Hello, everyone, and welcome back to then again, the podcast of the northeast georgia history center. I am Marie Bartlett, the director of education here, and it is my delight to introduce to you today our guest, Dr. Lisa L. Denmark professor of History at Georgia Southern University. And we will be discussing Dr. Denmark's book, savannah's Midnight Hour, which sounds incredibly fascinating. Thank you so much for speaking with us today.

Happy to be here.

Now, I love Savannah. It is one of my favorite cities. I've gotten to visit it several times now, and it is just one of those places where you can just feel the history around you. And everywhere you turn, there's something else there's a different story. So could you set the scene for us and tell us the story of Savannah very quickly? A brief overview up to the focus of your book? So we kind of have a little bit of backstory before we dive in.

Well, we could start at 1733 with the founding of Georgia, but I figure that takes up maybe three classes when I teach Georgia history. So we'll fast forward to maybe in the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War. Paul Presley wrote a book called on the Rim of the Caribbean, and he looks at colonial Georgia, and one of the things he says is that the revolution really, in his terms, decapitated economically decapitated sort of Savannah's power, because a lot of the loyalists who had money, who had capital left. And so Savannah suffered a decline in the post Revolutionary period. Population coming to Georgia chose to move to the backcountry. So Augusta North, augusta west, and Savannah lost both economic and political power. And so when you see Savannah roughly at the turn of the 18th and the 19th centuries, it's kind of a slow, dirty small town. It has commerce because of the Savannah River, but it's still in the shadow of Charleston. That's the lead up to the post 18 War of 1812 period, when cotton really takes off and Savannah suddenly becomes a major port because the cotton frontier is moving from South Carolina westward. So Savannah benefits from that.

Now, I really like this quote that you used in chapter three of your book, but what a pretty thing a railroad is. We must have one of our own. Positively how sweet it is to ride a hundred miles in the 10th of a Northwestern in the winter to Athens, to breakfast on Wild Turkey, to dine at Mobile on oysters and turtle soup, and to SUP at New Orleans on shrimp. Oh, it is like slaying that we hear the Yankees talk about. And this quote was published in the September of 1833 by the Savannah Georgian, and it was a reprinted letter from an old engineer, first published in the Augusta Chronicle. And I was just wondering, can you tell us a little bit more about Savannah and the railroad and how that really changes the economy for Savannah and just how it changes Savannah as a whole, because the building of the Central Railroad just, it really exploded. It connects all of those cities that we just talked would obviously that sounds wonderful. I would love, know, start to breakfast in Athens and then go all the way to Mobile and New Orleans for dinner and dessert. That sounds wonderful.

Well, and of course, ultimately you could do that. But the quotation actually comes from someone who was making fun of this idea of building railroads.

Really? I thought it was somebody who was very excited about it. I read it and was excited.

Yes. And I read it and was excited because I could use it. The quotation came at a point when Savannah was worried about the Charleston and Hamburg Railroad, which was being built in part at public expense from Charleston to Hamburg, which was a little town that was created again with public financing across the river from Augusta. And the goal was, in simplest terms, to begin poaching the cotton that was coming to Augustine floating down the Savannah River. Right. Because if you have a faster, cheaper route, it goes to Charleston. And this caused some significant panic and hand wringing in Savannah right. Because they could depend on that river to bring so there was this great debate about whether a railroad was the answer. Some people were still wedded to this idea that canals would work. People who own ferries were concerned about railroads. And so the old engineer was being facetious, but it turns out in the end, he was right. You would actually be able to do these. So the Central of Georgia really was born out of fear that Charleston was going to destroy Savannah if Savannah didn't do something. And the city of Savannah invested heavily in the railroad because they believed the only way to convince private investors that it was viable was to put public money behind it. So the Central Georgia was a private company, but the city borrowed $500,000 to invest in it because Macon refused to do so, even though Macon was going to be the so, you know, at the end of the day, it was very much a public private enterprise that was successful.

And does the railroad does eventually end up in Savannah? Correct.

