Note We returned from a trip to Georgia and South Carolina about a week ago and we wrote a travel log of our trip for a closed Facebook site. This was our final entry posted today and we thought that you might like to read it.
As our recent trip through the South recedes into memory there are a few things that will stand out for us. It was just two weeks ago Wednesday that we visited Grace United church and its very informative and revealing church cemetery that has its roots back to well before the American civil war. In one of our articles we told the story of the young preacher and his first cousin bride who married despite family opposition only to be set apart when she died in India on a trip around the world on their honeymoon. There were other stories in that graveyard and one of the most interesting ones surrounded a slave owner who ran a plantation there on St. Simons island.
On this mans grave stone is engraved comments as to how good a man he had been and ending with these words: he was a good master. When in the south one cannot always easily separate what was once the antebellum pre war being from what has occurred since that time. A great war was fought to free the slaves but in the backwater South the memories of what once was still linger on in old mansions and graveyards where one can still imagine what it must have been like when some held others against their will to sweat and slave and die picking the cotton and the other crops that sustained a lifestyle that we cannot conceive of today.
Not far from the grave site of the young minister and his bride and beside the “”good master” lies the grave of a thirty one year old son of the south who died in 1862 at the battle of Fredericksburg far from his South Carolina home. Years before this occurrence, this white man and a colored baby were introduced to their society together, something unheard of in that day mainly because the “good masters” wife did not share the conventional view of slavery to the point that she called her slaves “my people” rather than acknowledge them as property. The children of slavery and white privilege played together and grew to manhood inseparable from each other.
When the war broke out, the once slave child accompanied the “good masters” son north to fight for their way of life. When the confederate officer did not return from the battle his companion went in search of his body and found it pierced with five musket balls as his friend had died in an act of bravery while assaulting the federal lines. He put the body on his shoulders and brought it back to confederate lines only to be told after he had constructed a wagon to return it south that he could not have a horse because there were simply none to spare. So, this devoted black slave friend pulled the wagon himself back five hundred miles to South Carolina where he was denied admittance to the island because it was in federal hands. So, he took his lifetime friend to Savannah where he was buried until the war ended when he was brought back to be laid to final rest in the family plot next to the mother who had brought them together so many years before and the “good master” father who had facilitated it all. The family wanted to do something for the now former slave but they had nothing because their plantation had been burned by the departing northerners and everything was in ruins. But they did have land so they gave him some and he became one of the largest black landowners in the south before his death in the 1920’s.
There are thousands of stories of chivalry, desperation, desolation and gratitude scattered in graveyards across the south still today as a people cast into transition remember their past. And that is some of what we took from our trip to Georgia that we wanted to share with you.
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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