Claire Marguerite Lovejoy

Topic: CRS Version
The Civil War precipitated large population movements.  They began when planters, who lived along the Georgia coast, moved inland after the Union navy took control of Doboy Sound in late 1861.  As mentioned in the post for 23 June 2019, Tom Spalding’s daughter-in-law, moved herself and the family slaves to Milledgeville, Georgia. [1]

After Sherman took Atlanta on 2 September 1864, he dispatched residents through Lovejoy Station [2] to Macon, Georgia, [3] while he planned his march through the Piedmont during early winter, with limited provisions.  His troops were ordered to seize food and horses to supply themselves and demoralize the population.

He divided his men into two columns.  The western unit was protected by 5,000 cavalrymen, led by Judson Kilpatrick.  They followed the railroad to Lovejoy Station and Macon. [4]

Claire Lovejoy, who knew a version of “Kumbaya” around 1915, spent her girlhood years in Monroe and Meriwether counties. [5]  Individuals, who were slaves there during the Civil War, recalled Yankees breaking into smokehouses. [6]  Lewis Favor remembered that his widowed owner took him and “several other slaves” westward to LaGrange in Troup County after “a battle was being fought a few miles distant and they all saw the cannon balls fall on the plantation.” [7]

Life after Emancipation varied.  Favor said he and his mother stayed with the widow, [8] but Minnie Green said her parents left the plantation after the harvest in Meriwether County. [9]  In Monroe County, Alice Hutcheson said only one person left the Robinson’s immediately, [10] but later:

“I wukked for Miss Sally Yervin a while and den us moved here to Athens.  My gran’pa come atter us, and Mr. Mote Robinson moved us in one of dem big, high up waggons.” [11]

[I worked for Miss Sally Yervin a while and then us moved here to Athens.  My grandpa come after us, and Mr. Mote Robinson moved us in one of them big, high up wagons.]

The 1870 census showed the number of Freedmen living in Meriwether County had dropped more than 20% from 8,752 in 1860 to 7,369.  The African-American population didn’t grow much in Monroe County, an indication of out-migration and, possibly, high mortality.  It increased by less than 6% from 10,200 to 10,804.  In contrast, Bibb County, with Macon and a regional office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, jumped 67%, from 6,831 to 11,424. [12]

The price of cotton per pound in Liverpool, England, rose from 6.25 cents in 1860 to 27.5 cents in 1864.  When the Freedmen’s Bureau forced African Americans back into the cotton fields in 1866, [13] the price was down to 15.5 cents.  The next year it was 10.88 cents. [14]  Prices fluctuated from 8.5 cents to 9.1 cents through the 1880s. [15]

Low prices for cotton translated into reduced incomes for former planters who leased their land for shares of crops.  The per capital income of whites before the war had been $125.  “In 1879 it was just over $80.” [16]  They began to realize profits from their land were going elsewhere.

Many land owners, who once supervised the work on their plantations, moved into towns after they subcontracted oversight to their tenants. [17]  In county seats, they were in close contact with bankers, merchants, and representatives of railroads who were promoting a “New South” based on manufacturing rather than agriculture.  Local cotton spinning mills became the panacea. [18]

Cities along the fall line, with an infrastructure from before the war, [19] were the first.  In 1876, two local cotton merchants and one from Savannah organized the Bibb Manufacturing Company in Macon.  By 1895, it employed 700 people. [20]

The use of steam freed mills from their reliance on falls for power, but they still needed water to drive engines and railroads to ship products.  In Monroe County, Forsyth Manufacturing was operating by 1900. [21]  In Meriwether County, the town of Manchester was organized in 1909 on a new rail line for a mill built by Fuller Callaway. [22]

Few African Americans worked in textile mills, and none lived in company-owned housing. [23]  Black men were hired in logging, where the number employed in Georgie rose from 5,943 in 1890 to 10,240 in 1900.  More were working in turpentine camps. [24]

The new social elite in towns like Forsyth created a demand for African-American women to do the same jobs they had done on plantations: cooking, cleaning, laundry, and sewing.

