Stateside With Rosalea: Georgia

Although it was the youngest state at the time—just 50 years old—Georgia was the fourth of the 13 states to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Its origins lie in the debtors prison system of Great Britain. When the friend of well-connected Member of Parliament, James Oglethorpe, died of smallpox in just such a prison, Oglethorpe joined the prison reform movement.

On the wider question of what to do about the huge numbers of poor people in England, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, a group that included Oglethorpe and the first earl of Egmont “began exploring the possibility of creating a new colony in America. They believed that if given a chance, England's ‘worthy poor’ could be transformed into farmers, merchants, and artisans. But strict rules would be needed to prevent the class divisions that plagued English society. Thus, all the settlers would work their own land, with slavery and large landholdings specifically prohibited.”

With an eye to putting something in place that would stop the northward expansion from Florida of the Spanish, George II agreed to the idea, granting a charter that named Oglethorpe among the 21 Trustees who would oversee the founding of the new colony. On February 12, 1733, Oglethorpe and his band of colonists arrived at Yamacraw Bluff on the banks of the Savannah River, where they laid out the town of Savannah with the help of slave labor from South Carolina. The high-minded original intent had gone out the window by that time and not one prisoner or indigent was among the first boatload of colonists.

::Cousaponakeesa::
One of the first connections Oglethorpe made was with Cousaponakeesa, daughter of a Creek Indian mother and an English trader. (“Creek Indian” is the name that the English gave the Native American tribal groupings that lived along the banks of the Oskogee waterway, and the term gradually expanded its reach to cover all the tribes in the area.) As a child she was baptized and given the Christian name of Mary, and later married an English trader named John Musgrove, who was granted a trading post a few miles north of Yamacraw Bluff by the colony’s trustees.

Cousaponakeesa, because she was both bilingual and a businesswoman—taking over her husband’s trading post after he died and moving it into Savannah itself—looms large as Mary Musgrove on websites about Georgia history, although she is not mentioned at all in Houghton Mifflin’s Encyclopedia of the North American Indian. Hers was a matrilineal society—meaning Mary was regarded as a Muskogee (Creek) by the local indigenous people, not a “half-breed” as the English called her.

::Abraham Baldwin::
The next interesting character in Georgia history is one who gave us something whose value is still debated hotly today: two U.S. Senators per state, no matter their population size. His was the last vote cast at the Continental Congress when the U.S. Constitution was being written and the question being decided was whether Senate representation should be based on the popular vote or on having equality of numbers for all the states. Although he personally favored it being based on the popular vote because that was more democratic, he voted the other way, breaking a tie.

Baldwin was also a founder of the University of Georgia, which was the first state-funded university in the new nation. The 1785 Charter for the university begins with what one historian has called one of the five or six finest sentences in the English language: “As it is the distinguishing happiness of free governments that civil Order should be the Result of choice and not necessity, and the common wishes of the People become the Laws of the Land, their public prosperity and even existence very much depends upon suitably forming the minds and morals of their Citizens.”

::The Big Door::
But it is at another university, Oglethorpe, that perhaps the most fascinating tidbit of Georgia’s history lies: the Crypt of Civilization. Behind an Art Deco stainless steel door on the campus is a crypt containing what is supposed to be “every salient feature of present day civilization”—the present day at that time being the late 1930s. Sealed on the 28th day of May, 1940, it is not to be opened until the 28th day of May, 8113 A.D. Just supposing—and it’s a faint likelihood—that human beings will still be around in 8113, what will they find there?

The full inventory is here but, the time of its creation being wartime in the rest of the world, I naturally skimmed it first to see what kind of military items were included. One of the canisters contains: “1 toy equestrian, 18 toy soldiers, 12 toy civilians, 1 toy cannon, 2 muses, 1 anti-aircraft gun, 1 set samples of better ware”. Though I’m pleased there is so little, it’s still a bit worrying that there are half as many again soldiers as there are civilians.

Given that many of the items are incomprehensible to me—and I’m only 60 years removed from the crypt’s creation—it’s fun to imagine just what anyone from the far distant future could possibly make of them. Women’s stockings? Some kind of measuring device, perhaps. Sample of mahogany treated with bakelite varnish? Blank, uninscribed tablet for the issuing of proclamations. Denture? Body part of some now-extinct creature sacrificed in gruesome religious rite. Set of curtain holdbacks? Jewelry worn by priestesses while sacrificing said creature.

Even more fun is to imagine what we would put in a similar crypt as representative of every salient feature of present day civilization.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE--

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