It starts in Savannah. Construction began in Savannah. It was completed to Macon in 1843. And from there, the Central is either going to build additional feeder lines or lease out other railroads that had already started under construction. And it becomes, on the eve of the Civil War, one of the sort of best run, most profitable enterprises in the south. And of course, that benefits Savannah because the central is bringing cotton to the city and the city begins to so.

Because I always think of when I think of railroad and I hear, oh, the railroad is coming to this town, that always, to my mind, brings like, oh, this is going to become like the new hub, the new place of commerce. And I could just imagine Savannah being a port city on top of that. That means that everyone can now ship their things on the railroad to Savannah to put it on an actual right.

Right. And this is going to set off the building of the central from Savannah. Georgia railroad is going to be built from Augusta westward. This sets off the railroad building frenzy in the south, but the success of the central means that other cities want to copy that, and Savannah is consistently trying to replicate it as well, which leads to some problem.

Now, I was intrigued to find out one of the mayor, as you call them, one of the major players in Savannah in pretty much most of the 19th century is Edward C. Anderson, and he was elected mayor of Savannah eight times, which is just so many times. And he was elected and it wasn't know back to back terms. It was before the civil war. After the civil war. So can you tell us a little bit more about Edward c. Anderson and his impact on the city as mayor?

Well, Anderson is interesting, and he becomes a major player in the book because, well, he kept copious journals and all of his papers are at university of north Carolina. Some of them are on microfilm, and I read a great deal of them on writes. He has very legible handwriting, which helps because John Scriven, the other player, the other mayor, chicken scratch.

Oh, no.

So part of this is sourcing and the availability of sources, but Anderson kept very detailed diaries. So I know a lot about what happened in the mid 19th century because Anderson talks about it. At the same time. I also know that he edited some of his diaries later on, so they have to be taken right very carefully. Not that president James Madison didn't do the same thing. This is common. So Anderson, from what I can discover, was not necessarily a likable not. He was in the navy first, and he rarely spent more than a year on the same ship. And he kept getting transferred. And you have to ask yourself, why does he keep getting transferred? And apparently because he kept reporting people for very minor infractions. He was a tattletale at the end of the day, people wanted him off their ship. And so he's very upright. He always thinks he's right, but he's also very capable. He is an excellent administrator, and he knows how the game of local politics is played. And those things right are the reason why he winds up as mayor in the 1850s and then is elected the first mayor during reconstruction, because you don't have to like somebody to respect their abilities. Now, in today's world, I think we conflate those two sometimes. But that is why Anderson was ultimately successful as mayor, because he could do the job. At the same time, when you looking beyond 1885, at the end of the book, the Scriven family, the other mayor, John Scriven, who had a he drove Savannah to the ground. Economically, he is remembered more fondly than Anderson. Anderson kind of disappears from the lore of Savannah history. Part of that, of course, is that John Scriven's kids remained in Savannah. So he got really good press and Anderson got no press. But I find it interesting knowing what their administrative abilities were and how they contributed to Savannah's problems.

So I like how your book it takes kind of just like the whole 19th century to kind of just analyze and look at it because this is a time of extreme growth for Savannah, like we talked about with the railroad. What do you think Anderson's biggest achievement was in Savannah? Or maybe some of them? You don't have to pick just one.

The harbor managing to get money to dredge the harbor. So know, when the Central Georgia revitalized after the Civil War, anderson was a driving force not only as mayor, but after he left office in pushing Georgia's representatives, both the Democrats whom he agreed with and the Republicans with whom he did not, working with them to get federal money to deepen the. So I'd say that's his biggest economic accomplishment. A lot of what Anderson did, I would not actually call accomplishments. In a sense, he is using we'll call it another Naval or Seafaring know, he's at the helm trying to prevent Savannah from going down. And during his time as mayor, right. The city did not default on its loans. They managed to decrease expenses. But at the same is, he is fighting a rear guard action to prevent it from happening. And so he can say, this didn't happen on our watch. Right. Savannah did not default. Savannah didn't nearly go bankrupt on my watch. My successor, on the other hand, I.

