The President’s Message:
I am so pleased that
Round Table member Bill McEachern will be our speaker on Wednesday, May
14th.
He will present an excellent program,
War
with Barbery Pirates.
Besides being an acclaimed author, Bill is a great speaker.
Family and friends are invited.
There will be refreshments.
Just like Civil War troops, the Round Table travels on its
stomach.
See you at our May
meeting.
Gerridine
April 9, 2025
Program:
The Republic of
Georgia
The State of Georgia never fully
yielded sovereignty to the Confederacy.
When the State of South Carolina seceded before Christmas, 1860,
it triggered wild excitement in adjoining Georgia.
In Savannah secessionists held parades and burned bonfires in
celebration.
 In
December 1860, Georgia governor Joseph E. Brown, a passionate believer
in slavery and southern states' rights, opined that the election of
Abraham Lincoln, an anti-slavery Republican, to the U.S. presidency
would result in the ending of slavery in the United States.
He called upon Georgians to resist anti-slavery interventions,
declaring that failure to do so would result in the emancipation of
their slaves:
Georgia Governor, Joseph E. Brown,
was a South Carolina native born April 15, 1821 in Pickens County, South
Carolina. He and his brother
left the farm with his father’s plow horse and drove a yoke of oxen to
Anderson, South Carolina.
Brown traded in the oxen for eight months at the town’s academy.
In 1844, he moved to Georgia and served as headmaster at a local
academy. He was ambitious
and decided to attend Yale University to study law.
In 1847 he opened a law office in Canton, Georgia.
He served in the state senate and eventually was a circuit court
judge.
He was a secessionist leading effort
to remove Georgia from the Union and into the Confederacy.
However, he was a firm believer in state's rights, and he defied
the Confederate government's wartime policies.
He resisted the Confederate military draft and tried to keep as
many soldiers at home as possible to fight invading forces.
Brown challenged Confederate government policies of impressing
animals, goods, and slaves.
Several other governors followed his lead.
After South Carolina seceded, he requested the Georgia
legislature convene a special convention to vote on secession.
Elected at age thirty-six as a compromise candidate when the Georgia
state Democratic convention deadlocked, Brown was an ardent and an
articulate proponent of states rights in the fullest sense.
Even his mentor, John C. Calhoun, had not been so insistent upon
the right of each state to have the final word concerning implementation
or rejection of any and all federal legislation.
Along with Brown’s call for a
convention, at which to put the matter of secession to a vote, the
Governor asked the lawmakers of Georgia to establish a new military fund
of one million dollars "...to be used in order to put the state in a
posture of defense."
With the special fund voted and the
secession convention scheduled to convene at Milledgeville on January
16, 1861, the youthful governor acted swiftly.
He sent Colonel A. R. Lawton and the First Georgia regiment to
Fort Pulaski, a federal installation at the mouth of the Savannah River.
Rated as one of the strongest in the South, it had been built by
the U.S. Army's Corps of Engineers, for a time under the direction of
Robert E. Lee.
Following the directive of the
governor, Lawton seized the fort.
Almost simultaneously, other units of Georgia's military force
converged upon the huge arsenal at Augusta and took possession of it.
Federal forces made no resistance.
January 18 saw a fiery resolution
introduced into the special convention.
It repudiated Georgia's ratification of the U.S. Constitution
before declaring and ordaining that "...the Union now subsisting between
the State of Georgia and other States, under the name of the United
States of America, is hereby dissolved… making the State of Georgia in
full possession and exercise of all those rights of Sovereignty which
belong and appertain to a free and independent State."
In spite of spirited opposition, the
resolution carried by a vote of 208 to 89; eventually all but seven
delegates to the convention signed the ordinance of secession.
Georgia was a free and independent republic!
Official documents were hastily
printed for the Republic of Georgia.
Plans were made to send envoys to London and to major European
countries. Bankers were
consulted concerning the need for an immediate issue of the new
republic's currency. These
grandiose plans collapsed when delegates to a South-wide convention held
in Montgomery, Alabama, decided to pool their manpower and other
resources instead of going their separate ways.