The hidden benefit of segregation for African Americans was their children were spared working in textile mills.  C. Van Woodward found 25% of mill employees were between the ages of 10 and 15 in 1890. [25]

Monroe County, where Lovejoy went to school, had 41 public schools for African Americans in 1900, [26] and 50 a decade or so later.  None were in the town of Forsyth. [27]

If her grandmother lived near Forsyth and could afford tuition, then Lovejoy would have attended the Forsyth Normal and Industrial Institute owned by W. N. Hubbard.  Hubbard reported 500 students in 1911 and 433 in the 1912-1913 school year.  However, when Thomas Jesse Jones visited in 1913 and 1915, only 200 were attending. [28]

Three teachers handled nine grades, for an average class size of 66. [29]  By comparison, the public schools for Blacks in Monroe County averaged 81 students per building, while the white ones had 41. [30]

Meriwether County, which was only 45 miles west of Monroe, [31] had a more varied economy.  An ancient ridge of mountains, worn down to a few peaks, crossed the southern part of the county.  Its rivers flowed southwest to the Gulf of Mexico. [32]

Several springs, which flowed from the monadnocks, had been resorts since land was taken from the Creek in 1825. [33]  David Rose built two bath houses and sold lots to “gentlemen” in Columbus, Georgia, and Apalachicola, Florida, in 1833. [34]  The one was on the fall line [35] below the springs where biting gnats were a problem; [36] the other was its port on the Gulf of Mexico. [37]

After the Civil War, people from Columbus continued to come, even when the local hotel burned in 1889.  Charles Davis transformed the area in 1893 when he built the Meriwether Inn, which was accessible by a branch of the Southern Railroad that ran northeast from Columbus. [38]  Benjamin Bulloch established Bullochville [39] along the tracks the same year. [40]  Black men were visible servants, [41] while women cleaned rooms and did laundry.

Resort life was seasonal.  Lovejoy said she spent her summers with her grandmother in Meriwether County, when there was high demand for labor.  In winter, when the tourists were gone, she lived with her grandmother in Monroe County where there was a private school. [42]

When she revealed these details to Lynn Rohrbough in 1956, she was answering a specific question, not writing an autobiography.  One can place her in a social and economic environment, but can hazard no guesses about her family and its circumstances.

Graphics
1.  Hal Jespersen.  “Map of the Savannah Campaign (Sherman’s March to the Sea) of the American Civil War.”  Posted to Wikimedia Commons.  Uploaded by Nis Hoff on 3 February 2009; last updated 25 September 2013.

2.  D. F. Hewett and G. W. Crickmay.  Section of “Generalized geologic map of west-central Georgia and east-central Alabama, showing location of Warm Springs quadrangle (shaded area) and principal springs (numbered).”  The Warm Springs of Georgia: Their Geologic Relations and Origin.  A Summary Report.  United States Department of the Interior, Geological Survey, 1937.  5.

3.  Lennon’s photograph appears on the “Photos K” tab.

End Notes
The Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration collected oral histories from former slaves in the 1930s.  The ones from Georgia were published in four volumes by the Library of Congress in 1941. [43]  The interviewed individuals who were born in Meriwether County were:

Lewis Favor.  Interviewed by E. Driskell.  8 May 1937.  160–163 in volume 1.

Minnie Green.  Interviewed by Alberta Minor.  59–60 in volume 2.

Charlie King.  Interviewed by Mary A. Crawford.  16 September 1936.  21–24 in volume 3.

The one from Monroe County was Alice Hutcheson.  Interviewed by Grace McCune.  Edited by Sarah H. Hall and John N. Booth.  229–235 in volume 2.

1.  Milledgeville was the state capital.  It surrendered to Sherman on 23 November 1864. [44]
2.  Lovejoy Station is discussed in the post for 18 October 2020.

3.  “Atlanta Under Sherman.”  About North Georgia website.  Summer 2011.  “A total of 446 families with 705 adults, 860 children and 79 ‘servants’ made their way from Atlanta to Rough and Ready, the end of the tracks in Union hands.  Confederate wagons then carried the evacuees to Lovejoy Station, where they could depart to Macon.”

