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.
In 1898, a category three hurricane devastated coastal Georgia, crippling what was left of the rice plantations from south of the Sea Islands to further north of Savannah, as well as destroying over 60,000 barrels of rice due to the damage at warehouses and shipping docks such as the one depicted here in Brunswick.” Even after limping on after the insurrection and the land contestations during early Reconstruction, the rice economy in coastal Georgia was not able to recover itself after this final, inevitable blow.
Timothy Lockley, in his book on race and class in the antebellum lowcountry, describes the myriad ways that poor whites and Black workers interacted and relied on one another. Particularly of interest are the informal economies they created through trade and crime. Even as many were ultimately recruited to police the territory, some poor whites would inevitably have been trading partners with rebel Ogeechee workers in the preparations for and during conflict.107 Any efforts by poor whites who did aid in the rebellion’s efforts were undocumented or concealed, while the spectacular accounts of those who fled the area were publicly used to incite and justify later military intervention.
New Year’s Eve wore on in Savannah with Sheriff Dooner summoning a posse comitatus after he was refused military aid for the second time that week. Latin for “force of the county,” posse comitatus was a common law that allowed for a county sheriff to summon the arms of any number of able-bodied men over the age of fifteen to help in the apprehension of criminals or convicts. This legalized form of vigilante justice was common in the rural South, especially when the conflicts between Union and Confederate allegiances in state governments created gaps in the smooth functioning of law and order. Savannah judge Philip M. Russell, Jr. issued 150 warrants against Ogeechee rebels, both men and women, seemingly with lists of workers’ names from planters and managers who were driven out of the area. The warrants charged the individuals with “insurrection against the State of Georgia, robbery by force, robbery by intimidation, assault with intent to murder and larceny.” The sheriff went out by train with his first posse, but returned immediately, frightened of being outnumbered, and proclaimed that “that no legal process should be served in their neighborhood, that they had possession of the country and a government of their own, and no white man or office of the State should molest them with impunity.”108
On January 1, 1869, the Savannah Morning News reported:
The Negroes are receiving reinforcements from Bryan and Liberty Counties, and trustworthy persons from that section report that they are plundering all the plantations and threatening destruction to all who dare to meddle with them. They are said to have thrown up some sort of a fortification at Peach Hill and have all the roads and approaches strongly guarded.
Alongside the continued destruction of plantation homes, Middleton’s house was rumored to have been torched after its contents looted. Up until that point, his plantation home had been used as a central strategic location for the rebellion.109
At this point, Major Middleton was becoming an organizing force in Savannah. He called a public meeting at the courthouse, where he seduced the crowds to his side with the impending threat of an armed and brutal mob surrounding Savannah. Middleton showed his true interests when he told the assembled crowd
