Hello everyone, and thank you for listening to then again the podcast of the Northeast Georgia History Center. I am Marie Barlett, the director of the Ada May Ivester Education Center here. And today I am talking to dr. Kenneth wheeler, author of modern cronies southern industrial realism from gold rush to convict labor, 1829 to 1894. Thank you so much for being with us today.

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Marie.

So your book starts with the Georgia Gold Rush and then takes a look at the far reaching effects of it. For a lot of people, when they think of the effects of the Gold Rush, they usually just think about the Indian Removal Act and how then miners went on to California in 1849 chasing even more gold. But your book argues that there is so much more to this story. But before we get into that, could you just set the scene for us? Can you give our listeners a very brief overview of how the Georgia Gold Rush began? Because a lot of people in North Georgia, we've been to Delanaga, we've been to the Gold Museum, we kind of have an idea of how that goes, but some of our listeners might not. So could you just give us a brief overview?

Well, certainly people were always looking for wealth in the ground and there had been little gold strikes in Southern Virginia, in parts of western North Carolina. And of course, there are sort of tales of gold being found in North Georgia even before 1829. But 1829 is when it becomes public that there is gold in North Georgia. And people, they rushed to these strikes swiftly and in short order. It became clear that the Gold Rush in North Georgia was following a line, that there was a band, a mineral wealth band, sort of running south and west across the northern part of Georgia. And when you hooked that up with what they'd found in North Carolina and Virginia, pretty soon all you had to do was draw a line on a map and you knew where the gold might be. And so it just raised great excitement. People saw their chance for wealth and so miners rushed in. But of course, what you also saw when you drew that line was that it ran across the Cherokee Nation in northwestern Georgia.

So that kind of brings us to our first point, which is, can you tell us a little bit more about how the correlation between the Georgia Gold Rush led to the trail of, you.

Know, the Cherokee Indians had? A nation. And they were in Georgia, but they were their own, as the Supreme Court would later say, their own domestic dependent nation not subject to the laws of the state of Georgia. And so the discovery of gold just puts enormous pressure then on the Cherokee and brings, of course, Andrew Jackson's federal government into play because Jackson has been elected to the presidency. He wants to be reelected. There are no votes in the Cherokee Nation, right? Because they're part of their own nation. They don't vote for President of the United States and white men in Georgia are voters. Jackson wants their votes again in 1832, and he'll do anything he can to get those. And that helps lead to the Indian Removal Act of 1830. That act dispossesses the Cherokee of the Cherokee Nation, even though they're still there and will be for years to come. But it opens it up to the state of Georgia by lottery handing out gold lots and land lots throughout that gold Region. And so for a very uncomfortable series of years, the thousands of Cherokee are still there and thousands and thousands of whites with more rushing in are there as well, living cheek by jowl. And it's sort of a remarkable period in the history of the state.

Would you say that Georgia was expanding westward and what eventually that was going to happen anyway and the Georgia Gold Rush just kind of accelerated that? Or do you think that it truly was because of the Gold Rush or was it just kind of a perfect storm?

Well, there's just no question that the Gold Rush amped everything up to a great degree, and it just put so much pressure on the Cherokee Nation and it made the federal government very interested in that think. Certainly. I don't know how things would have unfolded had the Gold Rush not happened, but the Gold Rush absolutely pushed the issue right to the fore.

Now, can you tell us a little bit more about the development of the Western and Atlantic Railroad and how the railroad shaped growth in the Southeast and how the Gold Rush had anything to do with that? Because I'm thinking railroads. Railroads, Gold Rush. How are they connected? But they are.