Wash my hands up, but sometimes that is an accomplishment. It's not letting things fall apart.

Yes. Something else about Anderson that for those people who are doing research in the 19th century or especially in the 18th century and getting frustrated about the lack of information or the lack of primary documents, there was a point I was sitting Charleston Public Library because I was living in Charleston at the time, reading Anderson's journals. And this was at the end of his last time as mayor. And so this is during Reconstruction. And he writes in his diary, I left last night and I burned all my papers before leaving. So there's this gap during Reconstruction in the mayor's office because he just burnt everything. It's like things were happening. People were doing things he knew were illegal. And he was very circumspect in his diary about who was doing what. Sometimes he would not mention a name. He would just draw a line. And so it would be interesting to find out what really was happening at the city level during reconstruction.

But he burnt all the papers, so we'll never know. That's like one of the historians worst nightmares. You hear the library burn. You hear the courthouse burn, because he's like, well, there goes all of that information.

Yes. He admitted it. I burned it's gone.

Now, that's a good segue into our next question, and that is because the union army did occupy Savannah in December of 1864, and this was after Sherman's infamous march to the sea. And as most Georgians know, or at least mythologize Sherman's, that he went just burning everything in his wake, which is partially true, partially made up myth of how much he actually burned but he did spare the city of Savannah. Savannah was not burned. And there's actually a telegraph quote that I find quite funny that Sherman sent to Abraham Lincoln saying, I beg to present to you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah. And sometimes I wonder maybe the city was spared because you can't burn a Christmas gift that you gave to the President. Well, you have to keep the gift intact.

This is true. The destruction that occurred in Savannah occurred as a result of the Confederate cavalry, not of Sherman soldiers. So Sherman had he sent a demand for surrender to Hardy. General Hardy, who was in Savannah. Hardy already had orders to evacuate, right? Save your army rather than the city. And he knew he was going to evacuate, but he refused to surrender. And Sherman basically said, if you surrender right, Savannah will be spared. If not, I'm going to reduce you to rubble. And there are some who would argue that Sherman was actually relishing. That? I don't know. Depends on which interpretation of Sherman you want to believe. Hardy and his troops evacuated the city in the middle of the night, pontoon across the river, and immediately the city leaders just left. Stand out in all directions in the middle of the night on foot, because the confederates took all the horses and they're out in the middle of the night. There are no streetlights, right? Searching for some union officer to surrender the city to in an attempt to avoid being reduced to rubble. And they were successful. And some argue that Sherman was disappointed about that, although Sherman was not even present at that. Yeah, the Christmas gift is interesting. Some might argue that Sherman was even though he did not play politics, he was kind of playing a political game there. But he also surrendered. Not just a city, but what? 20,000 bales of cotton.

How Exciting. It's a great Christmas gift.

Yeah. So I'm giving you a city and cotton.

We're going to need a really large tree to put that under, but can make it happen. So why do you think or how did not getting destroyed change Savannah's place in the south after the Civil War? Because there were so many places that were destroyed, like Atlanta and Columbia and Richmond that were more rubbly than city e after the Civil War. But Savannah was spared. So how did that help? Obviously, the city recover and kind of change its position.

The city benefited in not having to spend money on complete reconstruction. Right. Rebuilding. We should probably use the term rebuilding, not reconstruction, to confuse politics. Sherman ordered the harbor reopened, and so the federal government did basically the minimum necessary to allow the harbor to reopen. So it's not just that Sherman didn't burn down the city and they did not have to rebuild the city, but the federal government also did the minimal necessary to reopen the harbor. So Savannah very much benefits from the Union arrival economically. I'd like to say that there were no hard feelings towards Sherman, but I can't.

