimination and outright terror. Yet during the postwar period elites received surprisingly strong validation from an unexpected quarter: the northern missionaries and U.S. government agents and military officials who for their own reasons sought to stall if not obliterate the drive for black self-determination. Why such divergent groups of white people found so threatening the quest of blacks for basic forms of equality and cultural integrity constitutes the heart of this story.

As well as any two individuals perhaps, Thomas and James Simms demonstrated that, for all their wealth, Savannah’s white leaders lacked absolute power. Together with other African Americans, the brothers helped to lead a series of civil wars that spilled out of the confines of a single plantation, city, or section of the country. These wars were presaged, and then ignited, when Thomas Simms found his way onto the Gilmore, and when James Simms found his voice.

Sell and Buy and Sell and Buy

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 1854, Savannah was diseased, dying. At dusk, tar fires kindled in the public squares threw a plume of acrid smoke into the air, an immense black shroud that settled over the desolate, oppressively hot and humid city. The lush, tree-lined thoroughfares were nearly deserted, the hush broken only by the muffled sounds of a horse-drawn hearse plodding through the sandy streets. The usually raucous marketplace was empty, stately homes were abandoned, schools and hotels shuttered. Many people had fled, most to the interior of Georgia or to the North. Behind closed doors, the ill, unattended, lay side by side with the dead, and in poorer areas of the city, human corpses mingled with refuse piled in back alleyways. Deprived of supplies from either the surrounding countryside or from arriving ships, the river port risked slow starvation. How changed is our beautiful, growing, healthy city, lately full of enterprise, noise, and business, despaired one of the city’s clergymen, exhausted from ministering to the ill. Racked with fever, chills, and convulsions, hundreds of all ages were succumbing to the black vomit, more commonly known as yellow fever.¹

Savannah was dying, and Richard Arnold, M.D., could do nothing to