Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (12 page)

When gold was discovered at Dahlonega in 1828, however, it created a renewed push into the Cherokee Territory. Benjamin Parks, said to have found the very first gold nugget while out deer hunting, told the
Atlanta Constitution
that “once news got abroad” that there was gold in the Georgia hills,

there was such excitement as you never saw. It seemed within a few days as if the whole world must have heard of it, for men came from every state. . . . They came afoot, on horseback and in wagons, acting more like crazy men than anything else.

Even as they tried to tolerate all these encroachments into the Territory, the Cherokee were disenfranchised in the courts, and they had no legal recourse even when whites stole from them in broad daylight. As the editor of the
Cherokee Phoenix
put it in 1829,

Our [white] neighbors who regard no law, or pay no respect to the laws of humanity, are now reaping a plentiful harvest by the law of Georgia, which declares that no Indian shall be a party in any court created by the laws or constitution of that state. These neighbors come over the line [between Georgia and the Territory], and take the cattle belonging to the Cherokees. The Cherokees go in pursuit of their property, but all that they can effect is, to see their cattle snugly kept in the lots of these robbers. We are an abused people. [Even] if we can receive no redress, we can feel deeply the injustice done to our rights.

White prospectors soon moved from rustling cattle to stealing whole Cherokee farms—emboldened by the fact that bogus claims could receive an official stamp of approval from state land agents. After the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Georgia officials began planning for the future of the Cherokee Territory, anticipating a day when government troops would force all native people west of the Mississippi. In 1832, two land lotteries were held to redistribute former Cherokee lands to Georgia’s white settlers.

In theory, those who drew land lots were allowed to take possession only if the property was unoccupied, but in reality, countless whites interpreted their winning tickets as a license to drive off Cherokee residents, including many who owned prosperous farms. In May of 1833, the editors of the
Phoenix
told how

an industrious Indian had by his steady habits improved his premises to be of considerable value, when it was drawn by one of the lottery gamblers in Georgia. The fortunate holder of the ticket applied to the governor for a [land] grant, which was given him on his assurance that there was no Indian occupant on it. The fortunate drawer . . . loaded his pistols, entered the possession of Ootawlunsta, pointing one [pistol] at him, and drove the innocent Cherokee from his well-cultivated field. . . . The Cherokee are doomed to suffer.

With such white “pioneers” growing more and more bold, and with Georgia officials unwilling to comply with two separate Supreme Court decisions upholding the Cherokee people’s rights as a sovereign nation, the stage was set for the Treaty of New Echota. Signed in 1835 by a small faction of the Cherokee—and against the wishes of Chief John Ross—the treaty ceded the entire Cherokee Territory to the United States, in exchange for
reservation land in Oklahoma. In the wake of New Echota, starting in the spring of 1838, the Cherokee people of north Georgia were rounded up by state militiamen and confined in makeshift pens, where they waited to start the forced march west. One of the largest Cherokee removal forts, Fort Campbell, was located in present-day Forsyth.

It was at Fort Campbell that Cumming mayor Charlie Harris’s grandfather Aaron Smith served under General Winfield Scott, commander of the Cherokee removals, in a unit known as the Georgia Guard. The guardsmen were notoriously cruel. Among them were many men who had come to north Georgia in search of gold and many who expected to personally profit from the removal of the Cherokee.

Charlie Harris grew up hearing tales of how his grandfather had once driven Cherokee families from their homes at gunpoint. According to Harris’s son David, Aaron Smith and other state militiamen spent the fall of 1838 deep in the pine forests of Forsyth, hunting down the last of the Cherokee holdouts. Smith was ordered to “search out . . . the pitiful and old Indians hiding and starving in the woods . . . who would not go willingly to the concentration camps for removal.” John G. Burnett, an army private who also served during the Cherokee removals, said that in 1838 he witnessed “the execution of the most brutal order in the History of American Warfare. . . . I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward the West. The trail of the exiles was a trail of death.”

In 1839, when the last of north Georgia’s Cherokee people set out on the eight-hundred-mile march to Oklahoma, the newly depopulated area of the Cherokee Territory was overrun by white land speculators, gold prospectors, lawyers, and farmers, who had either won their forty-acre lots in the 1832 land lottery or bought winning tickets from others.

