The Insurrection of 1868–1869
We had a small excitement in November, 1868, owing to a report which went the round of the plantations that there was to be a general Negro insurrection on the first of the year. The Negroes this year and the following seemed to reach the climax of lawless independence, and I never slept without a loaded pistol by my bed.”
—Ella Thomas, daughter of a prosperous farmer in Augusta, Georgia86
By 1867, the rice plantation owners in the Ogeechee Neck had become more organized and effective in revamping the cash crop system of their former society through the labor contract system introduced by northern interests. The close-knit nature of the planter class allowed them to reorganize ownership and management of their lands without compromising their economic power. Three of the prominent plantations in the Ogeechee Neck hired Confederate officers Major Middleton and Captain Tucker to run operations, and one of the first acts of these new managers was to evict everyone who refused to sign labor contracts. Those evicted and other sympathetic workers immediately began organizing around this hostility through the local Union League.87
Unrelated to the Union Army, the Union Leagues were a massively attended, decentralized, cross-racial political organizing body of southerners active during the Reconstruction era. Varying wildly in composition, style, strategy, and tactics, the local context of the League took precedent over any national doctrine that Radical Republicans might have been pushing at the time. Whether or not the Union League in the Ogeechee District began with the intention of becoming an insurrectionary force, leaders from the League moved beyond the marches, parades, strikes, and voter organizing that dominated other region’s Leagues.88 It can be gathered that in Ogeechee, those in the Union League were primarily concerned with getting land, and advocated for the direct action of setting up homesteads for themselves in the face of the government’s inaction toward that end.
1863 map of the rivers and railroads between the Savannah and Ogeechee rivers. Illustrated London News, January 1863
One historian of the Ogeechee rebellion, Karen Bell, asserts that—as tensions rose with laborers’ refusal to sign contracts—it was the leaders of the Union League who initially rallied the Union Home Guard, a protective militia of and for formerly enslaved Blacks, which was created in 1866 to support those who refused to work. It is also entirely possible that affiliation with the Union League was merely a strategic choice, enabling those in Ogeechee to organize aboveground meetings. In February 1868, however, Major Middleton made it illegal for the League to meet on any of the plantations he controlled, which effectively sent the organizing body underground. From there, the conspiring that would lead to the rebellion the following winter began.89
Accounts vary as to how hostilities specifically manifested in the last week of December 1868, but it seems that for at least a year, hundreds of workers and refugees of the Ogeechee Neck (and probably throughout Chatham, Bryan, and Liberty counties) conspired about the actions that followed. These included setting up communication networks, accumulating weapons and materials, and expropriating crops to fund the actions. To get a sense of what took place during the roughly two weeks of action that became known as the Ogeechee Insurrection, we must use daily newspaper reports from Savannah, as well as the limited available academic research, which aggregates the various paper trails left by property owners, court clerks, and military and state officials. While there is an abundance of testimonies from whites who fled the area and Black workers who were loyal to their employers, there are few firsthand accounts by those who participated in the revolt, save for one small manifesto by leader (and former Union League president) Solomon Farley.
It is worth noting that most of the daily events of the Ogeechee Insurrection were relayed through the Savannah Morning News, the prominent media outlet of the city. Throughout the nineteenth century, the media in the South operated as a legitimized amplification of the gossip and paranoia of white property owners; such reporting was encouraged by all sectors of society who were terrified of the upheaval of the conditions under which they were accustomed. This is not to say that conspiracies of slave insurrections and insurrections by free Blacks in the postwar south were not a constant threat to plantation society, but exaggeration was effective in efforts at controlling the majority of southern society who owned neither slaves nor land, i.e., poor whites and Blacks. The generalized fear of violent insurrection by Black men, a fear constantly reinforced by newspapers, was necessary to maintaining racial segregation between Blacks and poor whites. This obscured the reality: that the two often shared mutual interests and sometimes even a history of cooperation during rebellion.
Urban media outlets like the Savannah Morning News also functioned to maintain the myth that the African body was providentially ordained, and by implication psychologically inclined, to servility and thus bondage—a myth that was reinforced by the emerging “sciences” of phrenology and eugenics.90 Though both were functional to maintaining the plantation system in their own way, the narrative of providential decree sat uneasily beside the constant paranoia drummed up by media outlets seeking to engineer poor white support. This inconsistency rendered the prospect of an organized insurrection by Black workers at once horrific and omnipresent, while simultaneously inconceivable.91 The contradiction of these competing white supremacist narratives may also help to explain the differing accounts offered by certain white witnesses during the rebellion, as to whether the insurgents were an organized military outfit or more similar to a disorganized, riotous mob.92
Partly due to the unreliability of the media, precise statistics concerning participation in the insurrections are unavailable; so the number of people involved and actual dates of various actions are based partly on conjecture. What remains important is that between December 1868 and January 1869, hundreds of people were sick of negotiating with bosses, landlords, and Freedmen’s Bureau agents, and consequently forced all planters and those loyal to them off the lands where they lived. Within a limited territory, the infrastructural and symbolic power of the planter class was destroyed, and insurgents set out to live a new life. The following accounts are an attempt to give a fuller picture of their tactics, desires, and lives as they converged that winter on the five rice plantations between the Ogeechee and Little Ogeechee rivers.
On December 23, the Savannah Morning News reported that there is “proof of organization and a complete league among the country Negroes.”93 The source of this information was a citizen who was stopped a few days before “by armed pickets at every cross-road” and was only allowed to proceed after tense discussion.
The next day, the same paper reported that,
On all the Ogeechee plantations the Negroes appear to be banded together, thoroughly armed and organized. They will not work and, by threats of violence, prevent those who are willing to labor from serving their employers, their object being to prevent the rice crop from being secured by day that they may steal it at night.
Tucker and Middleton hired extra white men to watch the fields at night. Some night prior, a group of the rebels appeared in two fields owned by the planters and fired on the watchmen, wounding two and forcing the rest off the land. The band then stole sixteen sacks of rice, roughly 160 bushels. One source described the rebels:
They drill regularly, are armed, equipped and organized in regularly military style. They live mainly off plundering the plantations of poultry and stock, stealing the horses and selling them and raiding the woods for game. One of the ringleaders goes about at all times with an armed bodyguard and puts on as much style as an army brigadier. In that section of the country there appears to be no longer any security for life or property.
Bell’s