If you think of the nation in the 1830s, this was a time when people in the Southeast were actually feeling sort of insecure about their region of the country. Things had seemed to be going well. But suddenly, from the perspective of people in Georgia or South Carolina it seemed as though the Erie Canal running east and west right across the New York State and connecting the Great Lakes region to the Hudson River Valley. And then New York City along with the National Road, which know a federal road that ran from Cumberland, Maryland on west through Ohio and Indiana and on into Illinois. There was a lot of east west traffic and it didn't come to the Southeast. And then the other part of it was the Mississippi River Valley. So there was a lot of stuff that was happening in the Mississippi and the know, the Ohio River especially, but other rivers as well that led down to, you know, a teenage, a, you know, a crop and built. A flatboat and just floated from Illinois down the Ohio River to the Mississippi and then all the way down to New Orleans, and then you sell the crop and break up the flatboat and sell the lumber and then literally walk back to the old Northwest, what would eventually be the Midwest. But where's the Southeast in this story? It's nowhere. And so they felt like they were going to be locked out of an expanding nation, and it made people very anxious. They didn't want to become a backwater. And so South Carolinians put together a plan to build railroad technology was just emerging. And South Carolinians put together this ambitious plan whereby they were going to build a railroad that would stretch from Charleston to Columbia in South Carolina and then go over the Appalachian Mountains and connect to the two premier Western cities, as they would have called them at the time, cincinnati and Louisville. And if you look at a map, you can see that that would have been an enormously long railroad to build. And if you think of what it's like to just drive through the Appalachian Mountains, it would have been technologically, a human triumph to make that happen. And in fact, it never did happen. It was too expensive. South Carolinians were interested in it. They built a road from a railroad from Charleston to Columbia, but it never made it across the Appalachians. It just wasn't enough interest, and the expense would have been tremendous. And so in Georgia, though, people look at this situation and they say, oh, what if we were able to connect Georgia railroads to the Tennessee River, which comes very near, not quite to the state of Georgia, but very near the state of Georgia. And once you're on the Tennessee, you could use that river route to go all the way up to the Ohio River and connect to that Ohio Valley. And they said, we could do this without having to cross the Appalachian Mountains, and we could bring some of that Western commerce, the products of Western farms by river very close to Georgia, and then we could have a rail that connects it to the coast. And so the Western and Atlantic, there were some existing railroads in Georgia that would connect to it, but the Western and Atlantic was just to run from what is today Chattanooga and Atlanta. And of course, the Western and Atlantic Railroad creates both of those cities. The terminus points of the Western and Atlantic become the cities of Chattanooga and Atlanta. So that was hugely mean. You know, obviously the importance of Atlanta both in the state of Georgia today and in the nation is testament to how powerful the location of that city would be. And Chattanooga no slouch either as a city in the Southeast and as a very important place.

Absolutely. And could you give us some date ranges for when that happens so our listeners can follow along on the timeline?

Oh, yes, certainly. The Georgia State Legislature, as I recall, charters the Western and Atlantic Railroad in 1836, and then they complete it in stages, but it's essentially completed by 1845 and in the few years that follow. So it's being built in the late 1830s and in the early 1840s during a time of the economic panic and depression of 1837 and the years that followed. So in some ways, it was an economic stabilizer in the economy because it was state expenditures helping to even out a Georgia economy that was in rough shape, just as the nation was in the late 1830s.

So that happened right after the Gold Rush.

Essentially, it happens after enduring the Gold Rush. And, of course, the other thing is that that railroad crosses the Cherokee Nation. And so it could not have been built at an earlier time when the Cherokee had secure possession of their lands, but it's before Cherokee removal, or before enduring Cherokee removal. In fact, Stephen Harriman Long, who was the main engineer on building the railroad, had over 50 Cherokee laborers helping to build the path of the Western and Atlantic Railroad.

That's so interesting. Now I want to move on to one of the main characters of the book, which is Georgia Governor Joseph E. Brown. Now, what are his connections to northeast Georgia? The Georgia Gold Rush. Because when I was reading about him, he was born in South Carolina and then moved here as a young boy. So he was growing up with just all of this that you've been describing happening, going on around him. So how does that shape him?

Brown is bright, and when he moves to Georgia as a teenager, they move just outside of Delonega to the headwaters of the Etta River. And he sees how people are making their livings. He sees that they're digging up the you know, he comes from a farming family, but also a milling family. They have a small grist mill. His father does. Mackie Brown has a grist mill there on the headwaters of the Is. You know, he'll take whatever they grow on the farm and take it into Deloniga and sell it there to the Gold Rushers. And mean the gold was right know, they say after a hard rain, people would just go out onto the streets to just see if they could dig up anything that had been sort of washed into view by the you know, the gold rush was so powerful, of course, that the federal government built a branch of the US. Mint in Delonica. And so teenage Josephie Brown saw that mint being built, and you can bet he was right there watching it go up, and then you could tour it and watch it in operation. And so there it would have been stamping out $5 gold coins. So his experience of growing up sometimes we think of North Georgia maybe in the 19th century as being sort of a bucolic place, but he saw a place where people diverted water courses where they were smashing gold ore and digging into every hillside, just pockmarked efforts at trying to find the wealth. And so Brown looks around and he, you know, how are people making money around here? And to him, it know, exploitation of labor, free and enslaved labor. It was people building these stamp mills that would pound the ore, and then you would find the gold within the ore. It was people who were building the mint and making money this way and, of course, building railroads. And ultimately, Brown is going to bring together many of the elements that he saw at work around him as a boy and young man, and he's going to turn that into a powerful engine of industrialization in the state of Georgia in the decades to come.