This is the real origin story of Forsyth. While descendants of the county’s oldest families have long celebrated their “pioneer” ancestors, the truth is that early white settlers pushed relentlessly into the Cherokee Territory over the objections of tribal leaders and the U.S. Supreme Court—and found the land “empty” only after military troops rounded up sixteen thousand native people, imprisoned them in removal forts, and then drove the Cherokee out of Georgia like a herd of livestock.

When a new kind of “race trouble” broke out in 1912, Forsyth was a place that had already witnessed the rapid expulsion of an entire people, and many residents, like Charlie Harris, had heard firsthand accounts from relatives who’d taken part in the Cherokee removals. So whenever someone first suggested that blacks in the county should not only be punished for the murder of Mae Crow but driven out of the county forever, the white people of Forsyth knew in their bones that such a thing was possible. After all, many families owed their land and their livelihoods to exactly such a racial cleansing in the 1830s.

IN ONE OF
his many books on the history of the county, local writer Don Shadburn claimed that when his ancestors first entered the Cherokee Territory, they had to tame the county’s rugged wilderness by themselves. “The crops [of nineteenth-century Forsyth],” Shadburn wrote, “were worked exclusive of slave labor by the hands of the farm families
alone
—this native class of people viewed, then and now, as inherently proud, suspicious, God-fearing, and eccentric.”

But Shadburn’s paean to the hardworking, God-fearing “native class” of white mountaineers is one of those lies that persists because it is mixed with a kernel of truth. It’s true that many small-scale farmers worked Forsyth’s red soil without the benefit of slave labor. It’s also true that slavery was never as pervasive in the foothills
as it was on the vast plantations farther south—where slavery was the foundation of a globally dominant cotton economy. But while a majority of Forsyth’s early settlers owned no slaves, there was a sizable minority who did, and when they crossed the Chattahoochee in 1839 and entered the former Cherokee Territory, they brought with them a population of enslaved black men and women whose labor would be vital to carving out a living in the wild, isolated hills.

The largest slaveholders were the Stricklands, whose patriarch, Hardy Sr., had come into the county with the first wave of land lottery winners, in 1832, and had quickly established some of Forsyth’s most productive gold mines. In 1840, he owned seven slaves; a decade later, that number had grown to seventeen. By 1860, Hardy’s four sons, Hardy Jr., Tolbert, Joel, and Jacob, were the owners of a group of slaves that had now swelled to 113, and they used that massive supply of unpaid labor to grow rich from the bounty of Strickland mines and Strickland plantations, which were among the county’s largest producers of corn, wheat, and oats.

The last slave census before emancipation showed that Forsyth was home to a total of 890 enslaved people and nearly 200 different slave-owning families, representing 15 percent of all households. No one else in Forsyth owned slaves on the same scale as the Stricklands, but there were numerous other white men whose farms, mines, and households depended on enslaved workers. Most prominent among them were David and Martin Graham, S. W. Clement, and John Baily, each of whom owned more than thirty slaves.

The men and women Hardy Sr. brought into the hills were listed in the 1840 and 1850 slave schedules as “black,” but by 1860 more than twenty-one of the 113 Strickland slaves were recorded by the census taker as “mulatto,” or mixed race. Such distinctions based on skin color were not, of course, scientific. Nevertheless, that shift in the way the census takers viewed the growing population of Strickland slaves raises the possibility that some of the exponential
growth in the size of the slave community on Strickland farms was due to the rape of African American women by the families’ white patriarchs. Even today, descendants of the Strickland slaves tell family stories about light-skinned ancestors who spoke openly of having been fathered by their white owners.

At least one former Georgia slave made it clear to a white listener that plantations like the Strickland farm did not fill up with “mulatto” babies by chance. “Why is [my husband] George so white?” Carrie Mason asked a Federal Writers’ Project interviewer in 1937, going on to answer her own question:

’Cause his marster wuz er white genemun named Mister Jimmie Dunn. His mammy wuz er cullud ’oman name Frances Mason an’ his marster wuz his paw. Yas mam, I see you is s’prised, but dat happ’ned a lots in dem days. I hyeared tell of er white man whut would tell his sons ter “go down ter dem nigger quarters an’ git me mo’ slaves.”

