And there was the Civil War

 It wasn't so civil...we've all got to remember. War is war.

I recently read a beautiful but harsh book "When the Crows Took Their Eyes" by Vicki Lane, another blogger. She is an accomplished mystery writer from nearby Marshall, NC. This book is historic fiction about the Shelton Laurel Massacre during the Civil War...with wonderful characterization of some of the real people who lived and died in that area, as well as one fictional character. It is griping, and I couldn't stop reading it, and indeed, I want to reread it again soon.

I'm reposting a post of 2017 in which I looked at the area of Georgia some of my relatives came from. My great grandmother (Zulieka Granger Phillips Swasey (Dear Nan)(1858-1935)was born in Fort Gaines GA, though her parents were settling in the east Texas area on the Sabine River called Town Bluff TX.

Fort Gaines GA ancestors

The Queen City loaded with bales of cotton, near a covered bridge, Chattahoochee River at Fort Gaines

I've been researching how my ancestors from the south lived and died during the years of the Civil War and following.
So to talk a bit about Fort Gaines GA, where my ancestors the William Phillips Sr. and Samuel Gainer family lived as of 1850. Before looking at 1850, here's some background of the location.

History lesson about Fort Gaines Georgia:

Located in southwest Georgia, on the Chattahoochee River in Fort Gaines was a smallish city where cotton had been shipped down river to the Gulf of Mexico prior to the Civil War. There were three forts built at that location, with the earliest having been a frontier fort to protect settlers from Indians. (The Indian culture had been established in that area for 2000 years, and included building Kolomoki Mounds nearby.) 

The First Fort:  Fort Gaines was established in 1816 by order of Gen. Edmund P. Gaines, commander of a large district, who used this as his headquarters. Containing two blockhouses, the 100-foot square fort was enclosed by a stockade eight feet high. During 1817, when Indians were active in the area, settlers look refuge in the fort, garrisoned by Federal troops under Gen. John Dill.  (Incidentally, a 100-foot square is 100 feet on each side, not 10 feet which brings a 100-square foot size.)

  

The Fort at Fort Gaines, and to the right, the railing overlooking the Chatahoochee River/ 

Frontier village restoration at Fort Gaines GA

The Second Fort: In May of 1836 the 88th Regiment of the Georgia Militia built a small fort in anticipation of an attack by the Creek Indians. The Steamer Georgian had arrived crowded with women and children fleeing from the Indian uprising at Roanoke upriver. The Steamer, Anna Calhoun was pressed for 5,000 pounds of bacon and 8 barrels of flour in order to feed the refugees and militia. 

The uprising was quelled before the fighting reached Fort Gaines. This was one of the last major insurgences of the Creeks before their removal to the West by Andrew Jackson. That was also known as the Trail of Tears.

Two Covered Bridges

 A covered bridge near The Queen City loaded with bales of cotton

Coheelee Creek Covered Bridge, Early County GA

I think these are 2 different bridges, based on the height over the water surface.  And the Queen City paddlewheeler (Steamer) is probably in the Chattahoochee River, not a creek! Early County later was divided into other counties, and Fort Gaines now is the county seat of Clay County.


Today's quote:

Be humble for you are made of Earth. Be noble for you are made of stars.

Yes they owned other people and profited through them

Slavery.
Ugly word.
Ugly practice.

Some of those who owned other people believed they cared for them.  They deluded themselves that taking care of people who worked for them meant enough care and love.  They deluded themselves that the Blacks were better off being slaves.
No way.
No person should lack the same freedoms that our country was founded upon.

I've long tried to be reasonable about all the other aspects of the Civil War, since so many of our Southern Families fought and many men died for the things the South stood for.  I doubt highly that anyone was out there shooting Yankees because they wanted to keep their slaves.

But the long and the short of it is that all those who fought for the Confederacy not only were fighting for their own livelihood, their own families, but for the big illusion that had given wealth to a few, and not a fair competition in the world marketplace, but an unfair advantage of so much "free labor."

Once that the slaves were freed, their labor suddenly was costly.  The South never recovered.  Neither did the free slaves.  And neither did their owners.

I think of how our economy is so messed up these days.  Nobody is a slave, but there are certainly a lot of people living in poverty, who still work two jobs at minimum wage and barely get by.  There is again a great disparity between a small group of very rich people, and they make sure to keep the poor where they are.

On a more personal level...I like looking at my ancestors.  And as I dig through their correspondence I am finding the Southern voice.  One great great grandfather wrote following the Civil War to his brother, and then wrote to President Andrew Johnson.  His letters are long and full of his thoughts.  He was a man of some consequence, having lived through the Civil War, and actually having military duty during the War of 1812.  He was 70 when he wrote his brother in 1866. He bemoans the end of the Civil War as causing more pain for the freed slaves, as well as their masters, and one of these days I'll type it out because his writing is very hard to read.  It's on his Ancestry page, written to his brother.

I try to understand his point of view.

Then I scanned some documents which were sent to my grandmother who lived in Galveston and Houston Texas, born in 1886, and she asked her uncle to tell her about some of her ancestors.  He wrote that her grandfather, William Phillips, who died as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, was the son of a man "who traded in Negroes with his brother."  The brother lived in Virginia, and he lived in Georgia, which was where William was born.  William's father had died and his mother remarried, and they all settled in Texas.

I'd really like to forget that phrase "they traded in Negroes" again.

But I won't, and I can't.

My white privilege means I can stand up and say how bad that makes me feel.  I had many ancestors who sold other people of another race, who profited from the mindset and business that perpetrated slavery.

I had known my ship captain, another great great grandfather, Alexander G. Swasey Jr,  had transported some slaves from Charleston SC to New Orleans, LA, from the ship manifests which he signed.  But that didn't feel as if he was actually doing the business of profiting by slavery.  Not true.  He was part of a system that was as bad in its day as the racism that still is around today.  In between has been the Klu Klux Klan...and Jim Crow laws and illegal practices of racism run rampant.

So even though these people are individually guilty of their outrageous part in the system of slavery, the system is the problem.

I say again, the system of racism is the problem.  There is a lot of institutionalized racism, where everyone closes their eyes/ears to practices that demonstrate this ugliness still...or may tut-tut about it, but don't do anything to change it.

These ancestors are long gone, and their spirits are telling me that I need to stay aware of the systems that I don't pay enough attention to today.  Many of today's systems mirror the slavery of the south in 1860.

Yes, there are certainly some almost invisible systems still eroding our freedoms.  People who march for their rights are usually talking about these systems.

Can you think of a few of them?

On May 29, 2018, Rosanne Barr's show was canceled by ABC, because she tweeted a racist statement about an African American woman who was advisor to President Obama.