Thomas Spalding

Topic: Early Versions - Performers
The origins of Alexander William Wylley’s labor force are unknown. [1] He may have been given some slaves by his father when he married in 1830 or may have inherited a few when Alexander Campbell Wylly died in 1834. [2] Any of those slaves probably were purchased after the family arrived on Sapelo Island. He had owned 17 bondsmen in the Bahamas in 1784, [3] but one would guess he sold them with his lands to raise money to return to the United States with his growing family.

The more probable source was Wylley’s father-in-law. Thomas Spalding may have provided some as a dowry or wedding gift. It is unlikely Wylley knew much about growing rice when he married. He was born in 1801, just before his father began his wanderings from lease to lease. He would have been around eleven-years-old when his father finally acquired land on Saint Simons Island. One suspects he apprenticed himself to Spalding, who had made up for his childhood in exile by studying modern agricultural tracts, and then passing the information on to others. [4]

By the time Wylley married Elizabeth Spalding, her father had expanded his land holdings to include rice lands on Cambers Island, sugar lands near Darien, and cattle ranges on Black Island. [5] If he knew Wylley owned rice lands, the slaves may have come from Cambers Island.

Spalding eventually turned management of Cambers Island and the sugar works over to his son, Charles Harris Spalding, who would have been 22 in 1830. [6] In 1850, Charles owned 204 slaves, while his father had 293, and his other brother, the whose son would inherit the Sapelo plantation, [7] had 87. [8] After Thomas died in 1851, Randolph claimed 252. [9]

Little has been written about Cambers Island, especially since Charles sold it in 1855. [10] Much more is known about the general slave population on Saint Simons Island. Charles Lyell stayed with James Hamilton Couper in the late 1840s. He admitted he wasn’t there to study social conditions, but botanical and geological ones, and thus his observations may not have been as accurate as his scientific ones. [11] With that caveat, he wrote:

"The slave trade ceased in 1796, and but few negroes were afterward smuggled into Georgia from foreign countries, except indirectly for a short time through Florida before its annexation; yet one fourth of the population of this lower country is said to have come direct from Africa." [12]

He also observed a correlation between the size of the enslaved population on a given plantation and the ability of the slaves to speak English and adopt western ways of thinking. In what might have been an allusion to Gullah, he wrote:

"So long as they herd together in large gangs, and rarely come into contact with any whites save their owner and overseer, they can profit little by their imitative faculty, and can not even make much progress in mastering the English language." [13]

Spalding’s detached treatment of his slaves followed, in part, from his distaste for slavery as an institution. He thought the best way to manage people was to treat them like serfs who were granted autonomy in return for completing work that was assigned to them. [14] Watson Jennison thought they "practiced their religion without interference." [15]

Despite his views of slavery, Spalding was a businessman. His loyalist father had lost many of his assets during the American revolution. [16] His father-in-law began purchasing Sapelo Island in 1802 [17] to grow cotton from seed he had obtained from his loyalist brother-in-law who had moved to the Bahamas. [18]

Spalding inherited his contract when Richard Leake died in 1802, and financed his purchase of the land with the sales of his own father’s plantation on Saint Simons. [19] By then, he had received some cotton seed from his father’s former business partner, Roger Kelsall. [20]

Next, like the South Carolina swamp planters who bought slaves from rice growing areas in Africa, [21] he looked for laborers already familiar with his proposed crop. Ray Crook thought Spalding used contacts with loyalists in the Bahamas to buy a driver [22] and possibly other slaves from the Bahamian estate of John Bell who had grown cotton. [23]

In 1803, [24] Spalding and Couper’s father tried to smuggle some Igbo from Savannah. [25] When they neared land, the captives took over the ship, walked into Dunbar Creek, and drowned themselves. [26]

The locus of the African slave trade had changed since South Carolina rice growers were importing captives before the American Revolution. As mentioned in the post for 10 March 2019, most of the captives, who arrived in Charleston between the time South Carolina reopened the slave trade in 1803 and 1808 when it was closed by the United States, were from Kongo, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast of modern Ghana.

