Between December 30 and January 2, the county sheriff and his men got involved, and the antagonism between planters and ex-workers intensified. According to the Savannah Morning News, on December 30 warrants for larceny and assault with intent to murder were issued for seventeen Ogeechee Black men. Sheriff James Dooner was charged with executing the warrants and immediately called upon Major Perkins for military aid. Perkins jumped at the opportunity to help quell the rebellion, but was forced to rescind his offer hours later after higher-ups informed him that “under the existing state of public affairs no action could be taken by the military until every means and all energies of the civil authorities had been exhausted and they proved powerless to act in the matter.”95
Without support from the military, Sheriff Dooner and two other officers left Savannah early in the morning to deliver the warrants. They arrived at Station Number 1 on the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad, mounted the horses that awaited them, and headed five and a half miles west to Heyward’s plantation.96 When they arrived at Vallambrosia, the sheriff was assisted by the local overseer in detaining five men, who were then taken to the train bound for Savannah. The officers then proceeded to the New Hope Plantation, owned by a “Miss Elliot,” to find “the great rascal” Solomon Farley who, based on his political and criminal record, they believed was behind the plot.97
The officers broke into Solomon’s home, read his warrant aloud, and after some arguing he agreed to go with them. Before leaving the house Solomon exclaimed that he was “not yet secure” and “drew something upon a slip of paper and handed it to his wife, who started off up the canal upon receiving it.” He then handed off more slips of paper to his friends and family, who followed his wife’s example. As the officers began to realize what was going on, they ordered Solomon to stop writing and headed off toward the railroad station with him in custody. From here the Savannah Morning News reports that the crew of officers arrived with Solomon Farley at the train station around 2:30 p.m., and while eating lunch began to notice some disturbance up the road ahead. Black men and women from the Neck were amassing on the road leading to the train station, and as minutes passed their numbers increased. The News claims that it was a “great mob … armed with guns and other weapons. About 200, it was estimated, were present.” When the sheriff attempted to address the crowd, they replied that they “didn’t care for the Sheriff or anybody else.” The officers immediately deserted the train station and left Savannah by road, where the people followed “yelling like a pack of demons.” The police didn’t make it far before needing to leave the road and barricade themselves in a nearby house.98
In another account, the story goes that the crowd was not a disorderly mob, but rather that they attacked the police in “military formation.”99 Regardless of the competing accounts, the Ogeechee crew succeeded in de-arresting Solomon while disarming the sheriff and his officers, seizing their arms, warrants, money, and “whatever else of value they had about them.” The officers were left at the house, embarrassed and alone, to catch the next train on the fly as the rebels secured Station No. 1 against transporting the officers back to Savannah.100
On December 31—the morning after the sheriff and his officers made it back home—Savannah was teeming with rumors and excitement. People gathered in the streets to read the news and discuss what should be done. The Savannah Morning News reported, in the classic gossip style of the day, that it was “unanimous [in the streets] that things should be stopped and at once.” Also arriving in town at the time were George Baxley and Mr. O’Donald, employees of Major Middleton who had both been forcibly removed from the plantations and consequently found fast friends with the News reporters and the sheriff.
George Baxley should have known that his days of micromanaging and punishing workers and their families in the Neck were numbered: not long before, he was trying to tear down an old house on the land when he was stopped by a rice worker named Hector Broughton who warned him, “Don’t pull that house down, I’m coming back to get my forty acres and I want that house.”101 Baxley continued to manage the Southfield Plantation as usual until days later he was attacked and knocked unconscious by insurgents. Upon waking, he found a canoe at the river and fled to the city. As the News details:
Deep in the Ogeechee woods, just before sunrise, two hundred members of the Ogeechee Home Guards divided into military companies and armed themselves with muskets and bayonets. The men had putatively secured weapons in Savannah months before the revolt. Plantation managers also provided muskets to “trustworthy” African Americans on the Ogeechee neck to drive off the ricebird. As the men marched toward the plantations, they met George Baxley, one of Middleton’s overseers who had gone to investigate the commotion in the woods. The men lurched toward Baxley, surrounded him, confiscated his weapons, and struck him with the butt of a musket.102
Mr. O’Donald, a watchmen of Middleton’s, experienced a similar expulsion. O’Donald stated that the armed former workers took him out of his house, beat him up, and then proceeded to march him up and down his front yard, stopping every few minutes to give him a beating. He was eventually told to leave and never come back. Removal of O’Donald and Baxley, and men like them, were clearly acts of revenge, but there was also the strategic importance of removing the management class from the territory. Overseers and watchmen safeguarded the agrarian capitalist class by physically and psychologically disciplining the workers. The way that O’Donald was made to march up and down in rows in his yard, receiving a beating at the end of each row, sounds strikingly similar to the movement of field workers, tending up and down rows of rice plants, while being tormented by overseers who were attempting to increase productivity. This ritual beating is also reminiscent of the paranoia and terror that was created years later when Black workers were stopped by watchmen along roads, their daily movements policed to re-create the conditions of slavery times when Black bodies were strictly relegated to their value as manual laborers.103
The same armed insurgents also forced the planter and owner of the Southfield rice plantation, Major Middleton, to abandon his lavish home. An account from the plantation manager stated that the “lawless vagabonds … had completely cleaned it and the other houses of their contents … all the houses had been plundered of everything they contained.” The workers who showed for work had “no one to give them tasks” and simply loitered about.104
When the owners and managers had been run off, the rebels were said to have congregated at the Atlantic & Gulf Railroad Station Number 1, declaring that “no white man should live between the two Ogeechees.”105 This infamous declaration of the rebellion became a battle cry for Black laborers and struck fear into the hearts of whites who had abandoned the Ogeechee Neck, as well as those in Savannah who feared the spread of the insurrection. Black watchmen, who refused to join the rebellion, along with other Blacks who wanted to return to work or were friendly with the planter class, were pushed off of the land as well. Practically speaking, whiteness came to include not just a powerful racial caste but also those in collaboration with owners.
A brief aside on the racial demographics of the lowcountry is useful here. Before the war, one-third of low-country whites and nearly all free people of color lived in the urban areas of Savannah, Darien, Jefferson, and St. Mary’s, while the vast majority of enslaved Black workers lived in the surrounding rural areas. In 1870, there were 4,201 Blacks and 411 whites in the Ogeechee district.106 Regardless of these numbers, non-slave-holding white farmers did exist and intermingled within and around the plantation borders; but the planters created a myth of gentility, which said there was no class disparity between whites. The repercussions of this myth were that poor whites were socially invisible in geographic areas dominated by the plantation economy. Widespread illiteracy and their being absent from state property and court records reinforced the legal and historical invisibility of poor whites in areas like Chatham County.