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 history of the revolt further describes the attack on the watchmen above, stating that: “The Ogeechee insurrection had its origins on Southfield Plantation … when between fifteen and twenty freedmen, armed with muskets and bayonets, sought redress from Maj. J. Motte Middleton and Capt. J.F. Tucker for expelling them from plantation lands.”94 In the last week of December, watchmen, overseers, farm managers, planters, and others aligned with the management class of the rice plantations were driven off of the Neck by insurgents’ hostility, and they consequently headed to Savannah.
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
