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Expropriation and Communization in Low-Country Georgia

“You ask us to forgive the landowners of our island.… I cannot well forgive. Does it look as if he has forgiven me, seeing how he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness?”

—Anonymous former slave from Edisto Island, South Carolina, October 1865

“As to work, I do not imagine they will do much of it.”

—Charles Heyward,

a Combahee River, South Carolina planter, 1867

On the eve of 1868, while prominent Savannah citizens delighted in Christmas and New Year’s festivities, another party was brewing in the swamps and rice fields of the Ogeechee Neck just twelve miles south of the city. Hundreds of rice workers and forest squatters were driving the plantation overseers off their lands, and concretizing their plans to occupy the land and create new lives for themselves, independent of the newly imposed rent and wage system.

In November of 1864, Sherman’s troops took Atlanta and destroyed the entire railroad infrastructure in the city. They would return again, under different names, after the war to rebuild the railroads and the city but with northern, industrial investment and profit replacing the southern planter oligarchy.

The Ogeechee Insurrection would last only a few weeks, but its legacy lives on as the most coordinated series of occupations of the coastal southeast rice plantations. While rice workers all over South Carolina and Georgia were striking intermittently, the Ogeechee rebels went beyond work stoppages and transformed their lives by claiming the land that their ancestors had been forced to turn into rice fields. With arms and manifestos, the insurgents fought in the footsteps of the maroons before them and attempted to destroy the plantation system forever.

Land Contestation after the War

At the end of the war, many Black workers chose not to leave the plantations, homesteads, and cities where they were enslaved. The story usually goes that this was because they were isolated from survival networks away from their homes; however, many slaves had already freed themselves at home and did not need to leave to find sanctuary. The Emancipation Proclamation, which officially freed the slaves, was a militarily strategic move that legalized the incorporation of fugitive and contraband slaves into the ranks of the Union Army, while crippling the South’s productive capacity during the war.65 In effect, the Proclamation was symbolic; slaves had already been freeing themselves by the thousands, not to officially join a war they were already fighting on their own terms, but because “they wanted to stop the economy of the plantation system, and to do that they left the plantations.”66

For many slaves who had been trying to rid the South of the planter class for decades, the presence of an invading army complicated their efforts at freedom. To begin to catalog the attacks on plantation society in the South from 1861 to 1865 would be impossible because they were occurring everywhere and all the time. Refusal continued as it had for generations: in the various forms of sabotage, strikes, insubordination, individual acts of violence, conspiracy, and revolt.67 By 1861, to counter this rebellion, the entire South became one huge mobilized military camp, the effects of which perfected the systems of policing already created for slave labor.68

This engraving depicts the burning of a railroad depot, potentially in Atlanta, by Sherman’s troops in the fall of 1864. Below the flames, fugitives and refugees—symbolized by their carried belongings—are seen in the wake of Sherman’s army, representing the thousands that followed behind the advance of Sherman’s troops to Savannah.

In the pre–Civil War era, slavery resisters made constant and diverse attacks against cash crop production to interrupt the flow of profit and to gain autonomy. With the war winding down, the introduction of federal troops, and the planters’ attempt to return to the land, there was a distinct turn toward generalized expropriation and destruction by former rice and cotton workers in order to force the end of the system of plantation labor, prevent planters from recovering the wealth stored in their properties, and resist assimilation into wage slavery. These actions speak to the desires of the saboteurs, those who refused to forgive and forget their exploitation and who did not wait for Union bureaucrats to settle matters between the planters and themselves.

More than in any other part of the South, the accumulated resentments of slavery burst forth in violence. In Georgetown, plantation homes and meat houses were pillaged by the freedmen. Chicora Wood,69 the home plantation of Robert W. Allston before his death in 1864, was ransacked by his slaves—every article of furniture was removed and his meticulous plantation records destroyed.… On another Georgetown plantation, Blacks “divided out the land and … pulled down fences and would obey no driver.” Farther to the south, the magnificent plantation home at Middleton Place near Charleston was burned to the ground and the vaults in the family graveyard were broken open and the bones scattered by the slaves, including some who had escaped to enlist in the Union Army and who now returned with General Sherman to wreak vengeance.70