The Igbo lived east of the Niger river in what is now southern Nigeria. Spalding’s Bahamian driver, Bilali Mohamed, was a Fulani from Futa Jallon. [27] Sylviane Diouf thought he, most likely, was exported through a port in Guinea. [28]

The slaves on Spalding’s Sapelo Island plantation probably were a mix of Fulani, Igbo, and whoever else was available in the period. It was possible he acquired some or all the slaves already on the Cambers plantation when he purchased the land. Demographically, they may have been more like the groups on South Carolina rice plantations.

End Notes
1. Details on census reports of his slave holdings appeared in the post for 2 June 2019.

2. GlennGyn website published a list of Alexander Campbell Wylly’s slaves taken from the Glenn County, Georgia, probate court records for 30 June 1834. He owned 38 when he died. Based on the number of slaves owned by A. C. sisters in 1850, it seems likely that Wylly’s estate went to support his wife and children living at home, and not to his son. His sisters were mentioned in the post for 2 June 2019.

3. Sandra Riley and Thelma B. Peters. Homeward Bound. Miami: Island Research, 2000 edition. 250, note 32.

4. Buddy Sullivan. "Thomas Spalding (1774-1851)." New Georgia Encyclopedia website. 14 May 2003; last updated 21 February 2018.

5. Buddy Sullivan. "Ecology as History in the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve." Sapelo Island NERR Occasional Papers, 2008. 12.

6. "Spalding Family Papers." Georgia Historical Society website.

7. William S. McFeely. Sapelo’s People: A Long Walk into Freedom. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1994. 182, note 5.

8. Jack F. Cox. The 1850 Census of Georgia Slave Owners. Baltimore: Clearfield Company, 1999. 288.

9. Tom Blake. "McIntosh County, Georgia: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census." RootsWeb website. May 2001.

10. Buddy Sullivan. Footnotes to The Darien Journal of John Girardeau Legare, Ricegrower. Edited by Sullivan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. 125.

11. Charles Lyell. A Second Visit to the United States. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1849. 1:257.

12. Lyell. 1:267. Spain ceded Florida to the United States in the 1821 Adams-Onis Treaty. [29]

13. Lyell. 1:269.

14. E. Merton Coulter. Thomas Spalding of Sapelo. University: Louisiana State University Press,1940. 85. "It was Spalding’s hope that the slaves might progress through serfdom to a measure of liberty and independence. They should be attached to the land and not sold away from it."

15. Watson W. Jennison. Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750-1860. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky 2012. 175. His sources were not available in the on-line version.

16. Spalding’s family history was discussed in the post for 2 June 2019.
17. Sullivan, Spalding.

18. Thos. Spalding. "Observations on the Introduction of Long Staple Cotton in Georgia." The Southern Agriculturist and Register of Rural Affairs 5:189–190:April 1832. 189. Leake was married to Jane Martin. Her brother was John Martin.

19. Coulter. 39–40.

20. Thomas Spalding, Observations. James Spalding had immigrated to Charleston in 1760, then entered the Indian trade in Georgia with Kelsall. During the war, he sold his trading interest in Florida to William Panton and Thomas Forbes, who moved to the Bahamas after the Treaty of Paris returned the land to Spain in 1783. [30]

21. For more of the importation of slaves from rice-growing parts of the Africa, see the post for 13 January 2019.

22. Ray Crook. "Bilali—The Old Man of Sapelo Island: Between Africa and Georgia." Wadabagei 10:40–57:Spring 2007. 51–52. He mentioned Robert McKay of Meins and McKay, and Edward Swarbeck.

23. Crook. 48.
24. Wikipedia. "Igbo Landing."

25. Douglas B. Chambers. "Ebo Landing: History, Myth, and Memory." Nebula.Wsimg website. 2015.

26. Timothy B. Powell. "Ebos Landing." Georgia Encyclopedia website. 15 June 2004, last updated 11 March 2016 by Chris Dobbs.

27. Crook. 41. Futa Jallon was discussed in the post for 13 January 2019.

28. Sylviane A. Diouf. Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. New York: New York University Press, 2013 edition. 116. She thought the only likely ship to land in the Bahamas before 1790 was the Peggy, which "sailed from Assini in Ivory Coast and Nunez in Guinea." The Rio Nuñez flowed from the Futa Jallon.

29. Wikipedia. "History of Florida."
30. "Forbes Bluff." Florida Online website.