May 26-27 is the 1890’s Day Jamboree in Ringgold. I encourage any reader to attend and enjoy that wonderful community. I love having grown up in Northwest Georgia and celebrating our veterans, including both of my grandfathers who served in WWII.
But I also want to describe how the 1890’s were for my ancestors, living here in a singularly turbulent time. Based on, among other sources, History of Catoosa County and Into These Hills, my ancestors ate what they grew and little else, but would rather do that than work in a mill. Babies often slept naked on a pallet on the floor with flies covering him or her. Children never wore shoes. Everyone had lice; every bed had bedbugs. They used corn cobs as toilet paper. A doctor’s best method was simply encouraging the sick person to get well. Animal manure was often used as medicine.
People believed in signs from the sky. In turn, hogs were slaughtered, wood cut, holes dug, and sauerkraut made by the phase of the moon. They enjoyed cock-fighting, gander pulling, coon hunting, all rather violent activities.
The Deep South was a hot, humid, violent place without centers of culture. My ancestors were poor as dirt, but made it through. But it was worse for some. C. Vann Woodward, one of the greatest of Southern historians, describes the arc of the region’s history. The 1890’s saw the dying off of the Civil War generation, and a renewed focus on the young to honor that generation’s dying wish. Cotton prices went down creating additional fear and competition for scarce resources. The Populist movement threatened to split the white vote in a state that was over 40% black (blacks could and did vote at the time). While the rest of the nation was bursting at the seams economically and culturally, the Deep South was stagnant on both counts. Whereas about 20 percent of the population of the Northern states was foreign born, that number was only about 1 percent in the Deep South states.
Northwest Georgia was a land of moonshining and bootlegging. This was more profitable than farming, but destroyed families already living on the edge. It also led to radical organized crime and mob violence to punish informers. Most locals supported these “whitecappers,” called “kukluxers
" by the local black folks. This crime syndicate also fancied itself the upholders of the law in a place with weak legal institutions. This violence was disproportionally aimed at the local black population. Nationwide, there were over 1,500 lynchings in the 1890’s, more than ever before or since.
Although many whites in the South wanted black labor for farming, this wasn’t true in the hill country of Northwest Georgia. Blacks were pressured to leave the area from the Reconstruction Era until they were all gone from much of Catoosa County by 1918. This was done through mob violence, hangings, and general cruelty. According to an 1890's New York newspaper, the area was known as one of the wickedest places in the country, due to its lynchings, cowhidings, and tar and featherings. A Catoosa legislator was responsible for drafting the Jim Crow law segregating public conveyances during this time.
To a black man, a flogging or lynching was a constant threat. Likewise was the fear of rape among black women. Twelve percent of all children born to black women were “mulatto” or mixed race at the time. Sex between a white man and black woman was illicit and illegal then. Thus, a substantial percentage of babies born by black women were the product of a coercive power differential. We might call that rape by today’s standards.
Despite these conditions, there were heroes that emerged in these days among the black community. Many of them are unknown until the Kingdom comes, but some are. Richard Robert Wright was born to former slaves but studied at Harvard and became a bank president and met several presidents. March Thrash, who ate nothing but acorn soup during some of the Reconstruction years, was a joy to his neighbors and would tour Theodore Roosevelt around Fort Oglethorpe. His brother was a missionary to Liberia and returned to reunite when both were in their 100’s. R. Alonzo Scott was perfecting his trade of storytelling, song writing and preaching such that he would travel around the world twice, and lead a big church in England. He was friends with Frederick Douglas and Susan B. Anthony, before returning to Northwest Georgia to lead a church.
All that to say, my own ancestors had a work ethic, persistence and character that I truly envy. But they also had a blindness and cruelty that I worry might be in me. It is right and good to commemorate such a turbulent decade, but prudent to reflect on where we came from and where we must go. After all, “we are our ancestors in another age.”
Sources: The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward; History of Catoosa County by William H.H. Clark; Into These Hills by Floyd C. Watkins; Moonshining and Collective Violence by William F. Holmes; local newspapers and census records.
Samuel J. Gowin