Surrounded by bands of refugees, fugitives, and guerilla soldiers, and with more showing up each day, Sherman couldn’t leave Savannah until he made an attempt to address this impending crisis. Chiefly concerned with the fact that they were all unemployed, the Secretary of War General Edwin Stanton came in from Washington immediately to investigate the matter and work with Sherman toward a solution. After a few days of “examining the condition of the liberated Negroes,” Stanton chose twenty men whom he determined were fit to be leaders, whose backgrounds ranged from barbers and ministers to former overseers, and sat them down with Sherman to discuss a plan of action.71

From there, General Sherman issued the infamous “Sea Island Circular” of January 18, 1865, also known as the “Special Field Orders, No. 15,” which ordered the redistribution of all abandoned and confiscated lands from Charleston, South Carolina, to St. John’s River, Florida, including the Sea Islands and coastal waterways thirty miles inland. In effect, the majority of the South’s coastal rice and cotton plantations were to be divided into lots to be leased or sold to their former workers. Having no presidential or congressional authorization for this wartime act, Sherman appointed General Rufus Saxton, who became an abolitionist before the war, to deal with the details. Saxton would go on to direct the divisions of the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida when they were established in March 1865.72

Charged with managing this process of redistribution and political transition, many contemporary historians consider the leaders of the Freedmen’s Bureau to have been well-intentioned victims of their own bureaucracy. Regardless of individual Union officials’ sentiments toward racial harmony, however, it is clear that the larger function of the Freedmen’s Bureau and its policies was the smooth transition from one kind of class society to another, normalizing modern notions of landownership, contractual labor, and alienation. Another prominent leader of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver Howard, for example, is described by historian Eric Foner as representing the dominant view of the Union officials that, “most freedmen must return to plantation labor, but under conditions that allowed them the opportunity to work their way out of the wage-earning class.”73

As an institution, the Freedmen’s Bureau was a direct descendent of the “experiments in freedom” that occurred throughout the Sea Islands in Georgia and South Carolina, the sugar country outside of New Orleans, and the Mississippi Valley. Since the congressional Confiscation Act of 1862, the Union Army was permitted to seize and claim any land that had been abandoned by its Confederate owners or any land where its owners ceased to pay taxes. It is no surprise then that the concentration of lands that the Union chose to appropriate were where the region’s wealthiest cash crops were produced. In manipulating fugitives and refugees of these areas, the Union set up a pseudo-military slave camp to entice workers to continue to produce crops for the benefit of the northern war effort.74

In the case of the Sea Islands, the cotton plantations were organized by Union textile and railroad capitalists who were sent down to teach Blacks that “the abandonment of slavery did not imply the abandonment of cotton, and that Blacks would work more efficiently and profitably as free laborers than as slaves,” and to instill the free labor ideology that “no man … appreciates property who does not work for it.”75 The experiment on the Sea Islands was a total failure. The free workers preferred growing subsistence crops and refused to produce the profits that had been achieved in years before the war. The Yankees left in 1865, unable to secure a long-term investment in Sea Island cotton. Northern investors did not learn from this failed attempt at disciplining the Black worker through the wage-labor system, and they would continue to impose their definition of freedom as workers moved from subtle tactics of work slowdowns and workplace occupations to destroying the foundational infrastructure of the cash crop system.76

In the summer of 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau was still redistributing land that was covered under Sherman’s field order while importing northern philanthropic missionaries to staff compulsory schools for children and to teach investment economics to the new landowners.77 At this point, President Johnson received regular hate mail and threats from the previously wealthiest men in America, and would read reports from the Agricultural Department stating that “labor [in South Carolina and Georgia] was in a disorganized and chaotic state, production had ceased and … the power to compel laborers to go into the rice swamp utterly broken.”78 Johnson reversed all orders by the Bureau and sought to immediately repossess the planters of their property.79

It was at this time that the Freedmen’s Bureau revealed itself as the enforcer of the old economy in new terms:

The “two evils” against which the Bureau had to contend, an army officer observed in July 1865, were “cruelty on the part of the employer and shirking on the part of the negroes.” Yet the Bureau, like the army, seemed to consider the Black reluctance to labor the greater threat to its economic mission. In some areas agents continued the military’s urban pass systems and vagrancy patrols, as well as the practice of rounding up unemployed laborers for shipment to plantations. Bureau courts in Memphis dispatched impoverished Blacks convicted of crimes to labor for whites who would pay their fines.80

