County Courthouse, Wright Square, Savannah
Demolished 1890
(Courtesy of the Georgia Historical Society)
There was no publicly expressed sentiment against slavery in the Deep South. Even so, the issue would not go away nor could the growing abolitionist sentiment against slavery be silenced. John Brown’s raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, is regarded by some historians as the ominous first shots of the Civil War. Frederick Douglass, ex-slave and the most prominent black in the anti-slavery movement, described Brown as a white man who “is in sympathy a black man, as deeply in our cause as though his own soul has been pierced with the iron of slavery.” Hailed as a hero in the North and among African Americans, Brown was scorned by Southern whites.
The Reverend John G. Fee of the border state of Kentucky was also an exception. He actively preached against slavery. The son of a slaveholder, he persisted in preaching, praying and speaking against slavery in the slave state of Kentucky. Members of his abolitionist church, or those who aided him in establishing interracial Berea College were ostracized by the Community, which finally dispersed his teachers and drove a dozen Berea families across the river into Ohio. Fee was warned that if he came back to Kentucky, he would be hanged.
When the British actress Fanny Kemble came to America and married a Georgia plantation owner, she wrote to a sixteen year-old slave who had asked her to teach him to read: “I will do it . . . and yet it is simply breaking laws of the government under which I am living.” Then she decided, “Unrighteous laws are made to be broken . . . I’ll teach every other Creature that wants to learn.”
Contrary to popular belief all blacks were not enslaved before the Civil War. Their numbers in the Deep South were comparatively small but very significant, especially to those still enslaved. When General William T. Sherman arrived in Savannah there were 705 free persons of color in Savannah and Chatham County with 14,192 enslaved persons. The major reason for these small numbers was simply that the Georgia Legislature had passed complex laws making freeing of slaves virtually impossible. For example: If one wanted to free a slave, he had to pay as much as $1000 for doing so, and then that newly freed slave was immediately subject to be arrested and resold into slavery. Clearly the intent of the Legislature was to block the freeing of slaves. Historian Whittington Johnson in Black Savannah, 1788-1864 points out some features about the Savannah black community—free and enslaved—that distinguished it from other Southern cities.