The four adult sons of Hardy Strickland Sr., like the young men in Carrie Mason’s account, may have inherited an increasingly “mulatto” population of Strickland slaves because they themselves had fathered many of the slave children they owned. Congressman Hiram Parks Bell, who was a boy when his family moved into the newly opened Cherokee Territory, claimed that in the Forsyth of his childhood, residents “made an honest living by hard labor . . . and did not care whether slavery was established or prohibited.” But census records tell a different story; they show that slave labor—and the whole culture of slavery—was no more alien to Forsyth than anywhere else in nineteenth-century Georgia.

GEORGIA’S COLONIAL LEGISLATURE
first established a “slave patrol” system in 1757, citing widespread fear of a revolt. The “Act
for Establishing and Regulating of Patrols” required that all slave owners patrol the borders of their plantations after dark and ensure that any enslaved person found abroad had written permission. At first the work fell to the planters themselves, but soon many slave owners began hiring others to patrol for them. These “pattyrollers,” as they were known to black people all over the South, were usually poor white men whose hardscrabble homes bordered slave-farmed lands, and who were paid to capture and whip any slave caught out of bounds. Resentful of their rich white neighbors and eager to show that they were not at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, many of these earliest “night riders” approached the task with a brutal zeal.

There are few written records of the slave patrols, and none at all documenting the groups that once operated in Forsyth. So most of what is known comes from oral histories, like the stories told by a man named Edward Glenn, who was a slave on the Clinton Brown plantation, near Oscarville, in the 1850s. In 1937 Glenn recalled those days, and confirmed that the patrol system was in full force in antebellum Forsyth. “When a runaway slave” was caught outside the Brown plantation, Glenn said,

they was punished. . . . I saw a woman stripped naked, laid over a stump in a field with her head hanging down on one side, her feet on the other, and tied to the stump. They whipped her hard, and you could hear her hollering far off.

Glenn described how white patrollers also used the “Gameron Stick,” a punishment in which “the slave’s arms were bound around the bent knees and fastened to a stick run beneath them. This was [also] called the ‘Spanish Buck.’ . . . They stripped the slave, who was unable to stand up, and rolled him on one side and whipped him till the blood came.” As William McWhorther, a slave
in nearby Clarke County, put it, “Paterollers was de devil’s own hosses. If dey cotched a Nigger out and his Marster hadn’t fixed him up wid a pass, it was jus’ too bad; dey most kilt him.”

Such scenes are also common in the stories passed down through families forced out of Forsyth. One comes from Anthony Neal, whose ancestors Joseph and Eliza Kellogg became the county’s largest black property owners in the 1880s, although they’d begun their lives as slaves. Eliza made repeated attempts to escape during slave times, Neal says, and by the time the Confederate army surrendered, in 1865, and the slaves of Georgia were finally free, Eliza had run off yet again. According to family lore, before she could be told she was free, Eliza Kellogg first had to be coaxed out of hiding from the pattyrollers.

NEWSPAPERS IN 1912
may have portrayed Forsyth’s “trouble” as a sudden flare-up of racial violence, sparked by the alleged rapes of Ellen Grice and Mae Crow. But for many whites in the county there was nothing unusual about riding out to violently punish what they saw as black transgressions. Such night riding was a long tradition in many families, dating back to the days when Forsyth’s poor white men had been “de devils’ own hosses,” paid to patrol the roads of the county.

But in the wake of emancipation, that de facto police force of lower-class whites had become obsolete—and in August of 1912, the state legislature redefined vigilante violence as “riot, rout, [and] tumult,” which the governor’s troops were now empowered to stop with lethal force. To a new generation of whites like Charlie Harris and his partners in the Atlanta Northeastern Railroad, such “lawlessness” was no longer seen as a necessary evil, essential to managing black labor. To them, the mobs that had regulated black workers for so long were shameful, uncouth, and—worst of all—very bad for business.