From late 1865 until its dissolution in 1868, the Bureau’s chief occupation was to attempt, by any means necessary, to convince free Blacks to sign contracts to work for their former masters on plantations or smaller farms. When General Oliver Howard—an architect and proponent of the “Black yeomanry” model of freedom—had to go to Edisto Island, South Carolina, to tell people they were to quit the lands they had been squatting on and return to work on the plantations, the people who had been living free of labor contracts responded as follows:

General we want Homesteads, we were promised Homesteads by the government. If it does not carry out the promises its agents made to us, if the government having concluded to befriend its late enemies and to neglect to observe the principles of common faith between its self and us its allies in the war you said was over, now takes away from them all right to the soil they stand upon save such as they can get by again working for your late and their all time enemies … we are left in a more unpleasant condition than our former.… You will see this is not the condition of really freemen. You ask us to forgive the land owners of our island.… I cannot well forgive. Does it look as if he has forgiven me, seeing how he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness?81

Refusing to learn from the so-called experiments in freedom of the previous years, and still ignoring the clear words from the Sea Island people, in February 1866, Bureau officials attempted to bring former landowners back to the islands. The inhabitants armed themselves, drove off the bureaucrats and the planters, and barricaded themselves on the land, telling the capitalists, “You have better go back to Charleston, and go to work there, and if you can do nothing else, you can pick oysters and earn your living as the loyal people have done—by the sweat of their brows.”82 Accounts like this one are innumerable from the islands of Georgia and South Carolina in 1865 and 1866. These islands were geographically strategic to squat and defend, as many of the planters had abandoned them at the beginning of the war. The former workers, who knew the ecological and economic flows of the waterways between the islands and mainland, had no intention of leaving.

Snap, Crackle, Pop! Tensions Build in the Rice Fields

Across from the Sea Islands where squatters were defending their land, woven together by intercoastal waterways and tidal marshes, were the mainland rice fields surrounding the port towns of Charleston and Savannah. Second only to the Georgetown County rice kingdom in South Carolina, the Ogeechee Neck in Chatham County, Georgia, was the seat of the most profitable rice bounties in the country before the war. As on the islands, by the summer of 1865, planters were already returning to the Ogeechee River network with the help of Union officials and devising ways to reinvest in the rice crop. When planters returned to find their former lands claimed by multiple new owners, the Bureau worked with them to help them reoccupy their plantations. Planter John Cheves, who owned the 2,014 acres he called Grove Point Plantation, refused to recognize the thirty families who had gained possessory titles to 245 acres of his land in his absence. The Bureau followed his lead. In the true spirit of the capitalist debt economy, the Bureau helped him borrow $11,300 to pay back his debts and reinvest in his plantation. The planters who did not borrow money from the bank simply redivided their land and tried the scheme of the northern capitalists: selling their own plots to the people who already leased the land from the Bureau. Some planters, like the bosses of Wild Horn and Oriza, were so eager to get production up and running again that they simply leased the land to skilled workers in exchange for a portion of the crops.83

The workers who leased, bargained, and contracted with the Bureau and former masters for employment and housing were in the minority of the 4,200 Black people living in the Ogeechee district. Hundreds, if not thousands more were squatting in the pine woods around the swamps and surviving between subsistence hunting, fishing, and farming, and the informal economies that existed throughout slavery with other poor Blacks and whites. Frances Butler Leigh, a Sea Island cotton planter’s widow and mistress of three plantations after the war, attests to this lifestyle:

Our neighbors on Saint Simon’s are discouraged with the difficulties they encounter, having to lose two or three months every year while the Negroes are making up their minds whether they will work or not. There are about a dozen on Butler’s Island who do no work. They all raise a little corn and sweet potatoes and with their facilities for catching fish and oysters and shooting wild game they have as much to eat as they want.84

Most historians who recognize the phenomenon of these Black autonomous communities at the end of the Civil War describe them as solely the result of rice production conditions and the social relations specific to that labor, ignoring the fact that it was the active refusal of those conditions—through attacking and abandoning the plantation society—that secured the possibility of that freedom. It is necessary, however, to examine the history of southern rice cultivation in order to learn the full history of these maroons.

