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Slavery and Cotton in Antebellum GwinnettBy Michael GagnonThe story of George Morgan Waters encapsulates the transition from a western to a southern place of Gwinnett County, Georgia, in the antebellum period. From its origins, enslaved people worked the lands of Gwinnett while the county served as the western boundary of Georgia with the Cherokee Nation. Waters, a first cousin to Cherokee Chief James Vann, served as a counselor to Principle Chief John Ross, as a Cherokee Supreme Court Justice and as a member of the Cherokee National Council, as well as serving in a number of political offices as a white person in Bryan County, near the coast. He opened a ferry on the Cherokee side of the Chattahoochee River in the 1820s, and became the largest slave owner in the Cherokee Nation. Georgia’s unfair lottery for redistributing native lands to whites forced him off his land, and Waters moved across the river in the 1830s where he continued to run his ferry from Gwinnett. In the final year of Cherokee removal, he used his political clout to obtain legislation granting his children Georgia citizenship with all the accompanying privileges associated with being white. In 1840, George Waters possessed 100 African-American slaves, more than any other planter in Gwinnett. With his death in 1852, Waters freed a large portion of his slaves in his will, which set in motion lawsuits and legislation prohibiting all such future emancipations in Georgia. While Gwinnett County had begun as both western and southern at its origins, with fulfillment of Waters’ will, Gwinnett had matured into a typical southern place.Much has been written on slavery in the plantation South, and to a lesser degree on slavery on the mountain South. Very little has been written on places like Gwinnett in the transition zone from cotton plantations to the upcountry. South and east of Gwinnett lies the plantation belt, where enslaved African-Americans usually equaled or outnumbered the white population. To the north, lies the Georgia upcountry in which Frank Lawrence Owsley’s 1949 masterpiece, Plain Folk of the Old South, explored the demographics of Hall County, among other places, to demonstrate the importance of the yeomen class in the Southern upcountry before the Civil War. More recently Steven Hahn explicated yeoman society in Jackson county (just northeast of Gwinnett) during the antebellum period to explain the later rise of populism. Economist David F. Weiman investigated the differences in market participation among the plain folk in DeKalb County (just south of Gwinnett), also in the antebellum period. These plain folk included the yeomen who farmed lands they owned, and the poor whites who owned no land but ran livestock in the woods or rented farms. Gwinnett has all this: plantations, yeomen farmers, sharecroppers and renters, as well as poor whites without land who served as farm laborers. The county also contained gold mines, and directly participated in the proceedings that led to the removal of the Cherokee from Georgia. While not intending to be a conclusive study, this essay intends to explore the interplay of slavery and cotton production in a transitional county as Gwinnett “became Southern” in the antebellum period.In the 1820s, Gwinnett served as part of the boundary between white and native culture. The state legislature created Gwinnett County from recently acquired Creek and Cherokee lands on December 15, 1818, adding lands from neighboring Jackson County and then requiring Gwinnett’s county government to operate temporarily from Elisha Winn’s property near Hog Mountain until a permanent court house could be built. Another law specified that all new lands in Gwinnett would be distributed by lottery, delaying new settlement until the state surveyed the lands and held official lotteries. “Fortunate drawers” then either could settle on their land or sell their lots to land speculators. The Jackson County lands transferred to Gwinnett immediately gave the new county sufficient population to form a government, and Elisha Winn, as a former justice of the peace in Jackson County, understood the organizational structure and housing needs of this new county government. Winn’s son-in-law, William Maltbie, reputedly suggested naming the new county seat Lawrenceville, as a tribute to naval officer James Lawrence, whose dying command in 1813 was “Don’t give up the ship.” Some former Jackson County residents owned slaves at the time the legislature transferred their political jurisdiction to the newly formed county, making Gwinnett County a southern place at its inception. The first accounting of the “peculiar institution” of human property came with the 1820 census, when approximately 23% of all households owned slaves. Those households averaged a median of two slaves each, and the enslaved people accounted for nearly 12% of the county’s total population. Very few cash crops like cotton or tobacco would have been grown at that time, given the level of difficulty in transporting them on