4.  Wikipedia.  “Sherman’s March to the Sea.”  It reprints part of William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order 120 for 9 November 1864.

5.  The map with the post for 18 October 2020 identified the places where she lived.
6.  King, 3:23; and Hutcheson, 2:230.
7.  Favor.  1:163.
8.  Favor.  1:163.
9.  Green.  2:50.
10.  Hutcheson.  2:234–235.
11.  Hutcheson.  2: 235.

12.  “Table V.  Population, by Race and by Counties: 1880, 1870, 1860.”  Population, by Race, Sex, and Nativity.  United Status Census Bureau, 1880 Census.  Volume 1.  386.

Mildred Thompson.  “The Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgia in 1865–66: An Instrument of Reconstruction.”  The Georgia Historical Quarterly 5:42–43:1921.  “In Macon, Atlanta, Augusta, Savannah, and elsewhere multitudes of feeble men, women and children were living either in the open or in rude shelters of logs and brush.  Under these conditions there was inevitably much sickness with a high rate of mortality.” [page 42]

13.  Thompson.  44–46.

14.  N. Hall.  “The Liverpool Cotton Market and the American Civil War.”  Northern History 34:149–169:1998.  149.

15.  “All Cotton Area Planted and Harvested, Yield, Production, Price, and Value – United States: 1866-2019.”  39–62 in Crop Production Historical Track Records.  United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, April 2020.  39.  The high was 10.3 cents in 1881.

16.  Roger Ransom.  “Economics of the Civil War.”  Encyclopedia of Economic and Business History website.  24 August 2001.  His source was Ransom  and Richard Sutch.  “Growth and Welfare in the American South in the Nineteenth Century.”  Explorations in Economic History 16:207–235:1979.

17.  Mark Baldwin.  Soil Survey of Meriwether County, Georgia.  United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Soils, 1917.  9.  The soil survey for Monroe Country didn’t mention this, but it clearly is what happened with Ruby Pickens Tartt’s father in Sumter County, Alabama. [45]

18.   C. Vann Woodward.  Origins of the New South.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951.  131–133.  In Georgia, Michael Gagnon said: “The thirty-year cycle of boom and bust in Georgia’s antebellum textile industry proved that the success of southern textile mills was inversely related to long-term trends in the price of cotton.  When agriculture suffered, mill building flourished.  When agricultural profits rose, Georgia’s textile industry floundered.  Georgians rationally pursued profits in both agriculture and industry but were mindful of market forces and the history of risks in each area. [46]

19.  The infrastructure was intellectual rather than physical.  Most obvious was the development of millwrights and others with knowledge of hydraulics of rivers and dams.  Gagnon mentions antebellum experiments with plant size and sources for water power.  Company histories show northern ideas of marketing were not transferrable, and had to be reinvented.  For instance, when the Macon Manufacturing Company opened in 1851, “it was under the management of a northern man, and the goods being shipped to northern markets for sale.”  When it failed to prosper, the company appointed a local man who “immediately sought a market and credit at home, and succeeded in finding purchasers.” [47]

20.  Arden Williams.  “Bibb Manufacturing Company.”  New Georgia Encyclopedia website.  13 October 2006; last updated 16 September 2019.  In 1878, it bought the facilities of Macon Manufacturing.

21.  Georgia Department of Agriculture.  Georgia, Historical and Industrial.  Overseen by O. B. Stevens.  Atlanta, Georgia: George W. Harrison, 1901.  338.

22.  “Manchester.”  West Georgia Textile Trail website.  Callaway was expanding his operations from LaGrange in neighboring Troup County.   He is mentioned in the post for 28 October 2020.

23.  Woodward.  222.  In Charlotte, North Carolina, African Americans “worked in the boiler room, or as janitors or on the loading docks, and did not typically share their work environment with white mill operatives.” [48]

24.  “Georgia.”  131–147 in Manufactures and the Mechanical Industries, by States and Territories.  United States Census, 1910.  132.  Turpentine labor needs increased from 9,880 workers in 1880 to 19,199 in 1890.  Black men working in logging are discussed in the posts for 3 February 2019 (Georgia), 17 May 2020 (general), and 20 September 2020 (Sumter County, Alabama).