So can you tell us a little bit more about his governorship and also how he had an interest in convict labor, which I'm sure we'll get to in just a little bit, but can you just tell us a little bit more? We've talked about his childhood, his upbringing, how Northeast Georgia influenced him, and then where does he go from there? Obviously, he becomes governor, and he's governor during the American Civil War, which is, of course, a very interesting time for Georgia. So can you give us a little bit more insight into that?

The thing to note about Brown becoming governor is becomes governor when he's 36 years old.

Oh, I didn't realize he was so young.

Yeah.

For politics.

Absolutely. And so this was as opposed to the United States today, which has a lot of times very aged politicians, particularly at the national level. Brown was mentored as a young man. They saw the promise in him. And he gets propelled sort of as a dark horse candidate into the governorship in 1857. And he'll serve they were two year terms, and he'll serve four two year terms, and he'll be Georgia's sole Confederate governor. And the thing about Brown is he gets into the governorship and what does he do? He immediately starts to help the interests that he already naturally had. So he urges that the state give subsidies to iron makers in the state who he had worked closely with in the 1850s. And he says, we need a foundry. We need to make weapons of war instead of buying all of this, know, the West Point foundry in New York or know the Ames Manufacturing Company in Boston. And so he know we need a diversified economy. And this, to me, is one of the key points, is that Brown is modern. When I call the book Modern Cronies, I'm saying that Brown has a forward looking view of how Georgia should develop and how the nation should develop. And he doesn't have dreams of a kind of plantation kingdom of cotton fields and an enslaved labor force. He's dedicated to slavery, there's no doubt, but he's willing to exploit all kinds of labor in any way that the opportunity presents itself. So as governor, he tries to advance industrial interests. He tries to promote what we would call scientific agriculture. And so he's busily taking those influences from his youth and young adulthood, and he's turning that into state policy as governor. And as you said, he is interested in convict labor as a legislator before he becomes governor. He's the head of a prison committee. And immediately he starts thinking, are there ways we could put prisoners to work usefully? Maybe they could mine, or maybe they could build railroads. So that's on his mind even before he becomes governor. And as governor, the penitentiary. Well, the United States army does his work for him. They wreck the penitentiary in millageville because it was producing war goods for the confederacy. And brown says it would be so much money to rebuild the penitentiary. Let's see if there's some other place we could put these prisoners to use in a way that would benefit the state.

That's so interesting that he had an interest in that even before the civil war happened. I usually think of convict labor as really exploding after the American civil war, when, of course, we have the 13th amendment put in place, freeing all those who had been formally enslaved. But it does leave a subsection for prisoners, essentially. So there is a lot of convict labor after the American civil war. And actually, I always think of gone with the wind when I think of that, because there's this one scene where scarlett is running her sawmill, and she has a bunch of convict labor, and everyone's like, what is this? And she's like, well, it's free, essentially. So could you tell us a little bit about convict labor post civil war as well, and how Joseph e. Brown, even though he's not governor anymore, is still being kind of pulling some strings?