The plantation economy relied on the skilled knowledge of slave laborers, who brought with them a long history of highly developed rice cultivation practices from West Africa. Planters considered the tidal marshes and swamps of coastal South Carolina and Georgia to be perfect for rice production because cultivating these areas forced people to uproot the massive bald cypress and tupelo trees in the swamps, thus extending and controlling the tidal marshes while partly taming the swamps. Preparation began in January and lasted through February, during which time men would dig trenches and repair the irrigation systems. In March, women would create the rice seed balls and plant them. From April through July, the fields were flooded multiple times for sprouting and early growth, then weeded and protected against other flora and fauna. During the height of the late summer malaria season, the fields remained mostly flooded while men stood on constant watch protecting the crop from “rice birds” and other marshland creatures. Flatboats would arrive in the early fall to carry the harvest to the mills for processing and then off to the Charleston or Savannah markets.

[no image in epub file]

Entitled “Rice Cultivation on the Ogeechee River, near Savannah, Georgia,” this illustration shows the multitude of tasks that were required to propagate the rice crops, as well as the presence of both men and women doing work side by side. This representation of rice cultivation, however, creates the illusion of a peaceful, well-functioning economy at a time when strikes, work refusals, and land occupations dominated the coastal landscape. A.R. Waud, Harper’s Weekly, January 5, 1867

While some of the division of labor was gendered, the field work was organized as a task system. This meant that there were very few overseers to the operation and workers self-organized based on their knowledge of the tasks that had to be completed and who could best get those done. What emerged was an intensely cooperative production process, aided by the fact that the planters and managers could not stand to be in the swamps during the summer malaria months. Slaves were disciplined to the extent that they were rewarded for high yields by being allowed to stay with their families, but they also constantly manipulated the labor time so that they had free time to do other things. Rice required slave labor to profit; no one who had other options for survival would do this work. Increasingly throughout the nineteenth century those who refused this brutal labor came to include the rebels called maroons. By placing hundreds of laborers in a single area with little white oversight, the cooperative labor structure of low-country rice production more closely resembled the sugarcane fields of the Caribbean than most other plantations in the southern United States.

The low country in which this rice production occurred is a flat coastal plain that lies in Georgia and South Carolina. After the Civil War, the low country was made up of the lands that extended fifty miles inland from the Atlantic, about one-third of which consisted of immense swamps that interlocked with each other to form a long chain, stretching several hundred miles along the coast. The plantations often faced the larger rivers, backing up into stagnant swamp areas where slave quarters were erected. These so-called back swamps were stagnant water (unlike the tidal marshes where the rice grew) and were dominated by large cypress trees. As one historian of the maroons of the area states, they were liminal “places that planters owned, but slaves mastered,” where “white control was defined as loose at best.”85 Much as in the Great Dismal Swamp, the ecology of an undomesticated wilderness perfectly fit the needs of the bonded yet rebellious labor force.

Unlike the fugitive slaves who fled north and west, when maroons left their plantations they chose to make their homes in the nearby swamps. The survivalist skills and offensive tactics learned from over a hundred years of maroonage in the low country formed a collective knowledge base that people drew on during the Ogeechee Insurrection and throughout that larger period of revolt. Maroonage was not merely a lifestyle option for deserting enforced labor, but a specifically evolved method of attack on slave society. From the survival skills of hunting, fishing, tracking, and hiding to the conspiratorial skills of maneuvering within the swamps and plantation borders, navigating rivers, and setting up trusted networks for trading information and goods, the tactics of the maroons were just as essential to the attacks on the postwar plantations as in the antebellum period.

After the Civil War—with the power vacuum created between the planter class and the northern industrial class, backed by their respective political parties, and with the total destruction of the slave-based economy—these revolts took on new forms. A high-intensity class warfare emerged out of two hundred years of lower-intensity activities. The desires and demands of Black workers became total and generalized. When rebels organized the attacks and seized territory along the Ogeechee River plantations in 1868 they were continuing this maroon history, but with the new awareness that they didn’t have to live at the margins of the rice empire: they could destroy it.

