Over thousands of years, population groups who lived on Jekyll Island either fit in with the land or reacted to changes that came their way. How these different groups lived also changed. We’ll follow these different people groups in this post from the earliest inhabitants to those whose ancestors were forced to come here. You’ll probably recognize some of this information from previous posts around the Brunswick area of Georgia.
First residents on Jekyll Island were the ancestors of the Timucan and Guale people.
Two major changes in living happened for these early inhabitants.
how these early inhabitants lived
When the Europeans came, these tribes were living in north Florida and coastal Georgia, including Jekyll Island. These people decorated themselves with tattoos and wore clothes made of deerskin, Spanish moss, and woven natural fibers.
right: Men tilled the soil with hoes made of shell or fish bones attached to wooden handles. Women planted the seeds.
European artists made these people appear more European.
pottery
Archeologists have found pottery pieces that tell us about the native people who lived in Georgia for thousands of years.
Early pottery made more than 4000 years ago was made by mixing clay and plant fibers. Later pottery was made by mixing clay with sand, shells, or other tempering ingredients.
life and land were inseparable
canoes
next phase – Europeans claim the land
During this time, 2 more significant events happened in history of the world. Europeans started exploring and colonizing the Americas, and French contact occurred when French explorers claimed this area for France.
In 1562, Europeans started coming to the New World, claiming it as their own. First to come were the French.
William Horton (remember him?), Oglethorpe’s aide, built a military fort on nearby St. Simons Island and established a home on Jekyll Island for himself, his family, and his servants.
By the end of the 1500s, less than a century after Europeans arrived in Georgia, the population of native people were decimated.
By 1765, the native Guale and Timucua people from northern Florida and parts of George were completely wiped out. But the Europeans kept fighting to control the land.
In 1736, William Horton arrived, along with hundreds of other settlers, to build a town and military fort on St. Simons Island. In exchange for his service, he was given a land grant on Jekyll Island.
The portrait is of Sir Joseph Jekyll, painted in 1928, is a copy of the 18th-century original by Michael Dahl. General Oglethorpe named the island in honor of Sir Jospeh Jekyll, who was an influential politician and financier of the colony. Now we know how the island got its name!
back to Horton’s home
William Horton came to Georgia to defend Fort Frederica, the British outpost on St. Simons Island.
tabby, beer, and sailboats
Strong but labor intensive to make, tabby is a type of concrete made from easily available ingredients. Oyster shells were burned to create lime and then combined with sand and crushed shells. When mixed with water, the result was concrete. Mr. Horton’s house was made of this material.
what happened to them?
European weapons, greed, and disease decimated the native people during the 1600s and 1700s.
Between 1830 and 1850, the federal government forced tribes in southeastern United States to abandon their homelands and move west. This move affected approximately 100,000 Native Americans.
Today, the Seminole Nation lives in Oklahoma, and the Seminole Tribe lives in Florida. Both groups, and others, honor Jekyll Island as their ancestral land, and their history is still part of this place.
Of course we’re only looking at this time from one point of view. Most of these tribes had fought with the British against the Americans in the War of 1812. And if the relocation hadn’t happened, the United States wouldn’t have been able to expand and all of those coming from overpopulated Europe wouldn’t have a place to go.
Regardless of the reasons for the relocation, the process could have gone more humanely, and their new home could have been a better fit for the lifestyles they loved. Lessons that we should have learned better.
next phase – plantation era
Between the Revolutionary War (1776-1783) and the Civil War (it ended in 1864) was the time of immense change in the southeast and on Jekyll Island. By the late 1700s, the Dubigon family owned the island and ran a large cotton plantation.
the Dubignon family
The family settled in Georgia and bought Jekyll Island, setting up a plantation with about 50 enslaved workers. Their crop, Sea Island Cotton, was luxurious and lucrative. It grew well in the sandy soil, and the family cultivated it for several generations.
future generations
However, the Civil War changed life for the descendants of this family.
left: Son Henri and his wife Anne inherited the island from Henri’s father and managed the plantation until it was evacuated during the Civil War.
right: Great-granddaughter Josephine was married to Newton Finney who helped transform the island into a hunting paradise that became Jekyll Island Club.
a horrific journey
While slavery was outlawed in the United States in 1807, illegal African slave trade continued in secret. So how did the slaves get rounded up for the slave ships after the ships had been retrofitted for the voyage? Here’s one process what I found online from New Georgia Encyclopedia about the Wanderer.
“Still flying the triangular pennant of the New York Yacht Club, the former luxury ship arrived at the mouth of the Congo River, in present-day Angola, on September 16, 1858. Although portions of the West African coastline were patrolled by the British navy, specifically the British African Squadron, which sought to prevent the penetration of illegal slave traders, the Wanderer and its crew easily sailed up the Congo to areas where captives were readily available. It was on that river that Corrie and Lamar made contact with one Captain Snelgrave, a representative for an illegal New York slave-trading firm.”