Now, some people might be familiar with this idea of Old South like quote unquote, versus a quote unquote New South using the Civil War as really a breaking point. And just for our listeners who might not be familiar with that, the Old South refers to the antebellum south, one that was reliant on slave labor and plantation culture, and the New South refers to the south post war, a south that is trying to modernize and industrialize. And your book, it really doesn't make much of a distinction between the Old South and New South. It draws a nice straight line through all of it. So can you tell us why you decide to tell the story of Savannah in this way where there's not a breaking point and it's just really here is the 19th century?

Well, I will start with what my dissertation looked like originally. My dissertation, the completed version, covered Savannah 1866 to 1885, and it really looked at the debt crisis. And so I kind of wrote the book backwards. Or I started with the end of the story, and then I went back to the 1820s and dealt with the canal and then the railroads, because at the end of the day, the debt crisis that occurred in 1877, it turns out that Savannah was still paying on debts from the 1830s and 40s. They were still rolling them over. The story of Savannah's debt crisis has nothing to do with the Civil War. It's not that Savannah did not go into debt or spend money they didn't have during the Civil War, but the way that Savannah developed, borrowing money either to bring about internal improvements in a public capacity or borrowing the money to invest in railroads in private companies, that didn't change. And the reason it didn't change is because the Central Georgia Railroad was such a big success. The city of Savannah invested all that money. The central of Georgia was profitable. It paid dividends. The city was able to pay off that loan, and they kept trying to replicate that success and the Civil War happening on. By 1860, Savannah's debt was huge, but they managed it, and they expected the second major railroad. They invested lots of money in the Atlantic and Gulf to do the same thing as a central. When the Civil War broke, Been, there was no proof that that was going to fail. Of course it fails there. The Civil War does not demonstrate the folly of mortgaging the future. And so I try to eliminate a discussion of it. I will also say that Southern historians debate the Old South. New south. I refuse to call I teach the Annabellum South. I don't call it the Old South because a lot of the stuff that elements of the New South are simply rebranded ideas from the pre Civil War period. There's a great book that I sign, my students. It's Ken Wheeler's Modern Cronies students really love it, which is why I keep assigning it. And it looks at sort of the 1820s and North Georgia and how Joe Brown, who was governor of Georgia, and his various and sundry associates were looking towards a modern industrial. That's what one was that called again?

I want to write that one down.

It's called modern cronies. It's by Ken Wheeler and published by University of Georgia.

All right, that sounds interesting.

And it's a recent book. So both of our books came out. We were doing presentations at the Georgia Association of Historians, and he was dealing with the railroads of North Georgia, and I was dealing with the railroads of south and Central Georgia.

Eventually, all of the railroads will connect in some way, sort of. The book, in a way, uses Savannah kind of as a case study to look at questions that still plague governing bodies of all sizes today, even though it's really looking at Savannah on a city government scale. How do you balance using public policy and public money to grow the city and to get people to come to the city, but you don't want to overspend and go into debt and go bankrupt. Can you tell us, what do you think your study of Savannah can reveal for cities and governments of all sizes in this regard for today? What does it tell us about what can we learn from Zavan about how to balance these things?

Well, what you can learn is that public money is necessary in the vacuum of capital, right? So if you don't have private capital and something needs to be done, public money has to be spent somewhere. So that's part of the story. And the Central Georgia really demonstrates that building a sewer system, public money, you need a sewer system. You need to drain off all this water. So public money is necessary for a city's success, both in terms of its image and then its infrastructure. But the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad, which the city invested in heavily and ultimately caused the city's default, is a cautionary tale, because you have to balance what you can afford with what you can afford to pay in interest. And we all deal with this with credit cards and mortgages on a personal level. And it's how much I can afford this month. As long as I'm employed, could I afford this if something drastic happens. And in Savannah's case, the Panic of 1873, the Atlantic engulfs default on its loans, which the city signed for, right? All of this sort of creates a serious problem that leads to default. Savannah was not the only city, right? This was an epidemic across the nation. Savannah's debt wasn't the worst debt. It wasn't the worst default. There was one city that actually in Alabama, I think it was Mobile, but that actually surrendered its charter to avoid paying its debt. So Savannah is not the worst. It's going to recover by, of course, refinancing its loan. And so in many ways, the default, sometimes you have to have failure to learn from mistakes. And Savannah in the late 19th century, they're still borrowing money, but they're not investing in railroads. Right. They're not allowing a mayor to be both mayor of the city and president of a railroad like John Scriven was, which created all kinds of problems. So in a sense, they learned from their mistakes, at least temporarily.