The Insurrection of 1868–1869

We had a small excitement in November, 1868, owing to a report which went the round of the plantations that there was to be a general Negro insurrection on the first of the year. The Negroes this year and the following seemed to reach the climax of lawless independence, and I never slept without a loaded pistol by my bed.”

—Ella Thomas, daughter of a prosperous farmer in Augusta, Georgia86

By 1867, the rice plantation owners in the Ogeechee Neck had become more organized and effective in revamping the cash crop system of their former society through the labor contract system introduced by northern interests. The close-knit nature of the planter class allowed them to reorganize ownership and management of their lands without compromising their economic power. Three of the prominent plantations in the Ogeechee Neck hired Confederate officers Major Middleton and Captain Tucker to run operations, and one of the first acts of these new managers was to evict everyone who refused to sign labor contracts. Those evicted and other sympathetic workers immediately began organizing around this hostility through the local Union League.87

Unrelated to the Union Army, the Union Leagues were a massively attended, decentralized, cross-racial political organizing body of southerners active during the Reconstruction era. Varying wildly in composition, style, strategy, and tactics, the local context of the League took precedent over any national doctrine that Radical Republicans might have been pushing at the time. Whether or not the Union League in the Ogeechee District began with the intention of becoming an insurrectionary force, leaders from the League moved beyond the marches, parades, strikes, and voter organizing that dominated other region’s Leagues.88 It can be gathered that in Ogeechee, those in the Union League were primarily concerned with getting land, and advocated for the direct action of setting up homesteads for themselves in the face of the government’s inaction toward that end.

1863 map of the rivers and railroads between the Savannah and Ogeechee rivers. Illustrated London News, January 1863

One historian of the Ogeechee rebellion, Karen Bell, asserts that—as tensions rose with laborers’ refusal to sign contracts—it was the leaders of the Union League who initially rallied the Union Home Guard, a protective militia of and for formerly enslaved Blacks, which was created in 1866 to support those who refused to work. It is also entirely possible that affiliation with the Union League was merely a strategic choice, enabling those in Ogeechee to organize aboveground meetings. In February 1868, however, Major Middleton made it illegal for the League to meet on any of the plantations he controlled, which effectively sent the organizing body underground. From there, the conspiring that would lead to the rebellion the following winter began.89

Accounts vary as to how hostilities specifically manifested in the last week of December 1868, but it seems that for at least a year, hundreds of workers and refugees of the Ogeechee Neck (and probably throughout Chatham, Bryan, and Liberty counties) conspired about the actions that followed. These included setting up communication networks, accumulating weapons and materials, and expropriating crops to fund the actions. To get a sense of what took place during the roughly two weeks of action that became known as the Ogeechee Insurrection, we must use daily newspaper reports from Savannah, as well as the limited available academic research, which aggregates the various paper trails left by property owners, court clerks, and military and state officials. While there is an abundance of testimonies from whites who fled the area and Black workers who were loyal to their employers, there are few firsthand accounts by those who participated in the revolt, save for one small manifesto by leader (and former Union League president) Solomon Farley.

It is worth noting that most of the daily events of the Ogeechee Insurrection were relayed through the Savannah Morning News, the prominent media outlet of the city. Throughout the nineteenth century, the media in the South operated as a legitimized amplification of the gossip and paranoia of white property owners; such reporting was encouraged by all sectors of society who were terrified of the upheaval of the conditions under which they were accustomed. This is not to say that conspiracies of slave insurrections and insurrections by free Blacks in the postwar south were not a constant threat to plantation society, but exaggeration was effective in efforts at controlling the majority of southern society who owned neither slaves nor land, i.e., poor whites and Blacks. The generalized fear of violent insurrection by Black men, a fear constantly reinforced by newspapers, was necessary to maintaining racial segregation between Blacks and poor whites. This obscured the reality: that the two often shared mutual interests and sometimes even a history of cooperation during rebellion.

