The Background
In William Tecumseh Sherman’s February 1879 letter to The Atlanta Constitution about the state’s need for immigration, he praised North Georgia as “peculiarly adapted to fruit orchards, to gardens and small farms; and all you need to make it teem with prosperity is more people…”
But what about South Georgia?
Even the Constitution noted that “with respect to immigration, the remarks of General Sherman in regard to north Georgia may be applied to any part of the state, especially to southern and southwestern Georgia.”1
If you know anything about South Georgia, Sherman’s oversight isn’t surprising. Even now, the bottom half of Georgia is a sort of no-man’s land: primarily rural, sparsely populated, and largely ignored by those in Atlanta and the northern part of the state.
Today, the region is also deeply impoverished, but before the Civil War, Southwest Georgia was one of the richest sections of the United States—for a handful of White landowners, anyway.
By 1860, the Deep South produced two-thirds of the world’s cotton,2 and most of it grew in a swath of fertile country stretching from Southwest Georgia to lower Alabama and Mississippi, later called the Black Belt.
The fighting of the Civil War never even came close to Southwest Georgia, but in the early 1860s, most of the state’s 460,000+ slaves3 were bound there, and because the region’s plantations were so productive, the slaves far outnumbered the landowners.
Take, for example, Dougherty County, which includes the region’s largest city, Albany. In 1860, 150 landowners in the county owned 6,000 slaves, in what W.E.B. Du Bois later described as “perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew.”4
At the height of the Civil War, with the Confederate States Army struggling for food and supplies, the state legislature forced the plantations of a dozen Southwest Georgia counties, including Dougherty, to switch from cotton to food crops, and for two years the region became the army’s primary food supplier, lending it the title of the “Egypt of the Confederacy.”5 6
By the time Sherman wrote his letter to the Constitution, King Cotton’s reign in Southwest Georgia had collapsed as cotton production largely shifted to Texas in the 1870s.7 8 With slavery abolished, most of the old plantations were abandoned, although former slaves still tended the land as tenant farmers.
In 1878, W.H. Parkins (1836-1894), Atlanta’s first architect, purchased a plantation in Calhoun County, Georgia, just west of Albany. Given the area’s depleted condition, he must have paid dirt for the place.
Prompted by Sherman’s letter to the Constitution, Parkins wrote his own response in February 1879 to The Southern Enterprise of Greenville, South Carolina. Why Greenville? No clue.
Parkins’ letter was reprinted two months later in The Albany News, and is now reproduced here.
In the letter, Parkins lamented that Sherman had “left out the garden spot of Georgia entirely,” and extolled Southwest Georgia’s virtues for potential Northern transplants, namely: “delightful climate, rich loamy soils, plenty of streams, good society, plenty of land for all that want to come, and cheap.”
Contrast that with Du Bois’ harsher assessment of the region nearly 25 years later: “The whole land seems forlorn and forsaken.”
Of course, Parkins was White and had Atlanta money, so his perspective was bound to be a little rosier than the Black farmers Du Bois documented, who were still effectively shackled to the land by low cotton prices and high debt to absentee landlords.
I also wonder if Parkins had experienced a Southwest Georgia summer when he wrote this letter, given his boast that “We have winters without being froze up four or five months in the year—flowers in midwinter…”
He may have felt a little differently around June to September, when the place swelters like the portal to hell. Du Bois put it best:
“It gets pretty hot in Southern Georgia in July,—a sort of dull, determined heat that seems quite independent of the sun”9
What a Northern Settler Thinks of Southwest Georgia
Calhoun Co., Ga., Feb. 14, 1879.
Editors Southern Enterprise:
I have been reading over General Sherman’s letter published in the Atlanta Constitution, and it is plain to see that he speaks facts concerning the great drawback on immigration to Georgia and the South. What impresses me most, and what I take the greatest interest in, is the settling up of this portion of our State, also which to my mind is the best agricultural portion of Georgia. Now, Gen. Sherman’s letter will be read by thousands, and those who contemplate moving South will take his letter as an Index or guide as to the best portion of this State, Tennessee and Virginia; and as the General has been through the country three times, they think he ought to know. We feel that we have equally as good, if not the best, agricultural district in the State, and it should be made known far and wide. While Gen. Sherman does justice to the country he passed through, yet we consider he left out the garden spot of Georgia. He does not particularly mention this, so we desire to add our testimony, and cannot do it better than to herald it through such valuable and reliable papers as the Enterprise. We want your co-operation, for friend Jenkins knows whereof we speak.
Let it be known that here we can cultivate the land every month in the year, and get something to eat every day; delightful climate, rich loamy soils, plenty of streams, good society, plenty of land for all that want to come, and cheap.
I want to state for the benefit of my Northern friends (I am a New Yorker,) that if they knew, actually knew, what these lands would produce, with the same energy and push and intelligence they put into the lands North, they would be surprised at the results, and would soon be moving southward. We have winters without being froze up four or five months in the year—flowers in midwinter.—While I am writing hyacinths are in bloom.
This has been a great cotton growing section, but corn, wheat, oats, barley, &c., can be grown equally as well and with profit. I have traveled in North and Northeast, and Middle Georgia last year in search of a farm; finally, with prejudices on my mind, was induced to visit this section, and was not long in deciding what to do. I am delighted not only with the lands, but with the people, and the climate. If these lands were cleared of their stumps and old dead trees, they would look like the Western prairies. I can’t for my life see why so many people will go West and Northwest in those cold climates, when here is a stretch of country, that so far as climate is concerned, is unequaled in my estimation. And if manufactures be the object there is plenty of the very best water power.
This letter is already too long, as the General has in a manner advertised a belt of country from Lynchburg to Atlanta, let us keep the facts before the people who contemplate migrating South, that they can extend their trip beyond Atlanta and find better lands, and more equable climate further down. As I am interested in the building up and peopling of the agricultural portions of Southwest Georgia, I will take pleasure in giving the result of my observations to any of my Northern friends who will write me at Morgan, Calhoun county.
W.H. PARKINS.10
References
- “General Sherman’s Letter.” The Atlanta Constitution, February 11, 1879, p. 2. ↩︎
- U.S. History, Cotton is King: The Antebellum South, 1800–1860, The Economics of Cotton | OpenEd CUNY ↩︎
- Slavery in Antebellum Georgia – New Georgia Encyclopedia ↩︎
- Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk ↩︎
- Americus, Georgia “As it Was” in 1894. Americus, Georgia: Americus-Times Recorder (1971), p. 16. ↩︎
- Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk ↩︎
- ibid. ↩︎
- The History and Evolution of Cotton Production in Texas – Texas State Historical Association ↩︎
- Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk ↩︎
- Parkins, W.H. “What a Northern Settler Thinks of Southwest Georgia.” The Albany News (Albany, Georgia), April 17, 1879, p. 4. ↩︎
