1 Ebo Landing: History, Myth, and Memory Douglas B. Chambers ©2015 CHAPTER 1: ON THE WRIGHTS OLD PLACE Members, Plumb de line. Members, Plumb de line. O Members, Plumb de line. Want t’ go t’ Heaven got a plumb de line.1 The first known historical reference to Ebo Landing can be dated to 1857. The first recorded mention is not in a contemporary published source. It is not an artifact of print culture. Rather, like the story itself, the first known reference is an artifact of folk culture, from a private 1 “Plumb De Line,” in Lydia Parrish, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992; orig. publ. 1942), p.67. 2 letter. In this letter, from Anna Matilda Page King (1798-1859), mistresss of “Retreat” plantation, to her mainland cousin Amanda Woolley (b.1805), Mrs. King, in telling of the news of the week on St. Simons, casually mentioned “Ebo landing on the Wrights old place.”2 In this antebellum plantation world, the geographical reference apparently required no further explanation, nor was one forthcoming between these two cousins. Indeed it is curious that in the most famous literary antebellum description of St. Simons and its environs, Fanny Kemble (1809-1893), the wife of Pierce Mease Butler (1810-1867), who visited throughout the island in the early spring of 1839 accompanied by local slaves, with whom she went on daily voyages “up and down the river” including “explorations of the woods,” apparently never heard the story of Ebo Landing.3 Her enslaved companions, including Molly who was over 70 years old, and with whom Fanny clearly had a rapport, and the young slave man Jack, son of a former plantation driver (captain), who accompanied her everywhere, told her stories of slave runaways, and of the Revolutionary War era and before, and they took her to local historic sites of note like Oglethorpe’s Oak at Fort Frederica, and even to meet a very elderly and infirm enslaved woman named Charity, one of the oldest slaves on Hampton Plantation.4 And even though Kemble also spoke with local white ladies about slavery on St. 2 Anna Matilda Page King, Anna: The Letters of a St. Simons Island Plantation Mistress, 1817-1859, Edited by Melanie Pavich-Lindsay (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), p.326-327, emphasis in original. 3 Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 (New York: Harper & Brothers,1863), quotations pp.258, 263, respectively. The London-born Shakespearean actress Kemble married Butler in 1834, visited at Hampton from 16 February-19 April 1839, and later (1849) divorced Butler, in part over her opposition to slavery. Pierce Mease Butler was the grandson of Major Pierce Butler (1744-1822), and inherited a one-half interest in his grandfather’s estates in 1836. In 1859, Butler sold the entirety of his slaves, some 436 people, in a single “Great Sale of Negroes” at Savannah, liquidating his Georgia plantations on the eve of Secession, earning over $300,000 (the equivalent of some $6 million today). See Malcolm Bell, Jr., Major Butler’s Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), chapter 18. She resided on Butler’s Island for the first half of her visit (28 Dec. 1838 – mid February 1839), and then was on St. Simons at Hampton from mid February to mid April; Ibid., 53-193, 193-344, respectively. 4 Ibid., pp.246-251, 263, 288, 331-332. 3 Simons, in her account she never once mentions the story of the enslaved Igbo on Dunbar Creek. Kemble, moreover, had read the recently published journal of the notorius English novelist and playwright Matthew (‘Monk’) Lewis, clearly a kindred spirit, of his residence on a Jamaica sugar plantation in 1816 and 1818, which included many references to “Eboe” slaves at Cornwall plantation in Westmoreland Parish.5 Indeed, Kemble wrote, in January of 1839, that Lewis’s journal, published posthumously in 1834, was the very model of her own effort, though she took an epistolary approach: “I purpose, while I reside here, keeping a sort of journal, such as Monk Lewis wrote during his visit to his West India plantations. I wish I had any prospect of rendering my diary as interesting and amusing to you as his was to me.”6 Perhaps in 1830s St. Simons the story of Ebo Landing was still too raw to dare share with an outsider like Frances Anne Kemble, even someone as sympathetic as she might have been, given her openly antislavery (if equally openly racist) views. A second curious omission is the plantation diary kept in the 1840s and 1850s by Roswell King Jr., the longtime manager of the Butler estates in St. Simons and its environs. He was the son of Roswell King Sr. (1765-1844), who had been hired by Major Butler in 1802 to develop the plantation properties, including the 1700-acre Hampton Point (and adjacent