“Indiscriminate Flight of Inhabitants to the Interior”
Scene at Johnson Square on arrival of the news of the capture of Port Royal by the Union Forces
from Harper's Weekly
(Image courtesy of the Georgia Historical Society)
In March of 1861 Alexander Stephens, a Georgia attorney, and Vice
President of the Confederate States of America, delivered his
infamous “cornerstone” speech describing the Confederacy
before an enthusiastic overflowing crowd in Savannah in which
he proclaimed: “Its cornerstone rests upon the great truth
that the Negro is not equal to the white man: that slavery—subordination
to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”
“It was this racist bedrock,
born of self deception and assiduously cultivated since Georgia
was founded, that obscured the relatively simple fact that slavery
was an economic institution created to exploit the black worker.
It was this racism that took Georgia out of the Union in 1861,
that killed so many of its sons on the battlefields of the Civil
War, impoverished its economy and brought needless suffering to
countless people, both black and white.”
--Donald Grant, The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience
in Georgia
As the Union Army approached Savannah leaving behind a path 60
miles wide of desolation and destruction from Atlanta to the sea,
it also brought freedom to every enslaved person in that path.
Dr. William Pollard, a veterinarian and deacon of the First Bryan
Baptist Church, met General Sherman’s Army at the Bay Street
Road, identified himself and presented the torch of First Bryan
Baptist Church. Dr. Pollard was born in Savannah, July 13, 1824,
and lived on Bryan Street opposite the First Bryan Baptist Church.
“After the city of Savannah had been captured by the Union
Army, General Sherman set up a command post on East Broad Street
near the present site of the Pirate’s House Restaurant. Dr.
Pollard was given the mission, which he performed, of assembling
all persons of color in Chatham County and the surrounding areas
to meet in the square opposite the Second Baptist Church to hear
the reading and explanation of the Proclamation of Emancipation.”
Source: African American Episcopalians in Savannah,
p. 102
“During the Civil War St. Simons
was abandoned by the plantation owners. The men were in the Army
of the Confederacy and the women refugeed on the mainland at Waynesville
and later at Waresboro. The Negro slaves remained on the plantations
and many of the men joined the U.S. Army, enlisting in a regiment
commanded by Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the first Negro
regiment in the United States Army.”
Margaret Davis Cate, Early Days of Coastal Georgia
On the evening of January 12, 1865, one of the most remarkable
gatherings of the Civil War took place in Savannah. Twenty black
ministers and lay leaders joined Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton
and General William T. Sherman at the general’s headquarters
in the mansion of Charles Green (The Green-Meldrim House) on January
12, 1865. They had been summoned to consider the future of the
thousands of slaves freed by the devastating march of Sherman’s
army. The Reverend Garrison Frazier, 67, was chosen to represent
the views of Savannah’s black leadership.
The Reverend Ulysses L. Houston and the Reverend William
J. Campbell were among the twenty ministers who met with Secretary
of War Stanton and General Sherman.
Garrison Frazier being chosen
by the persons present to express their common sentiments upon
the matters of inquiry, makes answers to inquiries as follows:
First: State what your understanding
is in regard to the acts of Congress and President Lincoln’s
[Emancipation] proclamation, touching the condition of the colored
people in the Rebel States.
Answer—So far as I understand
President Lincoln’s proclamation to the Rebellious States,
it is, that if they would lay down their arms and submit to the
laws of the United States before the first of January, 1863, all
should be well; but if they did not, then all the slaves in the
Rebel States should be free henceforth and forever. That is what
I understood.
Second—State what you understand
by Slavery and the freedom that was to be given by the President’s
proclamation.
Answer—Slavery is, receiving
by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his
consent. The freedom, as I understand it, promised by the proclamation,
is taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where
we could reap the fruit of our own labor, take care of ourselves
and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom.
. . . .
Fourth: State in what manner
you would rather live—whether scattered among the whites
or in colonies by yourselves.
Answer: I would prefer to live
by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the South
that will take years to get over . . .
Excerpted from Free at Last, A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and The Civil War
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