25.  Woodward.  236.  40% of the employees were adult women, and 35% were adult men.  Macon Manufacturing advertised “we are much pleased with the order, cleanliness and healthfulness of this Establishment, and especially that the operatives are all Southern girls.” [49]

26.  Georgia.  766.

27.  Thomas Jesse Jones.  Negro Education; A Study of the Private and Higher Schools for Colored People in the United States.  United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, 1917.  232.

28.  Jones.  232.
29.  Jones.  232–233.

30.  In 1900, the Georgia Department of Agriculture reported Monroe County had 41 public schools for 3,326 African-American children, and 40 buildings for 1,648 white children. [50]  The larger number of Black children in school probably reflected the use of child labor in the mills.  The 1910 Census said “in the absence of legislation regulating child labor, all the cotton manufacturers in the state have signed an agreement to exclude from the mills children under 10 years of age, and those under 12 who can not show a certificate of 4 months’ attendance at school.” [51]  This implies younger children were employed in 1900.

31.  “Distance from Forsyth, GA to Greenville, GA.”  Distance-Cities website.  These are the county seats.

32.  Wikipedia.  “Apalachicola River.”

33.  Etta Blanchard Worsley.  “Warm Springs.”  The Georgia Review 3:233–244:1949.  236.  It was the 1825 Treaty of Indian Springs. [52]

34.  Worsley.  238.

35.  John S. Lupold.  “Columbus.”  New Georgia Encyclopedia website.  30 March 2004; last updated 9 September 2019.

36.  Mack S. Duncan.  “Fall Line.”  New Georgia Encyclopedia website. 18 November 2002; last updated 23 July 2018.  Gnats live in the sandy soil of the coastal plain.

37.  Wikipedia.  “Apalachicola, Florida.”
38.  Worsley.  240.

39.  Kaye Lanning Minchew.  “Warm Springs.”  New Georgia Encyclopedia website.  6 December 2002; last updated 22 August 2018.  In 1923, the new owner, Thomas W. Loyless, formed the Warm Springs Corporation with George Peabody, who, in turn, invited Franklin Roosevelt to visit in 1924. [53]  Bullochville became Warm Springs in 1924. [54]

40.  Kathleen Walls.  “Hotel Warm Springs.”  Visit Georgia Online website.

41.  Worsley.  240.  “The Negro drivers, wearing linen dusters and caps, cheerfully awaited Milady’s pleasure drive down from hotel to baths.”  If it was like other resorts, only Black men served as waiters in dining rooms.

42.  Her letter is quoted in the post for 18 October 2020.

43.  For more information on the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.

44.  Anne J. Bailey.  “Sherman’s March to the Sea.”  New Georgia Encyclopedia website.  5 September 2002; last updated 26 October 2018.

45.  See the post for 23 January 2019 for more on Tartt.

46.  Michael J. Gagnon.  “Antebellum Industrialization.”  New Georgia Encyclopedia website.  10 October 2003; last updated 28 August 2013.

47.  Item.  [Macon] Georgia Telegraph.   31 March 1857.  4.

48.  “Survey of African American Buildings and Sites in Mecklenburg County.”  Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission website.  February 2016.  2.

49.  The Southern Business Directory and General Commercial Advertiser.  Charleston, South Carolina: Walker and James, 1854.  Section for Bibb County, Georgia, reprinted on “Georgia Directories.”  Genealogy Trails website.  Emphasis in original.

50.  Georgia.  766.
51.  1910 Census of Manufactures.  131.

52.  Lonnie J. Davis.  “Creek Indian Land Cessions.”  Ocmulgee National Monument website.

53.  Worsley.  241.

54.  Elizabeth B. Cooksey.  “Meriwether County.”  New Georgia Encyclopedia website.  16 June 2006; last updated 18 July 2018.