the Hightower Trail, south of the county, or via the Federal Road in Jackson County. Neither route would have been easy to use. Instead, slavery might have been used to prepare lands for future agriculture.In the 1830s, the Georgia gold rush put Gwinnett on the front line of conflict over the removal of the Cherokee people. Whites illegally began mining gold on Cherokee lands in northern Georgia in 1829, but they legally purchased gold lands and established mines in the Sugar Hill militia district in the northwestern edge of Gwinnett County that adjoined the Cherokee Nation. As a result of the influx of miners, Gwinnett’s population in the 1830 census nearly tripled to 13,300 people. The enslaved in 1830 comprised nearly 18% of the county’s population, and 25% of all households contained slaves. However, the Georgia legislature attached a portion of the Cherokee Nation to Gwinnett for legal purposes intended to aid the state in dispossessing the Native Americans from their land. Thus, this census over-represents population growth since not everyone enumerated in the 1830 census actually lived in Gwinnett. Reports singled out Adam Q. Simmons’ mine on Level Creek as the most successful gold mine in Gwinnett in 1830s, but even it had difficulty maintaining profitability. Simmons’ son, James, reported regularly working with quicksilver to separate the gold ore. Others panned in gold lands along Level Creek and Richland Creek and probably used slaves not regularly engaged in agriculture for collecting nuggets and dust from the streambeds or digging shafts. Mining efforts waned but did not completely disappear until after 1850.Indian Removal played a large role in Gwinnett and the nation’s history in the 1830s. The trial of missionaries who refused to recognize Georgia law extending its political and legal jurisdiction over the Cherokee took place in Gwinnett Superior Court in Lawrenceville in August 1831. Two of the missionaries appealed their conviction to the US Supreme Court, which overturned their conviction in the landmark Worcester v Georgia decision in 1832. Georgia refused to acknowledge the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, and began to distribute Cherokee lands by lottery in 1832. Cherokee landowners, like George M. Waters, lost their lands despite their legal claim to them. Waters took advantage of a clause allowing him to remain in Georgia after the Treaty of New Echota forced Cherokee Removal in 1838, but under that provision his children would have been legally regarded as persons of color, without any legal or political rights. He resolved this problem by obtaining special legislation in December 1838 that declared his family white. Earlier in May1838, Gwinnett provided two militia companies to round up the Cherokee who had not voluntarily left Georgia and “escort” them to Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears, leaving nothing but whites and persons of color in Georgia.Gwinnett’s ongoing western status in the 1830s is also demonstrated by its participation in the Second Creek War in 1836. Gwinnett sent two volunteer companies of 100 men each to southwestern Georgia to subdue the Creek Indians who had been cheated out of their lands by corrupt whites following the removal treaty that ended the Creek Nation in Alabama. Eight members of Hammond Garmony’s Mounted Volunteers were killed when Creek warriors outmaneuvered them at Shepherd’s Plantation in Stewart County on June 9, 1836. In February 1837, Gwinnett citizens reinterred their remains on the Gwinnett Courthouse square in a single grave, and erected a monument to honor them. The monument also memorialized two Gwinnett citizens who were executed by General Santa Anna at Goliad during the Texas Revolution, again connecting Gwinnett to western expansion.The 1840s brought improved transportation, cotton and a maturing slave society to Gwinnett. The county’s population dropped 19% from the exaggerated 1830 census. The enslaved again comprised nearly 12% of the total population (as they had in 1820), with 24% of households containing a median of 4 slaves each. Up to the first years of the 1840s, most farmers in Gwinnett planted corn, and ran livestock, as one might expect of largely self-sufficient yeomen. However given that 138 households in Gwinnett contained 1-2 slaves, one might conclude that Gwinnett farmers fell into five categories: landless whites who were tenants on their farms; people who owned their farms (called yeomen) but who, like upcountry yeoman elsewhere, practiced “safety-first” agriculture and were largely self-sufficient; composite yeomen, like those in the plantation belt, who moved into market relations by purchasing a few slaves and growing cash crops; larger farmers, who engaged in commercial agriculture; and planters, who owned 20 or more slaves. This growth of a form of plantation belt yeomanry is what makes Gwinnett a transition zone between plantation belt and upcountry in Georgia, and so this study will focus on the farmers who owned slaves and/or grew cotton. Figure 2.1Slaves as percentage of Gwinnett’s populationFigure 2.2Slave Owning Households as a percentage of Gwinnett HouseholdsAs seen in Table 2.1, cotton arrived in the Georgia upcountry after 1840. While the 1840 agriculture census is suspect, Gwinnett recorded only 113 bales (400 pounds each) of cotton produced, while neighboring Hall County reported 1206 bales and Jackson County produced 2257 bales. Both Jackson and Hall were located on the Federal Road, which might provide transportation of the cotton crop to market, while Gwinnett lacked such transportation. In 1840, Gwinnett farmers reported significantly greater production of corn, wheat, oats, cattle, swine, sheep, and poultry than either Hall or Jackson, which implies a greater focus on self-sufficiency in Gwinnett than in its neighbors. Gwinnett’s transition to a market economy would start with the arrival of the Georgia Railroad within easy travel distance. Starting in 1842, Gwinnett farmers could transport crops to nearby railroad depots at Conyers in Newton County or at Stone Mountain in DeKalb County, and this accelerated the growth of cotton production and the redirection of slaves for that cash crop. Table 2.1Slaves & Cotton Bales for Gwinnett & Neighboring Counties, Georgia, 1840–1860CountyDirection from GwinnettSlaves400 LBS Cotton Bales184018501860184018501860Gwinnett--22382294255111325312446DeKalbSouth200427754955a130723972054aForsythWest5411027800243472656HallNorth1009133612611206205483JacksonNortheast250429413329225712021594NewtonSoutheast3720518764581028969387983WaltonEast362239094621156955995551Georgia280944381682462198408481499091701840a. 1860 data for DeKalb incorporates Fulton County as well for consistency of comparisons.In the 1850-1860 census years, Gwinnett farmers produced more cotton than its upcountry neighbors, Hall and Jackson counties, which have been studied as the locations of self-sufficient yeomen. DeKalb gives less clear results, because the county split into two halves, forming Fulton County following the 1850 census. Simply adding Fulton’s results to DeKalb’s data does not really improve analysis, since Atlanta became an important town during this period, and thus slaves lived and worked outside agriculture in Atlanta by 1860. Newton and Walton counties to the east of Gwinnett connect it to the plantation belt, and thus exceeded the non-plantation belt counties in the number of slaves and in cotton production. Figures 2.3 and 2.4 demonstrate that Gwinnett shared general trend lines on the growth of slavery with Jackson and Hall counties, but diverged from them in terms of cotton production. That divergence may have been simply better microclimate conditions for growing cotton in the two sample years, or it may reflect a substantive difference in the type of agriculture practiced in Gwinnett, moving from safety-first to increased market relations.Figure 2.3Comparison of Gwinnett’s enslaved Population with neighboring countiesFigure 2.4Comparison of Gwinnett cotton production with neighboring countiesGwinnett had become a mature Southern place by 1850. Cotton came of age, with both plantations and small farms producing it. Gwinnett farms raised 2,529 bales of cotton in 1850, while a decade later production dropped slightly to 2374.5 bales. The overall population continued to grow, and the slave population stabilized as a percentage of the population. Gwinnett’s enslaved comprised 20.4% of its population in 1850 and then dropped slightly to 19.7% in 1860, due to a significant increase in the county’s free population. 20% of the county’s households owned a median of 4 slaves each in 1850, which increased to 21% of the households owning the same median in 1860.The number of cotton bales produced by different farms demonstrates social differentiation in how people lived their lives in antebellum Gwinnett. Overall about 63% of all Gwinnett farms produced cotton in 1850, but this number rose to 76% in 1860. Farms producing less than 2 bales probably consumed the cotton they produced as largely self-sufficient households. This would place them in the traditional “safety first” category usually associated with upcountry households. In 1850, 38% of the farms produced less than 2 bales of cotton, and they produced about 12% of the county’s cotton. In 1860, safety-first farms fell to 32%, and their percentage of the county’s cotton harvest fell to 9.5%. Those producing 2-5 bales in both years more likely represented composite farmers, meaning they practiced some market production but not at the cost of self-sufficiency. These farm households put a toe in the waters of capitalism, but did not adopt it wholesale. In 1850, composite farmers made up almost 50% of all farms producing cotton in the county, and they produced nearly 44% of the cotton crop. In 1860, these composite households rose to nearly 56% of cotton producing farmers in Gwinnett, and harvested about 48% of the county’s cotton. Smaller commercial farmers raising 6-10 bales constituted only 8% of cotton producers in Gwinnett in 1850, and produced 18% of the cotton in 1850. In 1860, these smaller commercial farmers remained relatively unchanged at 8% of the cotton farms and 17% of the cotton. Large scale commercial cotton farms producing 11-20 bales constituted only 2.5% of the farms and produced 10% of the cotton in 1850, but in 1860 rose slightly to 3% of the cotton farms and 12.5% of the cotton harvested. Full market production of more than 20 bales of cotton created a cohort of 1.6% of the farms that produced 10% of the cotton bales in 1850. In 1860, the full market cohort dropped slightly to 1.2% of the farms but increased production to 12.7% of the cotton produced; these largest farms became more efficient producers by 1860.The agricultural censuses of 1850 and 1860 provide useful information for determining some of the social structure of the county. For example, in 1850, roughly 17% of Gwinnett’s farmers either rented or managed someone else’s farmland. In 1860, this group rose to nearly 22% of Gwinnett’s farmers, so landless poor whites constituted a growing segment of Gwinnett’s society in the 1850s. Interestingly, the landless whites showed similar differentiation regarding choices in cotton production that landowners demonstrated. In 1850, roughly half of the county’s 220 landless white farmers produced some cotton. But in 1860 only 68 of the 208 landless farmers produced no cotton. While the average production for these farms in both census years ranged from 1.9 to 2.1 bales, in 1860 43% of the landless raised just enough cotton for their own consumption, while 54% of the landless farmers were composite farmers, and the remaining 3% operated commercial farms, probably managing someone else’s land. These landless do not appear to be the dissolute dregs of society depicted in much of the history of Southern society. In fact, their choices appear to mimic the same choices of landowning yeomen. If one subtracts the landless from the cotton producing farm cohorts, one can approximate the different classes in Gwinnett. In 1860, 33% of landless farms produced no cotton, and these farm households probably constituted the “poor whites” depicted throughout southern history. The other 64% of landless whites more likely approached some form of “plain folk” who commanded respect because they earned a sufficiency to maintain their households. Thus, those “poor white” farms made up only 10% of Gwinnett’s total farms. The respectable landless “plain folk” who produced cotton constituted about 15% of the total farms in Gwinnett. The subsistence yeoman, those who owned their farms but only produced the cotton they consumed, made up roughly 24% of the county’s farms. The composite yeomen who owned their farms and produced cotton for the market while minimizing their risks, comprised 42% of Gwinnett’s farms. 9% of Gwinnett’s farms engaged in commercial agriculture by growing more than 5 bales of cotton in 1860, produced 41% of the county’s cotton.Figure 2.5Class Distribution in Gwinnett based on Cotton ProductionSlave ownership in Gwinnett repeats general patterns found throughout the South. Like elsewhere, planters composed a small minority of the enslaving class in Gwinnett. Throughout Gwinnett’s history of slavery, planters comprised less than 10% of the households with slaves. Slaveholders, in the 1850 and 1860 censuses, comprised approximately 20% of all Gwinnett households, and the slave population during the same sample years comprised about 20% of the entire county population. Planter ownership of enslaved black laborers rose from roughly 31% to about 33% of all slaves in Gwinnett from 1850-1860. While slaveowners held a median of 4 slaves per household in both 1850 and 1860, those households with only one slave declined from 22% to 19% during this same time. These were most likely house servants who did various domestic chores, or, if used in agriculture, they were the first purchase a farmer might have made to start a market orientation by producing cash crops. Those households with 2-4 slaves would have represented farms that already developed some market orientation, while maintaining some self-sufficiency as well. They represented roughly 35% of slaveowning households in both census samples. Households containing 5-9 slaves rose from 20% to 25% from 1850-1860. These households pursued significant market orientation and investment in humans. Their increase in the 1850s demonstrates an upward mobility. Households enslaving 10-19 people dropped from 17% to 13% from 1850-1860. Planter households, those owning 20 or more human beings, increased from 5% to 8% of the county’s households during this same decade. These last two cohorts represented classes driven by commercial agriculture or other capitalist pursuits. Interestingly, more of the slaveowning households increased some degree of human ownership by 1860, moving up from one cohort category to the next. However, owners of 1 enslaved person decreased, reinforcing the trend across the South of the increased difficulty to become a slaveowner at all. Figure 2.6 Gwinnett Slaveowning Households by CategoryFigure 2.7Gwinnett Slaves owned by Planters and Non-PlantersSlaves were not of all one kind either. In 1850 & 1860, the gender division of the enslaved reveals a fairly equal split of approximately 51% female and 49% male. The median age for all slaves in Gwinnett for both censuses was only 15 years, which means that nearly half of the enslaved would not have been able to do the work expected of an adult male, if used for agricultural labor. Women and girls averaged 19 years of age, with a median of 15 years, while men and boys averaged 18 years of age, with a median of 14 years, indicating that women tended to outlive men. Also, the census in 1850 reported only 10% of the enslaved were “mulatto,” meaning they were bi-racial, while the census categorized the rest of Gwinnett’s enslaved as “black.” Mulattoes increased to over 15% of the enslaved population in 1860, with median age of 12 years of age, and average age of 17, while “blacks” averaged 19 years of age with a median of 15 years. This age difference between blacks and mulattoes in 1860 indicates a probable jump in the births of mixed-race people in the 1850s. Patterns can be found in the relationship between cotton production and slave ownership. The 335 households that reported slave ownership in 1860 contained a median of 4 slaves each, with a $2,000 value of real estate, and $4,750 median reported personal property. However, only 62% of those slaveowning households produced cotton, with a median of 4 bales of cotton and possessed a median of 5 slaves. These slaveowning cotton producers reported a median of $2,450 in real estate holdings, and $4,750 in personal property. Another 127 households in 1860 owned slaves but produced no cotton. The cottonless enslaving households owned a median of 4 slaves, and reported a median of $2,000 in realty, and $4,000 in personalty. Nearly all slaveholders identified themselves as farmers, or included farming as an adjunct to their other profession. Those households that possessed slaves and produced cotton tended to be more affluent, but clearly something other than cotton was being produced on these cottonless farms that also utilized enslaved labor.Gwinnett’s enslaved most likely suffered during slavery. Ben Simpson recounted the cruelty of his master, including the murder of his mother, in his slave narrative in the 1930s. In her slave narrative, Sarah Gray mentioned cruel punishments in her enslaved youth in Gwinnett, but preferred to focus on more positive events in her life. While additional accounts are lacking, one can infer suffering from a number of sources. Since the US Census counted enslaved people each decade, and they demarcated cohorts in the 1830 and 1840 census, those cohorts can be utilized in the 1850 & 1860 censuses as well to obtain the chart in Figure 2.8 below, which averages the percentage of each cohort in the overall slave population of Gwinnett for four decades. What stands out immediately is that the slave population did not age in place. While the 1850 and 1860 census show the youth of the population with median ages of only 15 years, this graph of cohorts indicates that more than 70% remained below age 24 throughout the period of slavery. Another 15% of the enslaved lived to full adulthood (24-35 years), while only 11% reached 36 years or older. The free population ages spread out more generously. Nearly all whites who reached age 10 could expect to reach 39 years of age, while less than half of the enslaved children who reached 10 years of age could expect to live into their late 30s. Only 10% of each group lived to their late 50s, but whites were twice as likely to live beyond age 60 than did slaves. Exactly what happened to these people is not spelled out in the data. They could have died, moved elsewhere or been sold away. For example, Ben Simpson’s master took him from the Norcross area in Gwinnett to Texas in the 1850s. Sarah Gray, on the other hand, lived as a house slave on Jim Nesbit’s small “plantation” and remained in Gwinnett her entire life. Figure 2.8Slave Population by Age Cohort, 1830-1860Figure 2.9Free Population by Age Cohort, 1840-1860Mortality data collected by the census confirms that enslaved people died at a faster rate than non-enslaved people in the county in two sample years. The mortality rate for slaves in Gwinnett in 1850 was double that of the free population (1.6% for enslaved but 0.8% for free). The data for Gwinnett in 1850 is reinforced by similar death rates for slaves in the neighboring counties, as well as the state as a whole. Walton County slaves exceeded Gwinnett’s death rate in 1850 while the other neighboring counties ranged from 0.8% to 1.3%. In 1850, slaves throughout Georgia died at the rate of 1.4%, while the free population died at the lower rate of 0.9%. In 1860, 10 of every 1,000 enslaved (1%) in Gwinnett died that year, while only 7 of every 1,000 whites died (0.7%). Most of Gwinnett’s neighbor counties fared worse with an average death rate of 1.2% for slaves and a slightly worse death rate of 0.8% for the free population. Hard work, poor diet and difficult living conditions probably contributed to the higher death rate among the enslaved. Mostly the enslaved died of diseases or medical ailments, but not all. Three enslaved infants were reported “strangled” in April 1850, which possibly means they choked on something. A 10-year old enslaved girl died of dog bite that same year. One 18-year old enslaved woman named Sarah Akers committed suicide in April 1860 by shooting herself.The death of another enslaved man in 1848 speaks volumes about the nature of slavery in Gwinnett and elsewhere. On October 10, 1848, while drunk, Colonel James Austin assaulted one of his enslaved woman. Aleck, who was related to the woman, stopped Austin but then Austin chased Aleck into the upper reaches of his slave cabin where they fought. Austin cornered Aleck with a sword, but Aleck killed his master with a knife while defending himself. Fearing retribution against the enslaved community, Aleck turned himself in. The county inferior court tried and sentenced him to death. When Richard Winn, one of the justices of the inferior court during this ordeal conveyed this story many years later, he reflected that Austin was a poor master when he drank, and Winn felt sorry for Aleck, but Aleck had killed a white man which required his death.The death of George M. Waters in 1852 ends the period of Gwinnett as a western place and the execution of his will stands as testimony to the maturity of Gwinnett’s slave system. At age 75, Major George Waters died of a five-week protracted illness at Wales, his plantation in Gwinnett. In the 1850 census, Waters estimated the value of his Goodwin’s District plantation lands at $20,000, with 600 acres of improved land and another 600 acres of unimproved land, with $800 of farm implements, and he estimated the value of his livestock at $1,850. In that year, Wales recorded a harvest of 50 bales of cotton, 50 pounds of wool, 500 bushels of wheat, 3500 bushels of corn, 600 bushels of oats, 100 bushels of potatoes, and 400 bushels of sweet potatoes. Waters listed 57 slaves at his plantation, 54% of which were male. Waters’ son, Thomas, lived next door on a 595 acre plantation, valued at $5,000, that produced 28 bales of cotton in 1850. Thomas listed 28 slaves.Gwinnett Inferior Court initially probated Waters’ will, and the executors offered the plantation for sale in December 1854 to provide for distribution of the proceeds to Waters’ heirs. In the third part of his will, Waters provided for the manumission of a large portion of his slaves, seven of which lived on his other plantation in Bryan County. Waters specifically named the slaves, and their relations to each other in this will. Superior Court documents later described all of these slaves as collectively descended from Waters. Waters also specifically wrote into his will that his daughter, Williamina C. Cleland, should not contest the will since she had already received so much from her father, and he wrote into another clause that anyone who contested the will would lose all of their inheritance. Cleland contested the will asking for clarification of the wording of the listing of which slaves would go free, saying that only a limited number of the enslaved people should be freed, not all forty-one. A Gwinnett jury ruled against Cleland in Superior Court, but she appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court which ruled in 1855 on both which slaves were to be freed, and also on the legality of this manumission, given that Georgia outlawed manumissions without consent of the legislature in 1817. The courtroom in Gainesville pitted two legal dream-teams against each other, with former Governor Charles McDonald, along with Howell Cobb’s firm, representing the Cleland family, while T. R. R. Cobb, and Nathan L. Hutchins represented the Waters estate. Chief Justice Joseph Henry Lumpkin wrote the opinion when the court ruled in the executors’ favor on both counts, giving particular notice that the will made arrangement for the slaves to be transported outside the state before they were to be freed, if the state would not grant its consent by special legislation. In essence, Lumpkin explained, since the enslaved would leave Georgia before gaining their freedom, the state had no jurisdiction over their manumission. Waters also provided $1,000 for each of the manumitted persons to be paid from his estate for transportation and settlement costs to where ever in the world they chose to go. Thus began an even more interesting event: Waters’ emancipated slaves would be colonized to Liberia.Forty-one people from Gwinnett embarked from Savannah to Liberia on June 20, 1856. Their ship, the Elvira Owen, originated from Boston, and operated by the American Colonization Society. It stopped enroute at Baltimore and then at Hampton Roads, Virginia, where it picked up other emigrants before proceeding south along the coast. Despite fears of Savannah officials that the ship’s arrival would touch off slave revolts, the ship anchored off Tybee Island on June 19, and the next day 142 African-Americans from the southern slave states boarded via the steamer, Samson, and then a total of 321 emancipated people set sail to Liberia. Unfortunately, these sojourners suffered a health crisis during their fifty-day voyage in which ninety-nine people contracted measles and 120 passengers suffered an outbreak of dysentery. Twenty-one passengers died at sea, and another two died after arrival in Liberia. Within a month of arrival, those transported from Savannah were sent to a frontier outpost called Robertstown, where living conditions were primitive, and attacks were expected regularly from the native people of the area. Very few of the people from Gwinnett survived their freedom.In May 1857, twenty-seven year-old Jefferson Waters, one of the people emancipated in George Waters’ will, arrived in Atlanta with the story of what became of the people of Gwinnett who had travelled to Liberia for their freedom. The six other members of his immediate family died either on the voyage to Liberia or later in Liberia, and he reported that half of all the people sent from Gwinnett had died in the seven months in which he resided there. Jeff Waters escaped Liberia by taking passage on the ship, Mary Caroline Stephens, which arrived in Baltimore on April 25, after which Waters took a steamer to Charleston, and then the railroad to Atlanta. As a dark-skinned mixed-race man with straight hair, people along the way from Baltimore to Atlanta mistook him for a Native-American. When asked if he was “colored,” he feigned insult which convinced his inquisitors that he was not African-American, and he made his way unimpeded. No explanation of where he got funds for the trip was ever given. After arriving in Atlanta, he obtained passage back to Gwinnett, and Jeff Waters appears in the 1860 census at Thomas J. Waters’ plantation, but as the only free person of color on the plantation, not as a slave.Other members of the Waters family also reportedly made it back from Liberia. William Waters somehow made his way to Philadelphia, and then supposedly asked to be transported back home to Gwinnett. Local history in Gwinnett claims that Georgia’s national politicians, Howell Cobb and A. H. Stephens, provided funding for up to seven former Waters slaves to return to Georgia, but that the cost to the former slaves for this transportation was re-enslavement. The slave schedules for 1850 and 1860 do not include the names of the enslaved, therefore one cannot measure the truth of their story of re-enslavement. However, a Columbus, Georgia, newspaper reported a portion of the story of William, which supports some of this story.While never a significant number, free persons of color like Jefferson Waters existed in Gwinnett since its beginnings. The household of Jourdan Jinn recorded one free person of color in 1820. Five households enumerated a total of eight free persons of color in 1830. The number of free people of color increased to fourteen in 1840, spread over seven households. The 1850 census recorded eleven free persons of color in five households, but this time half of the households were recorded under the free person’s name rather than a white guardian’s name. William Keaton’s farming household in Cain’s District contained six members. All but the two Medlock sisters, Nancy and Hulda, were listed as mulattos. None of those listed in 1850 were enumerated in Gwinnett in 1860. However, the 1860 census counted thirty-three free persons of color in nine households. Again, several of these households were listed independently of a guardian’s name, with the two largest families headed by Julia Gay (nine members) and William Jefferson (eight members). In 1860, the census listed nineteen of the free people as mulattos. None of the families in 1860 listed any real estate holdings, and only one listed a value (only $10) for personal property.In the end, Gwinnett partially replicates the experiences of its neighboring counties. More like DeKalb County to the south, Gwinnett showed significant cotton production and slave ownership, mostly on smaller farms. Unlike cotton belt counties, like Walton and Newton, Gwinnett’s enslaved population proved notable, but never came close to a majority. Like Hall and Jackson counties, one would notice the plain folk in Gwinnett. Gwinnett possessed poor whites, landless but proud, but even more significant levels of self-sufficient and composite yeomen households. One could not miss the slaves in Gwinnett either, since they made up one out of every fifth person, and one of every five households contained some slaves. Like urbanizing Fulton County to the Southwest, in 1860, Gwinnett possessed more than 30 free people of color, some of whom appeared to live in their own households, and were enumerated without notice of a white guardian. As elsewhere, planters were the elite of the elite. The lack of a well-defined class of planters with more than 100 slaves, however, established that the mix of other free white classes would ultimately control the county’s future. ................
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