Experiment farm, 5 Lewis (1775-1818), a well-connected literary enfant terrible of London, and friend of Lord Byron, gained notoriety for his Gothic novel The Monk (1796). He had also written several plays, and gained some recognition as a poet, and served in the House of Commons (1796-1802). He was well known to be homosexual though he was never publicly disgraced (unlike his contemporary William Beckford); Lewis’s tempestuous lover was William Kelly, who was 14 when they met in 1802, the year that Lewis resigned his seat in Parliament. In 1812, following his father’s death, Lewis inherited two large sugar plantations in Jamaica: Cornwall in the far west with 307 slaves, and Hordley in the far eastern part of the island with 283 slaves, which Lewis then determined to visit in 1815, though he had become an abolitionist. He made two visits to Jamaica (1 January-31 March 1816; 23 January-2 May 1818), and died unexpectedly on the return voyage in 1818. See John Berryman, “Introduction,” in Lewis, The Monk (New York: Grove Press, 1952; orig. publ. 1796), pp.11-28, esp. p.23. See also Judith Terry, “Introduction,” in Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; orig. publ. 1834). 6 Kemble, Journal of a Residence, p.53. 4 and Little St. Simons island pasturage fronting the ocean and Altamaha Sound), which Butler had owned since 1774, and the 1500-acre Butler’s Island, acquired by Butler before 1784, a tide- island that under Roswell King Sr.’s management (1802-1819) was turned into an extensive rice and sugar, as well as cotton plantation with four separate slave communities.7 In January of 1803 there were 206 slaves at Butler’s Island including mechanics for the water-powered rice pounding mill and ditchers, with another 335 slaves at Hampton, in four communities, including Experiment plantation (and Little St. Simons).8 After cutting a narrow navigation channel through neighboring General’s Island in 1808, to improve communication with Darien, the island rice plantation boomed. By 1815 Butler’s Island was also producing sugar for the first time, and in 1830 there were 365 slaves on the island plantation; in the late 1820s, one visitor to the Altamaha River region was so impressed that she described Major Butler’s ‘tide-island’ as the “most valuable plantation on this river.”9 By the time of Fannie Kemble’s extended stay (1839), there were 436 slaves at Butler’s Island, and in 1850 when King was the plantation manager 7 See schematic maps in Bell, Jr., Major Butler’s Legacy, pp.108-109, 118-119. 8 Butler Papers 1447-Series II, “A Return of the Negroes belonging to the Honorable Pierce Butler In the State of Georgia on the fifth day of January 1803” (Mss.), Box 10, Folder 12, Historical Society of Pennsylvania [HSP]. 9 In 1828, as reported by James Spalding, Butler’s Island had 110 acres in sugarcane and produced 140,000 lbs. of sugar a year. Bell, Jr., Major Butler’s Legacy, p.125. U.S. Census (1830), McIntosh County, Ga. Quotation from Mrs. Basil Hall (1828) quoted in Ibid., p.125. Mrs. Hall had accompanied her husband Capt. Basil Hall in his journeys through eastern North America, including the Altamaha Sound in 1828, in 1827-1828, though unlike her husband’s journal her many letters have not been published, but are in the Margaret Hall Collection, 618, Library of Congress. Cf. Capt. Basil Hall, Travels in North America, 1827-1828, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Cadell and Co., 1829), which went gone through many printings, including 2 volumes (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1829). Bell cites as the source of his quotation, Una Pope-Hennesy, ed., The Aristocratic Journey (New York: 1931), p.234. For an 1877 survey map of Butler’s Island, see Buddy Sullivan, ed., “All Under Bank”: Roswell King, Jr. and Plantation Management in Tidewater Georgia (Midway, Ga.: Liberty County Historical Society, 2003), p.vii; for a detailed interpretive map based on the 1877 survey plat, see Bell, Jr., Major Butler’s Legacy, p.118-119. At Sapelo, Thomas Spalding had been intensively experimenting with sugarcane cultivation for nearly a decade (1805-1813), and finally in 1814 Spalding produced a commercial crop that sold for $12,500; James E. Bagwell, Rice Gold: James Hamilton Couper and Plantation Life on the Georgia Coast (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000), pp.63-64. 5 fully 524 enslaved people lived and worked there (also in four settlements or ‘camps’), while another 319 Butler-owned slaves were at Hampton.10 These were some of the very communities that kept alive the story of Ebo Landing.11 The key decade, of ca.1802-1810, when Pierce Butler turned purposively to developing Butler’s Island, the particularly arduous and labor-intensive