Urban media outlets like the Savannah Morning News also functioned to maintain the myth that the African body was providentially ordained, and by implication psychologically inclined, to servility and thus bondage—a myth that was reinforced by the emerging “sciences” of phrenology and eugenics.90 Though both were functional to maintaining the plantation system in their own way, the narrative of providential decree sat uneasily beside the constant paranoia drummed up by media outlets seeking to engineer poor white support. This inconsistency rendered the prospect of an organized insurrection by Black workers at once horrific and omnipresent, while simultaneously inconceivable.91 The contradiction of these competing white supremacist narratives may also help to explain the differing accounts offered by certain white witnesses during the rebellion, as to whether the insurgents were an organized military outfit or more similar to a disorganized, riotous mob.92

Partly due to the unreliability of the media, precise statistics concerning participation in the insurrections are unavailable; so the number of people involved and actual dates of various actions are based partly on conjecture. What remains important is that between December 1868 and January 1869, hundreds of people were sick of negotiating with bosses, landlords, and Freedmen’s Bureau agents, and consequently forced all planters and those loyal to them off the lands where they lived. Within a limited territory, the infrastructural and symbolic power of the planter class was destroyed, and insurgents set out to live a new life. The following accounts are an attempt to give a fuller picture of their tactics, desires, and lives as they converged that winter on the five rice plantations between the Ogeechee and Little Ogeechee rivers.

On December 23, the Savannah Morning News reported that there is “proof of organization and a complete league among the country Negroes.”93 The source of this information was a citizen who was stopped a few days before “by armed pickets at every cross-road” and was only allowed to proceed after tense discussion.

The next day, the same paper reported that,

On all the Ogeechee plantations the Negroes appear to be banded together, thoroughly armed and organized. They will not work and, by threats of violence, prevent those who are willing to labor from serving their employers, their object being to prevent the rice crop from being secured by day that they may steal it at night.

Tucker and Middleton hired extra white men to watch the fields at night. Some night prior, a group of the rebels appeared in two fields owned by the planters and fired on the watchmen, wounding two and forcing the rest off the land. The band then stole sixteen sacks of rice, roughly 160 bushels. One source described the rebels:

They drill regularly, are armed, equipped and organized in regularly military style. They live mainly off plundering the plantations of poultry and stock, stealing the horses and selling them and raiding the woods for game. One of the ringleaders goes about at all times with an armed bodyguard and puts on as much style as an army brigadier. In that section of the country there appears to be no longer any security for life or property.

Bell’s history of the revolt further describes the attack on the watchmen above, stating that: “The Ogeechee insurrection had its origins on Southfield Plantation … when between fifteen and twenty freedmen, armed with muskets and bayonets, sought redress from Maj. J. Motte Middleton and Capt. J.F. Tucker for expelling them from plantation lands.”94 In the last week of December, watchmen, overseers, farm managers, planters, and others aligned with the management class of the rice plantations were driven off of the Neck by insurgents’ hostility, and they consequently headed to Savannah.

Between December 30 and January 2, the county sheriff and his men got involved, and the antagonism between planters and ex-workers intensified. According to the Savannah Morning News, on December 30 warrants for larceny and assault with intent to murder were issued for seventeen Ogeechee Black men. Sheriff James Dooner was charged with executing the warrants and immediately called upon Major Perkins for military aid. Perkins jumped at the opportunity to help quell the rebellion, but was forced to rescind his offer hours later after higher-ups informed him that “under the existing state of public affairs no action could be taken by the military until every means and all energies of the civil authorities had been exhausted and they proved powerless to act in the matter.”95

Without support from the military, Sheriff Dooner and two other officers left Savannah early in the morning to deliver the warrants. They arrived at Station Number 1 on the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad, mounted the horses that awaited them, and headed five and a half miles west to Heyward’s plantation.96 When they arrived at Vallambrosia, the sheriff was assisted by the local overseer in detaining five men, who were then taken to the train bound for Savannah. The officers then proceeded to the New Hope Plantation, owned by a “Miss Elliot,” to find “the great rascal” Solomon Farley who, based on his political and criminal record, they believed was behind the plot.97