Okay, so of course, if people have been intrigued by this podcast and they want to learn more about this topic, they can go and read your book and get a much broader and more in depth than we could go in just our nice little survey of a podcast here. So can you tell us a little bit more about your book where you can find it? And of course we'll link it in the description below so people can just click a link and find it. But can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Well, the book is called at the Midnight Hour and there is a long subtitle which I did not choose and you can find it at University of Georgia Press. It was in hardback. It's now in paperback. Get it on Amazon. There is a Kindle version or an ebook version, so I recommend you go through UGA Press. You could wait for a sale, of course, if you like.

But there and I was also wondering about the title because I really like the is just it seems really interesting. I'm immediately intrigued and also reminds me of another book that said in Savannah, the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. So could you tell us a little bit more about how you came up with the name for the book?

I didn't come up with it's. A quote. In the default crisis of 1877, one of my three major players, you've got Anderson, got John Scriven and this other guy named William Waring. Waring keeps pushing the city to admit they have a problem. And of course the city does not want to admit that their economy is about to crash. And he's giving a speech in front of sort of a mass audience in a square. And he says, we are now at the midnight hour, right. And we have to decide what to do going forward. And of course I read that and thought that would make a wonderful title. But there were a couple of other titles that could have come from sort of the speeches given. In 1877. One person actually said Savannah has gone to pot. Press the press decided they didn't want to go with that.

That would have also been an intriguing title, though I couldn't see myself picking that up just because be what?

Yes. Henry Jackson referred to the city of Savannah as a monster, and hermaphrodite oh.

Now that's also a fun title.

That is a good one. And the other one that was in the pot, so to speak, was Mortgaging the Future, because ultimately that's what and that was another quote. So you have all these people who recognize what has happened, and so I'm not being original. Some of these are really good quotations that you have to use.

Absolutely. It's always good as a historian when you find a juicy quote that you can use in your paper and maybe even get a title out of it for that paper, for that book.

And the press insisted that the subtitle could not have municipal finance in it because nobody would buy municipal finance, because at the end of the day, that's what a lot of this is about. But it's really about people making really good decisions and then really bad decisions. And sometimes decisions that are good for them are bad for the city.

Do you have any final thoughts, anything that you really wanted to share that you just hadn't gotten a chance to with my questions?

I have to think about this one a moment. This will be radio silence that will be edited out. I'd like to give a really big shout out to Savannah Municipal Archives. When I started this project many years ago, the director was Glenda Anderson, and she was so very supportive and knowledgeable about what the city had and boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff she brought out. And she finding AIDS. She knew what was available. And since then, Luciana Sprocker has taken over as director. She was just starting there when I was doing my original research. And over the years, with all of my projects, my first call is to the city archives to tell them what I'm working on and to say, what do you have? Is a wonderful place to work, mostly because the people there know what they have, and I am so very grateful for their support.

That's wonderful. We cannot do it as historians without archives. We need those artifacts, we need those paper documents to be able to tell the stories right? To really interpret those documents and put them together into something like a book that is really summarizing those archives in a way that people who don't have time to go and sit and read all of those diaries and finance report can. Actually, it makes it more accessible to people. So if you would like to learn more about Susannah, it's midnight hour. Be sure to check out this book. I have a brother in law who I think I might be getting this book for Christmas for. He might be listening to this podcast already and know that. But that's okay. That's why he won't buy it himself. That's incredibly fascinating. Thank you again so much for being on our podcast today, for being on Then Again. We really appreciate it. And again, thank you to all of our listeners for listening. We couldn't do this podcast without you either. So until next time, take care, everybody.

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 I? Vista Education Center. Please join us next week for another episode of Then Again.