“After a period of negotiation, Corrie and Lamar placed an order with Snelgrave for 500 Africans, who were to be delivered to the Atlantic beaches from the barracoons, or slave warehouses, higher up on the Congo. The Americans paid for the African captives, at a rate of $50 per head [$1576 today], with rum, gunpowder, cutlasses, and muskets rather than with paper or gold. The entire transaction was completed in less than a month, and by mid-October the Wanderer had begun its return voyage to the United States.”
The tragedy of the Wanderer that came to Jekyll Island in 1858 upset the North, and it was the last ship to bring a large group of slaves to the United States and was one of the last issues to spark the fire of the Civil War.
Stacked like spoons, shackled, and in cages, they lived in dark, cramped quarters, enduring sickness, heat, and starvation. After the 6-week trip, the ship landed on Jekyll Island, and the remaining 409 survivors were forced into slavery.
“Man’s inhumanity to man.” (Robert Burns) So glad the North decided to take a stand on the issue and fight the Civil War to stop it.
survivors
Many of the Wanderer‘s survivors were boys between 12 and 18, probably because they were the strongest of those on the trip and probably had been taken care of by their elders. The youngest survivor was born at sea.
On shore, they (not sure if the reference is to the slaves already at the plantation or the slaves from the ship) built a fire, ate, and made shelters from palmetto leaves. Just 10 days later, they were given English names and sold into slavery on rice and cotton plantations in the South. Some survivors eventually served the Union Army in the Civil War. Others moved north, and a few tried returning to Africa and their families.
life as slaves
right: ads for fugitive slaves often had an image like this one
Wonder what ever happened to the slave ship Wanderer? In spring of 1861, Union troops seized it as an enemy vessel at Key West, Florida. The Union navy converted the ship and used it for various purposes, including gunboat, tender, and hospital ship. Sounds like a good use for this ship after its bad start.
cotton gin
By the mid-1800s, the American South was producing 3/4 of the world’s cotton, and 1/3 of the South’s population was enslaved.
As we’ve said before, the Dubignon family depended on their slave labor to cultivate and harvest Sea Island Cotton, their cash crop.
Cotton was picked from late June until December; work started before sunrise, and torches were used in the fields later in the day so picking could be done at sunset. The days were long and hot, and the work was grueling and back braking.
final phase – Civil War and beyond
Charles Lamar, one of the key organizers of the Wanderer‘s illegal expedition, commanded the regiment stationed on Jekyll Island. Robert E. Lee inspected batteries protecting Brunswick. All of these batteries were moved to Savannah less than a year later, and in March 1862, the Union Army seized Jekyll Island.
Two men who had survived the Wanderer voyage and were then sold into slavery in Louisiana, August Congo and Wimba Congo, joined the Union Army’s Colored Troops under officer P.B.S. Pinchback (the man in the following picture) who became the first black governor of Louisiana.
I’ve often wondered what President Lincoln would have done with a 2nd term in office. We know that Vice President Johnson, from the other political party (Democrat) reversed what had been put in place. I think we would have had a different country if President Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated.
Anyway, I decided to find what he would have worked on in a second term. From the Britannia Encyclopedia online page, I found these policies he probably would have put in place:
- His main object should be to restore the “seceded States, so-called,” to their “proper practical relation” with the Union as soon as possible.
- He possessed no fixed and uniform program for the region as a whole (all of the states), but was going to work with each state. Since “States Rights,” the 10th Amendment, was so important to the South, this was probably a good way to go.
- He seemed willing to use the old rebel governments temporarily as a means of transition from war to peace.
- He was on record as opposing the appointment of “strangers” (carpetbaggers) to govern the South. He hoped that the Southerners themselves, in forming new state governments, would find some way by which whites and Blacks “could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new.”
- A program of education for the freedmen, he thought, was essential to preparing them for their new status.
- He suggested that the vote be given immediately to some African Americans—“as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.”
Another of President Lincoln’s ideas was one we read about and remembered was from the museum underneath the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. His thought was to give the freed slaves the option of going back to their home countries in Africa.
We were shocked when we first read this, but then realized that the Africans had only been gone from their families and all that was familiar to them for a few years, so his idea could have been a loving thing to do. What do you think?
blending cultures
The Gullah Geechee people are descendants of African people who had been enslaved along the coasts of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.
Over time they learned to speak with each other in a unique creole language that melded English with 30 different African dialects. They shared with each other their traditional arts, crafts, cuisine, music, and dance. The Gullah Geechee people today honor and celebrate their roots in their artistic expressions, language, and ceremonies.
right: Descendants perform dances honoring their ancestors.
Pottery vessels like the face jugs in the following picture were made by those who had been brought here, including survivors of the slave ship Wanderer. Some think that the faces on the jugs were to fend off evil.
What an informative, and sometimes difficult, walk through history. Guess that’s the nature of history—some good and some bad. Hopefully we can duplicate the good and learn from the bad.
We’re done with our visit to Coastal Georgia and are going home for a couple of weeks. The next trip is to southern Alabama near Mobile. See you then!