Joseph e. Brown in 1865, things look pretty bad for him. He's in prison in Washington, DC. For a short time for allegedly having violated his parole. He comes back to Georgia. His home in canton, Georgia, has been burned. Enslaved people who he had owned are now emancipated, and that the capital investment in human property has evaporated for him just as it has for other slaveholders. And he's kind of unsure of what to do. He's a part investor in a iron company that winds up going bankrupt. And so he's sort of casting about trying to figure out what to do. And he does get appointed to the Georgia supreme court. He's the chief justice of the Georgia supreme court, but it's not really where he wants to be. But it does put him in a nice position to help out when a legislator comes to him. The western and Atlantic railroad I didn't say this earlier, but it's a state owned railroad. It's a public utility after the war. The concern is that it's become a sink of patronage and that it's really not nearly as profitable to the state as it should be. And so the state says, well, maybe we ought to lease this to someone else. And so the legislation that creates a lease of the Western and Atlantic Railroad comes in draft form to Brown. And Brown says, well, here's how you ought to write this. Here's how the lease ought to be created. And eventually that's what turns into law. And who takes advantage of it? It's Joseph E. Brown. Effectively, he writes the legislation providing for the lease of the railroad, which he then acquires as part of a group of lessees, and they lease the Western and Atlantic Railroad, which Brown had effectively run indirectly as governor of the state. He gets a 20 year lease of the railroad, and he's going to use that as his avenue back to power and wealth in. Then, you know, he uses Dade County coal mines. There's not a lot of coal in the state of Georgia, but the coal that we have all runs right through the very northwestern tip of the state in Dade County. And there were coal mines up there that Brown managed to lease for himself. And so with the railroad, with a growing Atlanta that needs coal, with access to those Dade County coal mines, brown has some ingredients for what we would call a kind of integrated economic system. And who's going to work the coal mines? Georgia also then passes a convict lease law, and Brown winds up getting the lion's share, hundreds of these convicts who are then sent to Dade County to work in the coal mines. So, you know, prisoners of the state leased by Brown, working in coal mines leased or owned by Brown, putting the coal onto a private railroad and then onto the Western and Atlantic Railroad, taking that sometimes to Atlanta, sometimes to places further afield, that's the kind of integrated industrial vision coming to fruition. And my argument of the book is that Brown makes that happen. But he saw the ingredients of all of that in North Georgia in the 1830s and the 1840s, as he saw early railroaders grist, millers, iron makers. And Brown manages to put all of that together in the decades that follow. Because when the war ends, when this American Civil War ends, brown is 44 years old. And so he has a lot of political experience. He has friends all over the state. He has the wherewithal to reinvent his life, and he does so very impressively. And when he wants a Senate seat, he secretly finagles getting the sitting US. Senator from Georgia, John B. Gordon, to resign. And Brown secretly discovers ways to get Brown to get Gordon sorry, John B. Gordon paid to go join another railroad. And then Brown gets himself appointed to the seat and he winds up holding that Senate seat for most of the rest of his life.

Wow, that is an interesting story of a human who know, saw opportunity and just took it anywhere that he could.

I agree. Brown was I mean everyone understood that Brown was very talented and very just farsighted and he was ruthless. Might be too strong a word, but let's just say he was very ambitious and determined.

Those who probably liked him, his political allies would say that and his political enemies would probably say ruthless.

Well said.

Now can you tell us a little bit more about how you got the title for your book modern Cronies and where did that come from?