The officers broke into Solomon’s home, read his warrant aloud, and after some arguing he agreed to go with them. Before leaving the house Solomon exclaimed that he was “not yet secure” and “drew something upon a slip of paper and handed it to his wife, who started off up the canal upon receiving it.” He then handed off more slips of paper to his friends and family, who followed his wife’s example. As the officers began to realize what was going on, they ordered Solomon to stop writing and headed off toward the railroad station with him in custody. From here the Savannah Morning News reports that the crew of officers arrived with Solomon Farley at the train station around 2:30 p.m., and while eating lunch began to notice some disturbance up the road ahead. Black men and women from the Neck were amassing on the road leading to the train station, and as minutes passed their numbers increased. The News claims that it was a “great mob … armed with guns and other weapons. About 200, it was estimated, were present.” When the sheriff attempted to address the crowd, they replied that they “didn’t care for the Sheriff or anybody else.” The officers immediately deserted the train station and left Savannah by road, where the people followed “yelling like a pack of demons.” The police didn’t make it far before needing to leave the road and barricade themselves in a nearby house.98

In another account, the story goes that the crowd was not a disorderly mob, but rather that they attacked the police in “military formation.”99 Regardless of the competing accounts, the Ogeechee crew succeeded in de-arresting Solomon while disarming the sheriff and his officers, seizing their arms, warrants, money, and “whatever else of value they had about them.” The officers were left at the house, embarrassed and alone, to catch the next train on the fly as the rebels secured Station No. 1 against transporting the officers back to Savannah.100

On December 31—the morning after the sheriff and his officers made it back home—Savannah was teeming with rumors and excitement. People gathered in the streets to read the news and discuss what should be done. The Savannah Morning News reported, in the classic gossip style of the day, that it was “unanimous [in the streets] that things should be stopped and at once.” Also arriving in town at the time were George Baxley and Mr. O’Donald, employees of Major Middleton who had both been forcibly removed from the plantations and consequently found fast friends with the News reporters and the sheriff.

George Baxley should have known that his days of micromanaging and punishing workers and their families in the Neck were numbered: not long before, he was trying to tear down an old house on the land when he was stopped by a rice worker named Hector Broughton who warned him, “Don’t pull that house down, I’m coming back to get my forty acres and I want that house.”101 Baxley continued to manage the Southfield Plantation as usual until days later he was attacked and knocked unconscious by insurgents. Upon waking, he found a canoe at the river and fled to the city. As the News details:

Deep in the Ogeechee woods, just before sunrise, two hundred members of the Ogeechee Home Guards divided into military companies and armed themselves with muskets and bayonets. The men had putatively secured weapons in Savannah months before the revolt. Plantation managers also provided muskets to “trustworthy” African Americans on the Ogeechee neck to drive off the ricebird. As the men marched toward the plantations, they met George Baxley, one of Middleton’s overseers who had gone to investigate the commotion in the woods. The men lurched toward Baxley, surrounded him, confiscated his weapons, and struck him with the butt of a musket.102

Mr. O’Donald, a watchmen of Middleton’s, experienced a similar expulsion. O’Donald stated that the armed former workers took him out of his house, beat him up, and then proceeded to march him up and down his front yard, stopping every few minutes to give him a beating. He was eventually told to leave and never come back. Removal of O’Donald and Baxley, and men like them, were clearly acts of revenge, but there was also the strategic importance of removing the management class from the territory. Overseers and watchmen safeguarded the agrarian capitalist class by physically and psychologically disciplining the workers. The way that O’Donald was made to march up and down in rows in his yard, receiving a beating at the end of each row, sounds strikingly similar to the movement of field workers, tending up and down rows of rice plants, while being tormented by overseers who were attempting to increase productivity. This ritual beating is also reminiscent of the paranoia and terror that was created years later when Black workers were stopped by watchmen along roads, their daily movements policed to re-create the conditions of slavery times when Black bodies were strictly relegated to their value as manual laborers.103

The same armed insurgents also forced the planter and owner of the Southfield rice plantation, Major Middleton, to abandon his lavish home. An account from the plantation manager stated that the “lawless vagabonds … had completely cleaned it and the other houses of their contents … all the houses had been plundered of everything they contained.” The workers who showed for work had “no one to give them tasks” and simply loitered about.104

When the owners and managers had been run off, the rebels were said to have congregated at the Atlantic & Gulf Railroad Station Number 1, declaring that “no white man should live between the two Ogeechees.”105 This infamous declaration of the rebellion became a battle cry for Black laborers and struck fear into the hearts of whites who had abandoned the Ogeechee Neck, as well as those in Savannah who feared the spread of the insurrection. Black watchmen, who refused to join the rebellion, along with other Blacks who wanted to return to work or were friendly with the planter class, were pushed off of the land as well. Practically speaking, whiteness came to include not just a powerful racial caste but also those in collaboration with owners.