Reluctantly, Governor Brown and his allies yielded to pressure
and agreed to join the Confederate States of America.
The Republic of Georgia had survived for less than six weeks.
But the ideas that led to its formation were alive and well.
Jefferson Davis had not reached Richmond when Brown issued an
order that all Georgia military units were to remain in the state, under
his personal command.
Brown became concerned about the
growing power of the Confederate government, which had moved to
Richmond, Virginia, in June after the war started in April 1861.
The first disputes over controlling and equipping Georgia forces
were ominous, for the Confederacy could hope to win only by a
centralized, unified war effort.
Soon the disputes escalated, and in April 1862 Brown directly and
openly challenged the new Confederate draft.
At the time a revolutionary but necessary action to mobilize limited
Southern white manpower against a more populous enemy.
Despite a lack of support by the state supreme court and the
legislature, Governor Brown tried to exempt state military forces.
As the draft kept expanding and
drawing more manpower out of the state, the governor kept resurrecting
his forces with Georgians too young or too old for conscription.
This became a kind of ritual struggle between Brown and Jefferson
Davis, accompanied by bitter correspondence.
The governor’s defiance set an example for other states to
further cripple the faltering draft.
He also provided exemptions for thousands of Georgia men who
found jobs in a rapidly expanding state bureaucracy.
Brown launched a recruitment drive
and began establishing new regiments. He placed orders for rifles,
artillery, and ammunition.
Though Georgia owed token allegiance to the C.S.A., Brown intended to
continue to run the state as an independent entity with its own army and
even its own navy. Brown
wanted locally raised troops to be used only for the defense of Georgia,
in defiance of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who wanted to
deploy them on other battlefronts.
When the Union blockade prevented Georgia from exporting its
plentiful cotton in exchange for key imports, Brown ordered farmers to
grow food instead, but the breakdown of transport systems led to
desperate shortages.
However, during the war, Georgia
sent nearly 100,000 men to battle for the Confederacy, mostly to the
Virginian armies. Despite
secession, many southerners in North Georgia remained loyal to the
Union. Approximately 5,000
Georgians served in the Union Army in units such as the 1st Georgia infantry Battalion, the 1st Alabama Cavalry Regiment, and a
number of East Tennessean regiments.
Georgia's Rabun County in
particular, which did not declare secession from the Union, was highly
Unionist, described by some as being "almost a unit against secession."
One of the county's residents recalled in 1865 that "You cannot
find a people who were more averse to secession than were the people of
our county", stating that "I canvassed the county in 1860-61 myself and
I know that there were not exceeding twenty men in this county who were
in favor of secession."
The dividing lines were often not as
clear as they are sometimes viewed in Rabun County during this period.
In
A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the
Mountain South, Jonathan Dean Sarris examines the wartime experiences of
Fannin and Lumpkin Counties.
Within these two counties, Unionist and Confederate leaning factions
fought brutally directly within the home front between 1861 and 1865.
Sarris argues that there is a "complex web of local, regional,
and national loyalties that connected pre-industrial mountain societies"
and that these loyalties are among the major factors that determine the
leanings of these mountain towns.
The Madden Branch Massacre in Fannin
County was one of several atrocities that occurred as the mountain
counties divided into pro and anti-Confederate factions.
On November 29, 1864, six Georgians trying to enlist in the U.S.
Army - Thomas Bell, Harvey Brewster, James T. Hughes, James B. Nelson,
Elijah Robinson, Peter Parris, and Wyatt J. Parton - were executed by
the notorious Confederate guerilla John P. Gatewood," ...the
long-haired, red-bearded beast from Georgia."
While concentrated in the mountains and large cities, Unionism in
Georgia was not confined to those areas and could be found in areas
across the state.
Bickering, squabbling, and downright
defiance of orders from Richmond continued throughout the war.
North Carolina's governor approached, but did not quite reach,
Brown's: level of defiance.
Neither of these executives ever conceded that Richmond had any more
right to tell them and their citizens what to do than did the old
federal government in Washington.
Consequences of this stance were
sweeping. Long before it was
formally promulgated; most states had gone their independent ways in
important respects. Nearly
all had a special gauge, or width, for railroad tracks.
South Carolina's locomotives could not run on Georgia's tracks
without elaborate adaptation.
That might add to the pride of both the Palmetto and the Peach
states, but when military materiel was being shipped from Charleston to
Savannah it had to be unloaded at the state line, and then clumsily
reloaded in boxcars built to Georgia's specifications.
Nevertheless, the hallmark of his
wartime administration was his resistance to the authority of the
central Confederate government, a policy that was soon copied by some
other Confederate governors and that helped to undermine the overall war
effort. Governor Brown's
opposition surfaced in many fields.
He opposed the army's impressments of goods and especially slave
laborers. He frustrated
Confederate efforts to seize the Western and Atlantic Railroad and to
impose occasional martial law.
He bitterly criticized Confederate tax and blockade-running
policies. Over time the
war-weary legislature backed him more often, and influential politicians
like Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens and former secretary
of state Robert Toombs became his open allies as morale slumped in
Georgia. Continually at war
with Jefferson Davis, Brown is believed by some analysts to have
contributed to the fall of Atlanta and to the collapse of the
Confederacy.
Pushing southward from Chattanooga,
General William T. Sherman and his men relied entirely upon the
single-track Western & Atlantic Railroad as their supply line.
State owned; the line was built from Chattanooga southward to
Atlanta in prewar days.
As Sherman moved farther and farther
from other Federal forces, the railroad that was the lifeline of his
campaign became increasingly vulnerable.
To many, it seemed obvious that Jefferson Davis could have sent
guerrilla units to cut the railroad, not just once, but over and over
and over again. Such a
delaying tactic might have meant an entirely different end to the
Atlanta campaign.
For reasons wholly unaccountable to
ordinary citizens, Davis never sent Confederate sappers to wreck the
Federal supply line. Was
this a way of retaliating for Joseph E. Brown's stubborn refusal to
concede that his government was subordinate to that in Richmond?
No one knows positively, but the weight of evidence suggests that
Brown, Georgia, and the Confederacy paid heavily, indeed, for the
governor's rigid insistence that the rights of states came first, last,
and always.
During at least one period of
crisis, Abraham Lincoln had his own hands full with northern governors
who, perhaps for the first time, wanted to claim states' rights as a way
of evading increasingly stringent draft laws.
But the crux of the long struggle over the extent of central
power of a united or confederated government, as opposed to the rights
of member states, always lay in the region whose states had claimed the
right to secede.
After the fall of Atlanta, Georgia's
governor pulled from the Confederate Army of Tennessee the troops he had
reluctantly lent to that army.
Brown is believed to have seriously considered the possibility of
negotiating a separate peace with Union forces without consulting
Richmond.
At one astonishing point in 1864,
Brown simultaneously led legal fights against the rights of the
Confederate government and sent Georgia troops to contest with
Confederate troops led by General John B. Hood.
Viewed from the perspective of over a century, it is astonishing
that the C.S.A. managed to function at all.
Georgia, North Carolina, and other member states were almost as
angry with Richmond as they had been with prewar Washington.
Seldom told in the North and
virtually unknown in the South, this story of internal strife within the
Confederate States of America yields fresh understanding of some of the
difficulties faced by those who decided to fight it out in the name of
states’ rights and for the preservation of the plantation/slavery
system.
The Confederacy collapsed in April
1865. Governor Brown was
arrested and briefly imprisoned in Washington, D.C.
Paroled, he backed U.S. president Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction
policy and received a full pardon in September.
Then a Republican, Brown served as
chief justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia for two years.
As Reconstruction ended, he swung back to the ranks of the
Democrats and again prospered in law and business.
During his postwar career Brown was a member, along with John B.
Gordon and Alfred H. Colquitt, of a group known as the Bourbon
Triumvirate, which held much of the political power in the state from
1872 to 1890. From 1880 to 1890 Brown served in the U.S. Senate, until
poor health forced his retirement.
He died on November 30, 1894.
The Brownlows of
Tennessee
“East Tennessee was a thorn in the
side of the Confederacy throughout the war.
The people of the mountains held little sympathy for the “upper
crust” of the slave holding class.
Few, if any, in East Tennessee could afford to buy a slave and
therefore depended on each other for assistance when needed.
One of the Confederacy’s chief sources of trouble was Parson
William Brownlow. Originally
a Methodist minister, William was tagged with the nickname of “Parson”
the rest of his life.
Parson Brownlow kept the communities
in and around Knoxville in a constant state of political and religious
uproar with his strongly pro-Union but equally strong pro-slavery
rhetoric. He had violently
opposed secession in 1861.
He soon became a leader of the Unionist elements in east Tennessee. His
anti-Confederate speeches were tolerated during the first few months of
the war, however, reports linking him to the burning of railroad bridges
and articles in his newspaper, Brownlow’s Knoxville Whig, proved too
much for the Confederates.
He was imprisoned on December 6, 1861, physically expelled from the
Confederacy on March 15, 1862 and triumphantly accompanied the Union
army when it captured east Tennessee.
He became a firm advocate for a “hard war” against the South.
He was elected Governor of Tennessee in 1865 and 1867.
In 1869 he was elected to the U. S. Senate.
Following in his father’s footsteps,
William Brownlow’s youngest son, James P. Brownlow, proved to be quite a
soldier. By the age of
twenty-two, James was one of the youngest Colonels in the Union army.
He commanded the Tennessee Cavalry (Union) under General Sherman
during the Atlanta Campaign.
He had a natural skill for commanding troops and was a leader who was
often heard to say “Come on boys,” rather than “Go boys”.
On one occasion he actually challenged a Confederate commander to
single combat.
 On
June 9, 1863, Sherman attempted to cross the Chattahoochee River near
Roswell, Georgia. Brownlow was ordered to create a diversion but
realized any direct attack would likely fail.
The use of any horses would have made too much noise as would
marching soldiers. He sent
two companies of soldiers lead by Captain Moses Wiley to attack at a
specific time totally stripped of their clothing (or as their Mama would
have said,’ bare nekked”).
Meanwhile, Brownlow was crossing farther upstream without any attention.
In
a letter to his father Colonel Brownlow wrote about his escapade:
As soon as Capt. Wiley saw that I
had nearly reached the opposite shore, He and his men charged very
bravely, but missing the ford.
When half way over, he and every man went plunging in over their
heads, and just then the rebels opened fire upon them, and compelled
every man to seek shelter under large rocks in the river, as best they
could.
Captain Wiley was now in such a
condition as to be unable to advance or retreat, and unfortunately left
me and my ten men on the enemies (sic) side of the river, without help.
And with a prospect of going to Atlanta sooner than we desired,
destitute of even so much as a shirt. Not fancying this, and acting upon
the maxim that ‘he who never bets never wins’ I determined to charge
upon the rear of the rebels, who were firing at Wiley’s party.
My charge was a success, I completely surprised them and took
them prisoners, and with them I captured a long ferry-boat, and returned
to my command.
The sergeant in command of the
rebels was a New York Dentist, who told me that he had been living in
the South but a short time.
He said he never was more surprised, and did not think any person was
bold enough to swim a river and attack them.
Gen. Sherman is said to have been pleased with our exploits, and
the ‘Special Artist’ for Harper’s Weekly has prepared a sketch for
charging the Chattahoochee.
One Confederate stated, “Tain’t fair
to come at us that way.”
The following is said to be an
exchange between a Union soldier and a Confederate.
“Hello Yank!”
“What do you want, Johnny?”
“Can’t talk to you anymore.”
“How is that?”
“Orders to dry up.”
“What for, Johnny?”
“Oh, Jim Brownlow with his damned
Tennessee Yanks, swam over upon the left last night, and stormed our
rifle-pits naked-captured sixty of our boys and made ‘em swim back to
him. We have got to keep you
on your side of the river now.”
Union Brigadier General Edward M. Cook said, “One of the funniest
sights of the War.”
Last changed: 04/27/25 |