Sure, the modern. As I've said, all I mean by that is that Brown is forward looking and some historians have posited the south as feudal in nature, as anti modern. And what I see in North Georgia is a group of people brought together by the Gold Rush and the opportunities that Cherokee Removal presented to them. They come together and they have a very modern outlook. They want to create a diversified economy in Georgia, an industrial Georgia and a Georgia with modern transportation. And so they are modern. And the other part of that is they are cronies. And I mean that in two senses. In one sense there is a network of people who mentor Joe Brown and help thrust him forward in politics and connect him to these industries. And many of them are powerful Baptists. And frankly in the political history of Georgia this is a big shift when Brown becomes governor because prior to that know Brown is from upcountry Georgia, northern Georgia and most of the political class in Georgia had come from coastal Georgia plantation Georgia religiously. They're episcopalian? Presbyterian. And so having the kind of upstart young country Baptist of a Joseph E. Brown is a real change sort of socioeconomically. And when he comes to Millageville then as governor who does he bring in with him to run the state penitentiary, to run the Western Atlantic Railroad, to serve as his personal secretary. It's all these North Georgia Baptists who he's been mentored by and who has helped and he surrounds himself with them. The political culture in Georgia would never be the same. It would never be the same. And so one of Brown's biggest enemies was Robert Tombs. And Tombs represented this kind of plantation sort of elite and they just thought Joseph E. Brown oh, putting a country bumpkin like that in the governor's mansion, what a waste and what a know how Georgia had fallen. But Brown sees what the future is and he remade the state. Well, people would accuse him of basically turning the state over to the Baptists. And so there's even the story of how when he became governor he and his mentor John W. Lewis allegedly they went along the line of the railroad just sacking the various station managers and replacing them with their Baptist friends. Who knows if this is true but it wound up actually one of Joe Brown's sons cut it out of the newspaper and pasted it into his scrapbook. But they got to one station. The clerk inside said, oh, the manager is out, but he'll be back in just a moment. And a couple minutes later here comes the fella cheerfully singing a popular Baptist hymn as he walks up the steps into the station. And Brown and John W. Lewis look at each other and they're ah, okay. So they just pocket their dismissal papers and they go on to the next station. So the article said it was the right song in the nick of time or something like that. Exactly. That's an apocryphal story. But it does represent how people saw Brown changing employment and the political culture in the state of Georgia. So that is a big change. And then they are also cronies in the sense we sometimes talk about crony capitalism people who have sort of the inside track to government contracts and things of this sort. And what I argue in the book is that these people, they use the power of the state constantly to help their private interests. So we can view that as clever or it's like the difference between ambitious and, you know, Brown's political enemies would have said he's there eating at the public trough. Our tax dollars go in and Brown winds up the beneficiary. And I think Brown and his friends would simply say look, we're all working to advance our interests and the state should help all of Know. And so Brown is busily mixing and mingling with people who use the power of the state to help them. And so I describe in the book some ways. In Know, the people who are building the Western and Atlantic Railroad are also investing in land all the way along the path of the Western Atlantic Railroad so that when the railroad is built their land sites are going to increase in value as there's development along the railroad route. Brown as governor, certainly tries to help his friends get subsidies for the business interests that he supports. And after the war, you see it in his lease of the state railroad. You see it in the way he gets his organizations chartered by the state. You see it in the way he uses the convict labor system, a state labor system to take advantage of prisoners and put them to work toward his private interests. So modern cronies doesn't have to be an epicent, a term of disparagement. But I'm just saying this is how Georgia developed in the 19th century.

Now, of course our listeners have gotten a wonderful preview of what your book is. But of course there's so much more that we just don't have time to cover today. So if people wanted to buy your book, can you tell them how they could go about doing that?

Certainly. The book is published by the University of Georgia Press and it's available directly from the press. But it's also available through, say, amazon or other retailers like that. So it's not hard to find. If you'll just type in Modern Cronies, you'll quickly find how you can purchase the book.

Now, do you have any final thoughts or is there anything that you wanted to share that you hadn't gotten a chance to do yet that oh, I really wanted to share this story or this fact?

No, except just to say that I think the book is an interesting reinterpretation of the development of Georgia in the 19th century. I think it takes things that we sometimes relegate, like the gold rush. I think we really were sometimes oh, yeah. DeLonga but the gold rush is much larger than that and so much gold, right, that the federal government says we have to build this branch mint there. International companies were mining gold in North Georgia in the 1830s and the early 1840s. And so by the time eventually it will seem less significant because it peters out and because the Western gold rushes were so large by comparison. But at the time that the Georgia Gold Rush happened, these were the largest gold strikes in American history. And their effect on the Georgia economy and the national economy from 1829 and on through the 1830s was, I think, a profound economic influence. And as I say, it brought together a lot of ambitious, talented people. And Joe Brown grew up among them, saw what they were doing, and he's able to put together their insights and create, in the late 19th century, an integrated industrial operation that shaped the state of Georgia dramatically.

That is a perfect summary. I don't think that there's anything else to add to that except for the book's name again is Modern Cronies Southern Industrialism from Gold Rush to Convict Labor, 1829 to 1894. And that book is by, of course, the Dr. Kenneth Wheeler, our guest today. Thank you so much for being with us.

Oh, it's been wonderful to talk to you. Thank you.

Marie you Then Again is a production of the Northeast Georgia History Center in Gainesville, Georgia. Our podcast is edited by media producer Juada Rodriguez. Our digital and on site programs are made possible by the Ada May Ivester Education Center. Please join us next week for another episode of Then Again.