A brief aside on the racial demographics of the lowcountry is useful here. Before the war, one-third of low-country whites and nearly all free people of color lived in the urban areas of Savannah, Darien, Jefferson, and St. Mary’s, while the vast majority of enslaved Black workers lived in the surrounding rural areas. In 1870, there were 4,201 Blacks and 411 whites in the Ogeechee district.106 Regardless of these numbers, non-slave-holding white farmers did exist and intermingled within and around the plantation borders; but the planters created a myth of gentility, which said there was no class disparity between whites. The repercussions of this myth were that poor whites were socially invisible in geographic areas dominated by the plantation economy. Widespread illiteracy and their being absent from state property and court records reinforced the legal and historical invisibility of poor whites in areas like Chatham County.

In 1898, a category three hurricane devastated coastal Georgia, crippling what was left of the rice plantations from south of the Sea Islands to further north of Savannah, as well as destroying over 60,000 barrels of rice due to the damage at warehouses and shipping docks such as the one depicted here in Brunswick.” Even after limping on after the insurrection and the land contestations during early Reconstruction, the rice economy in coastal Georgia was not able to recover itself after this final, inevitable blow.

Timothy Lockley, in his book on race and class in the antebellum lowcountry, describes the myriad ways that poor whites and Black workers interacted and relied on one another. Particularly of interest are the informal economies they created through trade and crime. Even as many were ultimately recruited to police the territory, some poor whites would inevitably have been trading partners with rebel Ogeechee workers in the preparations for and during conflict.107 Any efforts by poor whites who did aid in the rebellion’s efforts were undocumented or concealed, while the spectacular accounts of those who fled the area were publicly used to incite and justify later military intervention.

New Year’s Eve wore on in Savannah with Sheriff Dooner summoning a posse comitatus after he was refused military aid for the second time that week. Latin for “force of the county,” posse comitatus was a common law that allowed for a county sheriff to summon the arms of any number of able-bodied men over the age of fifteen to help in the apprehension of criminals or convicts. This legalized form of vigilante justice was common in the rural South, especially when the conflicts between Union and Confederate allegiances in state governments created gaps in the smooth functioning of law and order. Savannah judge Philip M. Russell, Jr. issued 150 warrants against Ogeechee rebels, both men and women, seemingly with lists of workers’ names from planters and managers who were driven out of the area. The warrants charged the individuals with “insurrection against the State of Georgia, robbery by force, robbery by intimidation, assault with intent to murder and larceny.” The sheriff went out by train with his first posse, but returned immediately, frightened of being outnumbered, and proclaimed that “that no legal process should be served in their neighborhood, that they had possession of the country and a government of their own, and no white man or office of the State should molest them with impunity.”108

On January 1, 1869, the Savannah Morning News reported:

The Negroes are receiving reinforcements from Bryan and Liberty Counties, and trustworthy persons from that section report that they are plundering all the plantations and threatening destruction to all who dare to meddle with them. They are said to have thrown up some sort of a fortification at Peach Hill and have all the roads and approaches strongly guarded.

Alongside the continued destruction of plantation homes, Middleton’s house was rumored to have been torched after its contents looted. Up until that point, his plantation home had been used as a central strategic location for the rebellion.109

At this point, Major Middleton was becoming an organizing force in Savannah. He called a public meeting at the courthouse, where he seduced the crowds to his side with the impending threat of an armed and brutal mob surrounding Savannah. Middleton showed his true interests when he told the assembled crowd why they should hasten to intervene: “Capital which has fed these people, who are now deriving sustenance from plunder, would cease to be invested here.”110

On the evening of January 1, when the train stopped at Station No. 1, there were no rebels in sight. A sheet of paper was flapping in the wind, nailed to a post. A manifesto of sorts was written on the page by Solomon Farley: