Tag: Civil War

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South Carolina Packing List

Gear

We took eight-weight 9 foot rods, floating lines, and seven foot 16 pound leaders. We took redfish flies, which are generally any fly that looks even vaguely like a shrimp, crab, or small fish. If redfish are eating, they will eat anything you throw at them, including feathers, fur, polyester, and baseballs. Tan is my preferred color, unless my preferred color is chartreuse, purple, red, or pink, or if I’m feeling natural either olive or white. As long as they’re eating, redfish are a happy fish, and almost any color works.

What could be easier?

So of course we had a problem with our reels. I have used the same reels in saltwater for 30 years: Tibors. They’re beautiful things, handmade in Florida, and they come in different sizes for different fish, the 8-9 Everglades for bonefish and redfish, the 9-10 Riptide for permit and jacks, the bigger 11-12 Gulfstream for tarpon, and finally the massive Pacifica for things like sailfish and marlin, whatever those might be. Actually, I own some other 11-12 reels but I don’t own a Gulfstream, and I don’t need anything as big as a Pacifica. I own several Everglades and a couple of Riptides, but I lust after an orange Gulfstream. Not that I’d ever mention it because then Kris might feel obligated to remember that on my birthday or Christmas.

Or Father’s Day. Father’s Day is coming up.

Tibors are bombproof, easy to work on in the field, and for any given size their parts are interchangeable. They take almost no maintenance, and their design hasn’t changed significantly in the 30 years I’ve used them. Tibor engraves your name on a nameplate for the reel, and there is something so satisfying, so validating when one screws on that identifying nameplate. It’s there for everybody to see: this guy Neil Thomas ain’t fooling around. He owns a Tibor, so he must be special!

I love them. Mine have my name on them. I’m special.

Tibor makes other reels, the Signature, the Backcountry, the Billy Pate, but only the Tibor is just the Tibor. Tibors now come in fancy colors, though as I recall the originals were either gold or black. My oldest is gold, though the gold has faded and it’s pretty beat up. It’s the reel I used in South Carolina, and right now it’s in our skiff down the coast at Port O’Connor. It’s a well-made thing.

Kris doesn’t like them, and that was our problem. It’s not that they don’t work, but she says they’re heavy, and bulky, and to her they just don’t feel right. I keep trying to slip them in on her, hoping she’ll grow as fond of them as I am, because then I’d have an excuse to buy more. When we were packing for Charleston her usual eight-weight reel had a seven-weight line on it, so instead of switching the line I packed one of my Everglades. She complained the whole time we fished.

It was too heavy. It didn’t feel right on her rod. Where was her reel?

So now she has a new reel, a Hardy that she picked out at Gordy & Sons. It was a Christmas present, and by me a capitulation. It’s lightweight, probably flawless, probably made in Korea. It’s certainly very nice. It’s not a Tibor.

Hotels

Visiting the King Street shopping district in Charleston is a Garden & Gun ad incarnate. There’s jewelry and ball gowns, beachwear and books. I’m certain there are Luis Vuitton purses, and purses made at a boutique South Carolina saddlery shop, and purses made of woven sea grass. There’s crockery and cookware and antiques. I always wondered why Charleston was such a vacation magnet, and now I know. People go to Charleston to shop.

Where once slaves were auctioned, now there are bibelots, and bibelots don’t come with the same moral downside. I bought a spool of 20 lb. saltwater tippet at the Orvis store, so I did my part. My shopping was completely successful.

There are also hotels. You can spend as much as you’d like on a King Street hotel, though probably not as little. We actually stayed outside of the shopping district several miles inland, in an area of town that is gentrifying from the possibly dangerous to the marginal. I’m fond of mid-century modern motor inns, and we found a restored one in Charleston. In Savannah, just down the coast, we had stayed at a great restored motor inn, but the Starlight Motor Inn in Charleston was not as finely finished as the Thunderbird Inn in Savannah, nor was it as central. It was very good though, with small but well-appointed rooms. The room rates were immensely reasonable, and parking was free. I’d stay there again in a heartbeat.

The strange thing about the Starlight, I guess the ultramodern thing about the Starlight, was that we never saw any live employees. Check-in was by internet, which included a room code but no card or key. There was only a keypad for room entry. Room-cleaning was by request at an extra cost, which seemed fair since the room rate was so low. There was a storage unit with extra towels and coffee and whatnot in a cabinet in the stairwell under our room, and whether or not we were supposed to we helped ourselves to what we needed. There is a bar at the Starlight, but it’s open Thursday to Sunday and we were there Monday to Wednesday. I’m certain we could have roused someone if we’d needed, but there was never a need.

There was a pickle ball court painted onto the parking lot, and a moveable net, but there wasn’t a pool. Kris didn’t tip me when I carried our bags to the room.

Donuts

Annie’s Hot Donuts, in Mount Pleasant, was outside of Charleston proper but on the way to the ferry for Fort Sumter. At Annie’s, donuts are made when ordered, with fat fry-dom on demand and toppings from an ice cream sundae buffet of choices. It is such a miracle, why have I never seen one of these before? Why isn’t there one in Houston? Granted, in the morning, at the best Houston Shipley’s, the glazed donuts are hot when you get them, and a hot Shipley’s glazed is donut perfection, but that’s turnover and time of day, not the business plan. Every donut at Annie’s is hot when delivered. Miraculous.

There is an online list from Eater of Charleston’s essential donuts, but it unforgivably doesn’t include Annie’s. On the morning we fished–we fished one morning and then the next afternoon–we were on the water before any of the Eater-listed donut shops opened. We tracked down where Glazed Gourmet Donuts on King Street had been, but it’s now permanently closed. Joey Bag of Donuts was out of our way, though it was certainly one of the best names ever. On the day we fished in the afternoon, we had breakfast at The Junction, which was on the list, but it wasn’t donut day at The Junction so we had to settle for biscuits. I’ll grant that they were excellent biscuits.

The Junction was interesting not just for the biscuits, but because it was in Park Circle, even further west of the King Street shopping district than our motel. Park Circle seems to be the Bohemian, as opposed to the Garden & Gun, side of town, where because of cheap rents you can find a micro-brewery, or a bike shop, or a vinyl record store. It looked fun to explore, and I recall the biscuits fondly.

Restaurants

There are as many restaurants in Charleston as there are guitar pickers in Nashville, and in addition to the redfish that I didn’t catch, we left a bunch of restaurants untested. For our two lunches we had oysters near King Street. If we had had three days for lunch, we would have had oysters three days. We didn’t eat near enough oysters.

The two places we ate lunch, 167 Oyster Bar and Amen Street Fish and Raw Bar, weren’t joints. They were upscale, focused on seafood generally, and we paired our oysters with other more substantial things. At Amen Street in addition to oysters we had the shrimp corny dogs, she crab soup, and at 167 for some reason a lobster roll. I don’t think lobster rolls are native to South Carolina, but sometimes I give over to my baser desires.

There are authentically joint-like oyster joints in Charleston, but we didn’t make it to any and its a shame. Next time.

The first night in town we ate at Rodney Scott’s, which is whole-hog South Carolina Barbecue. There was this strange disconnect when people asked where we ate and we said barbecue, because they immediately assumed we’d eaten at a newer place, the Central Texas-style Lewis Barbecue Charleston. Why, I ask you, would we go from Texas to South Carolina to eat Hill Country brisket? I’m sure it’s excellent brisket, and I’m vaguely curious if it’s any good, but the world of barbecue is large, and for us whole hog is a rare treat. Brisket is not. Even great brisket is not.

At Rodney Scott’s, who orders both the hush puppies and the cornbread? Who doesn’t?

Monday night we ate at Hannibal’s Kitchen, which is traditional Charleston Gullah Geechee and which sports authentic 1980s Black Liberation decor. it was a great place, and we both ate the crab and rice. Both Rodney Scott’s and Hannibal’s are places I’d go back to. If Hannibal’s were in my neighborhood I’d go back way too often.

Tuesday, our last dinner, we went to Fig. I’m always so proud of myself when I get a reservation at a place like Fig, because it means that I’ve planned far enough ahead to do something hard. Fig might be the best known of all of Charleston’s high-toned restaurants, and it’s not easy to nab a reservation. Did I have to make the reservation 60 days ahead? 120? On the day our oldest child was born? I can’t remember, but whenever, I did it.

I read in some review that Fig is the place locals go for special occasions: Graduations, anniversaries, Tuesday nights . . . The decor is a bit dated, but it was presumably always meant to be clubby. The menu is American modern with a South Carolinian bent. It’s pricey.

After all that build-up though for some reason the waitstaff couldn’t get my orders right. My drink was wrong and had to go back to the bar. My entree was wrong and had to go back to the kitchen. I am apparently getting crankier with old age, because it bugged me, when usually I would have written it off to the sorts of normal human foibles at which I excel. Then I realized the staff was just dazzled by Kris’s beauty and couldn’t pay attention to me, so it was ok. After all, who wouldn’t be so dazzled?

Just as a reminder, that’s the orange Tibor Gulfstream. With blue backing.

Fig also had oysters, and we ate some.

Fort Sumter

We’ve been to a lot of Civil War battlefields, Shiloh, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Bull Run, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and Central High School in Little Rock. Fort Sumter may have been for me the most emotionally charged of all of them. Perched out in Charleston Harbor, in the midst of all that historic Southern outrage, it held the deepest reservoir of failed possibilities. Bombarding Fort Sumter was the path we chose, and we’re still paying.

We timed our visit right because Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest was published in 2024, and it is a great introduction to both the antebellum mindset and the particulars of Fort Sumter. It is also a timely book and pilgrimage to ponder the current state of affairs in these late days. It would have been a shame to miss either the book or the pilgrimage.

Playlist

Dizzie Gillespie was born and raised in Cheraw, South Carolina, then moved to Philadelphia when he was 18, and then moved on to New York. He also once stabbed Cab Calloway in the leg.

Moving to Philadelphia was a right of passage for South Carolina African Americans, who repatriated their popular music to South Carolina as Beach Music. Stay (Just a Little Bit Longer), Under the Boardwalk, Sixty Minute Man, My Girl, Such a Night . . . Motown was Detroit, Stax was Memphis, but Beach Music had its own sound and its own audience, and the audience was at least partially White and in South Carolina, busily Shagging.

Not that. That wasn’t invented until later. The Shag is the state dance of South Carolina.

Gillespie didn’t play Beach Music, but after the stabbing he was fired by Cab Calloway. It apparently wasn’t much as stabbings go, and he tried to apologize, but Calloway held a grudge, as bossmen will.

Gottlieb, William P., Portrait of Dizzy Gillespie, New York, NY, 1947, public domain.

Gillespie went on to become the first great trumpet player of BeBop, and influenced a generation of trumpeters that included Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, and Clifford Brown. Gillespie wasn’t the only great jazz musician from South Carolina. Hank Garland, the great jazz/country/rock and roll guitarist, was from Cowpens. Freddie Green, the greater jazz guitarist, was from Charleston. The great country blues guitarist, Reverend Gary Davis, was from Laurens.

Popular bands from South Carolina tend to have an edgy new-wave feel. The Country band, Shovels and Rope, is from Charleston, Ben Bridwell of Band of Horses is from Irmo, and Iron and Wine is from Chapin.

There’s enough diversity among good musicians from South Carolina to make for a fine playlist. Even The Marshall Tucker Band is perfectly ok in small doses. Did you know that there was never anybody in the band named Marshall Tucker? He was a blind piano tuner from Spartanburg.

Freddie Green, circa 1938, Library of Congress.

John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas was born on Parris Island, though he grew up in Virginia. I figured it was a close enough connection to include his Monday, Monday and Words of Love.

When Dizzie Gillespie appeared before his World War II draft board, he said, and I quote, “in the United States whose foot has been in my ass?”, and questioned whether they really wanted to give him a gun. He was classified 4-F. It’s good to know one’s limits. The funny thing is that notwithstanding the shooting threat and the stabbing, Gillespie is generally considered to have been not only a great jazz trumpeter (maybe along with Louis Armstrong the very best), but also a good-natured guy.

Guitar

I’m writing this so long after we went to South Carolina that I can’t remember if I took a guitar, or, if I did, whether I played it. Too late now to figure it out.

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South Carolina, Part One

For much of its history, if you were in need of a moral compass, you could do the opposite of whatever South Carolina was doing and have a pretty good chance of getting things right.1 South Carolina as often as not was a self-righteous, pompous Dickensian church beadle, proclaiming the virtues of starving and beating orphans for fun and profit. It seems always to have been peculiarly obsessed with wealth and status. It’s really hard to like much of South Carolina’s past.

South Carolina was the only original colony whose founders owned slaves. Instead of coming direct from England, a majority of its early settlers came from the sugar plantations of the West Indies, particularly Barbados, where slavery was already a going concern. Charleston became a major slave market for the Colonies, and between 1803 and 1807 South Carolina squeezed through Charleston the last legal shipments of approximately 50,000 slaves. In most slaveholding states, it’s estimated that somewhere north of 30% of whites owned slaves. In South Carolina, the number is estimated at 50%. Until the export in the 1830s of a goodly number of South Carolina slaves and their owners to better cotton land in Alabama and Mississippi, black slaves in South Carolina significantly outnumbered white residents. Until the 1730s, a majority of South Carolinians were African-born.

South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun was the mastermind of the first threat to the Union, the 1830s Nullification Crisis. Because tariffs to protect northern manufacturing increased the cost of goods in South Carolina, Calhoun (then Vice President) came up with the useful notion that a state could nullify any federal law it didn’t like. South Carolina did just that, but before the question could be tested Andrew Jackson worked a compromise with lower tariffs. It’s one of the reasons Jackson is on the $20 bill. Before Lincoln, Jackson first saved the Union from South Carolina.2

In 1856, South Carolinian Congressman Preston Brooks brutally beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor because of an antislavery speech by Sumner criticizing Brooks’ first cousin once removed. Brooks resigned his seat later in 1856 for reasons other than the beating, and was almost immediately re-elected. He died a year or so after the re-election, and good riddance. It was almost four years before Sumner recovered sufficiently to return to the Senate.

John McGee, Southern Chivalry–Argument Versus Clubs, 1856, National Museum of American History (Caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks). McGee’s engraving is wrong in an important respect. According to eyewitnesses, Brooks beat Sumner not with the tip of the cane, but with the heavy gold knob. The cane is on exhibit at the Old State House in Boston.

It is usually remarked that Brooks used a gutta-percha cane for the beating, though gutta-percha is never explained.3

The Bishop of Charleston, Patrick Lynch, was a slaveholder and a prominent slavery apologist. According to The South Carolina Encyclopedia, before the war he was the legal owner of about 95 slaves, most of them the property of the Diocese. He was the Confederacy’s delegate to the Vatican.

South Carolina’s U.S. Senator James Hammond, child molester (of his own teenage nieces) and slave rapist (one of whom may have been his own daughter), dared the free states to threaten Southern slavery in an 1858 speech declaring that cotton was king:

“What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? I will not stop to depict what everyone can imagine, but this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.” 

Hubbard & Mix, Negro Quarters, T.J. Fripp Plantation, St. Helena Island, S.C., circa 1863, Library of Congress.

In hindsight, there are three ironical twists to Hammond’s proclamation. First, much of our cotton now comes from India and China, not the U.S.4 If Hammond had been right, even for that moment, he would ultimately have been wrong. Had the South’s secession succeeded, an independent slave South, increasingly isolated and economically irrelevant, would have ultimately failed because someone else would have produced the cotton.

The second twist is that because its government lacked meaningful central authority, the South never stopped producing cotton during the war. Planters continued production, even while the planter class was largely exempted from the Confederate draft. During the war cotton was slipped out of the South by blockade runners or through Mexico. Presumably quantities were reduced, but there was never the cessation of manufacturing that Hammond had projected. Worse, by allowing the production of cotton, the South didn’t grow sufficient food. As the War progressed, starvation in its cities became widespread, and Southern White hunger hastened the War’s end.

Detail of photograph by Henry P. Moore, Slaves on Plantation of Confederate general Thomas Drayton, Hilton Head, S.C., 1862, Library of Congress.

And of course the third twist was that Hammond was just plain wrong. Cotton was not king. The South lost the War and never received the support from foreign nations that Hammond had expected.

Then South Carolina was the first state to secede, and then it kicked off the War by firing on Fort Sumter.

After the War, South Carolina was a leader in voter repression and Jim Crow. It even produced its own powerful version of the Klan in the 1870s, the Red Shirts. In July 1875, at Hamburg, S.C., approximately 100 Red Shirts attacked 30 black militiamen, killing two and then torturing and murdering four more. One white died. The Hamburg Massacre kicked off the Red Shirt violence of the 1876 gubernatorial election. Immediately following Hamburg approximately 100 Blacks and two Whites were killed in Ellenton, and five Whites and three Blacks were killed in Cainhoy.

The Red Shirts at Hamburg were led by Benjamin Tillman, who later served 24 years as a U.S. Senator from South Carolina. Tillman justified the execution at Hamburg of Simon Coker, a black state legislator. Coker had asked to pray. According to Tillman, while Coker was kneeling in prayer, it was declared that he was taking too long and “[t]he order ‘aim, fire,’ was given . . .”, presumably by Tillman. Tillman wrote as justification that at Hamburg the Red Shirts were in a battle to protect the Anglo Saxon way of life, which, whatever that may be, sort of begs the question.

Mike Stroud, Meriwether Monument, 2008, HMdb.org, used in accordance with site restrictions. Monument in John C. Calhoun Park, North Augusta, S.C., commemorating Thomas McVie Meriwether, the white casualty of the Hamburg Massacre, who “gave his life that the civilization builded by his fathers might be preserved for their childrens children unimpaired.”

The home of the founder of the Red Shirts, Confederate Brigadier General Martin Gary, was restored by the Daughters of the Confederacy in Edgefield, South Carolina, and is operated by a 501(c)(3) as a Red Shirt shrine. Admission is $5 for adults.

Segregation was defended in South Carolina into the 1970s. In 1964, Strom Thurmond, a former pro-segregationalist Dixiecrat nominee for President and U.S. Senator from South Carolina, supported Barry Goldwater against Lyndon Johnson and began the exodus of Southern Democrats to the Republican Party.

Brigadier General Martin Gary, founder of the Red Shirts, circa 1861-1865, Duke University. He looks quite the mad zealot.

  1. As an aside, I had assumed that none of my ancestors came through South Carolina, but there are at least a couple of fifth great-grandparents buried near Spartanburg, a Mary [?] and John Birdsong. Birdsong was a Revolutionary War major, and died in 1790, well before the Civil War. By the War my later Birdsong-related ancestors had moved on, though generally not from the Confederacy. They were just in different places. I suppose I carry some of the weight of South Carolina’s history, but one really couldn’t ask for a better last name to ponder than Birdsong. ↩︎
  2. Don’t tariffs just make your eyes glaze over? Apparently we’re going to have to revisit them soon enough. Who knew that tariffs could cause price increases? ↩︎
  3. Gutta-percha is a kind of rubber obtained from a tropical tree, the Palaquium gutta, and the first widely available thermoplastic was produced from its sap. Demand for gutta-percha in the 19th and early 20th centuries threatened the trees. In addition to canes for beating abolitionist senators, gutta-percha was used among other things to insulate the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cables and to revolutionize golf by providing the first solid-cores for golf balls. It is still used for root canals. ↩︎
  4. My Granddaddy was my family’s latest cotton farmer, but certainly not the first. During the Depression he once gave my Momma a bale of cotton to pay for her college tuition, so like a lot of Southerners, Black and White, I have a relatively direct tie to cotton. Notwithstanding the South’s early claim to cotton, now a lot of our cotton comes from somewhere else. It is irony on irony that much of China’s cotton that comes to us in Chinese-produced tee shirts and whatnot is grown by forced labor in the Uyghur region, where China is ethnically cleansing its Muslim minority. ↩︎

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Georgia Packing List

Gear

For trout in North Georgia we took 5-weight rods with floating trout lines. We used long 9-foot 4X fluorocarbon leaders with weighted nymphs. I took an Abel disc drag reel, kinda the pinnacle of obsessively over-built trout reels, but it didn’t get much of a workout. For all the trout I caught I could have used a spool of bright yellow sewing thread, or kitchen twine, or bailing wire, with any of them tied to a stick I picked up on the riverbank. It would have been harder to cast, but I would have caught just as many fish.

In saltwater we fished with 8-weight rods and floating redfish lines, with 7-foot 16 lb leaders. We used the guide’s flies, which if you squinted real hard looked a bit like tarpon toads. They were prettier flies than what I use at home for redfish. My redfish flies look like deformed bits of cotton plucked straight from the boll and colored brown with a Magic Marker. I forgot to take a photo of the guide’s redfish flies.

We could have used the guides’ rods instead of hauling our own to Georgia, but how could we ever amortize their cost if we didn’t haul them with us? We gotta get our money’s worth.

Barbecue

I found a list of Georgia barbecue places on the internet, and on the way to Savannah we stopped at one. Because I didn’t particularly like the barbecue, I’m not going to mention it’s name. Just remember, it’s somewhere between Ellijay, Georgia, and Savannah. I’m sure there are better places than the one I chose, but Georgia being Southern I expected anything that made a list to be quality barbecue. This wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either. Maybe I’ll try again someday.

We did get a pretty good Cuban sandwich in Blue Ridge, but as a Texan I have strong barbecue opinions but am mostly ignorant about Cuban sandwiches. I thought it could have used some pickles, but what do I know?

Donuts

We stayed in the northside Atlanta suburbs for wedding festivities. Two mornings we ate Atlanta suburban donuts, once at a utilitarian donut shop next to a gas station, Marietta Donuts, and once at an artisanal donut shop, Doughnut Dollies. Both had good donuts, and Doughnut Dollies managed to walk that fine line between too much imagination on the one side and boredom on the other. That’s not easy to do when you’re hawking artisanal doughnuts. I especially liked the frosting on Doughnut Dollies’ strawberry and orange doughnuts. All that fruit made me feel healthy.

Restaurants

Ok, so the barbecue we tried wasn’t great, but we otherwise ate a lot of good food in Georgia. In eight days I gained eight pounds.

The first night we went to a Korean place, Woo Nam Jeong Stone Bowl House, on Atlanta’s Buford Highway. Atlanta seems mostly to be either Anglo (50.7% in the metro area) or black (32.4% in the metro area), but that’s mostly. There is a Hispanic and Asian population, and Buford Highway is this strange culinary accident where a lot of Asian and Hispanic mom and pop restaurants have landed. I could have gone back to that Korean place for every subsequent meal. The food was so elegant but at the same time so homey and delicious that it was impossible not to be happy. All those dishes of pickled stuff couldn’t have been more beautiful. And all the bowls matched, which is more than you can always say at our house.

I suspect I could eat for days on Buford Highway.

Lunch Saturday we ate at Mary Mac’s Tea Room. It’s an Atlanta meat-and-three African American institution that serves huge–and I mean really really huge–portions of Southern food. Covering the walls they had photos of famous people who’d eaten there. There were several of Jimmy Carter and, of all people, the 14th Dalai Lama. I guess the Dalai Lama knows a good meat-and-three when he sees it. They didn’t ask for my photo for the wall, but I suspect that’s only because I couldn’t clean my plate.

Sunday evening we ate at a Vegan Mexican/Cuban place, La Semilla. Vegan Mexican/Cuban seems to me a strange combination, more because of the Mexican/Cuban than the vegan, but it was completely successful and very hip. I’m sure some of that hipness rubbed off, and you’re now reaping the benefit. Our friend Shelley can’t eat dairy, and she declared the vegan queso the trip highlight, because queso.

In Savannah we ate at The Grey, which is one of Georgia’s best-known restaurants. They priced accordingly, but it was worth it. If nothing else, it’s located in the old Savannah Greyhound Bus station, and who can resist repurposed 1930s streamlined modern art deco architecture? We couldn’t decide what to eat, so we copped out and ordered the tasting menu. They also had the greatest cop-out martini ever, named for one of the owners who could never decide what she wanted. It was advertised as a mix of curated gins and vermouths, with both a twist of lemon and olives. It was the perfect martini for the indecisive, and could only have been improved if they’d both shaken and stirred it. It was excellent, and if I’d drunk two it would likely have been more excellenter. I only had one and I could still barely speak English.

We ate at Common Thread, which was also highly recommended, expensive, and excellent, and we got ice cream at Leopold’s because we were walking down the street and there was a line. Who can resist a line at an ice cream parlor, and if you can, why would you want to? There’s a lot of good food in Savannah. There’s a lot of good food in Georgia, though the jury’s out on the barbecue. Did I mention I gained eight pounds?

The Civil War

Georgia was the industrial heart of the Confederacy. From 1863 to War’s end, Georgia was the final focus of the Union’s Western campaign. After the Confederates under General Bragg defeated the Union under General Rosecrans at Chickamauga, Ulysses Grant took charge of the Western campaign. Grant changed the War. Under Grant, General Sherman led the Union in two of the most important campaigns of the War, the Battle of Atlanta and Sherman’s March to the Sea. I had three great-great grandfathers at Atlanta, two Confederate, one Union. Those Union victories cut off the Army of Northern Virginia, and with Grant’s Virginia campaign the War ended.

Chickamauga, September 18-20, 1863, was a major Union loss, and the War’s second bloodiest battle. There were more than 34,000 Union and Confederate casualties, and more than 4,000 deaths. That means that over three days, 34,000 Americans, Southern and Northern, were shot, stabbed, or blown up, and more than 4,000 of them died. The Union fought at Chickamauga to capture the Chattanooga railroad hub and open Georgia for Union invasion. The South fought to destroy the Union’s Army of the Cumberland. The South won the battle, but under Bragg they didn’t cripple the Union army. Because the South failed, two months later at Missionary Ridge Chattanooga fell to the Union under Grant. That defeat at Chattanooga may well have ended the South.

We visited the Chickamauga battlefield, and weirdly it’s in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Congressional District. It’s odd that one small region could produce two such catastrophes.

Chickamauga National Battlefield. Apple Maps.

Back to Atlanta. In addition to wedding festivities and eating, we visited the Botanical Garden and the High Art Museum, but best of all we visited the strange Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama at the Atlanta History Center. The History Center has a solid presentation about the Battle of Atlanta, of which the Cyclorama is only a part, but the Cyclorama is its own attraction. It’s a 358′ x 49′ hand painted canvas, which is a painting longer than a football field. It may be the largest oil painting in the world.

Some interesting tidbits about the Cyclorama. According to the history center, Southern troops at the Battle of Atlanta outnumbered Northern, but the Cyclorama was painted in the 1880s in Ohio, a Union state. In the painting the South is vastly outnumbered. When the Cyclorama was first moved to Atlanta in 1891, many of the Union soldiers were repainted with grey uniforms to show the South winning the battle. It’s a problem with history. It’s hard not to slant the presentation.

Where We Stayed

In Atlanta we stayed in the Roswell DoubleTree. It was fine, but where we stayed was less important than that we were in the suburbs, and (except for the Atlanta Brave’s Truist Park), a lot of Atlanta eateries and attractions seem to be located centrally within easy driving range of downtown. Every time we went somewhere–well every time we went somewhere other than Total Wine, REI, or the wedding–we had to drive 20 miles. If I ever go back to Atlanta, I’ll stay somewhere central.

In North Georgia we stayed at a B&B, the Overlook Inn. If you’re going to some relatively remote mountain destination, you’re statutorily required to stay in a B&B. It was pretty, and on our second night we ate dinner there. Kris always complains about B&Bs because on the mornings we fish we never get to eat the breakfast, but she didn’t complain about this place, maybe because our friends the Marmons were there. And the dinner we ate there–all four of us had the smoked trout–was great. The Georgia mountain views were also great.

In Savannah we stayed at a restored 1960s motor lodge, The Thunderbird Inn. Who doesn’t like a restored 1960s motor lodge? This one had everything you could want except Magic Fingers, a swimming pool, and free parking. The turndown service was a Moon Pie and RC Cola, and there was 24-hour coffee and popcorn in the lobby. The rooms were small, the colors bright, and the sign was neon, so it was almost perfect in every way. It was also very central, but everything in Savannah seems reasonably central.

Where We Didn’t Go

When we fished in North Carolina we stayed with our friend Bryan, and his family had given him a week in Blue Ridge, Georgia, for his birthday. We went to Blue Ridge, and we had a good Cuban sandwich there, but Bryan didn’t go to Blue Ridge for the Cubano. Bryan went to Bill Oyster’s six-day bamboo rod building class. He hadn’t been yet when we stayed with them, but later he sent me pictures of the classes and the rod he built.

Now I can’t find Bryan’s pictures. They’re on my computer somewhere, probably under my virtual bed, or in a virtual drawer in my virtual closet. They were great photos, and I was jealous. Bryan made a beautiful rod.

Bill Oyster is famous for his rod-building class, and maybe more famous for his bamboo rods and his metal engraving. Bamboo rods aren’t explicable. They’re best compared to an old Jaguar E Type, or a 1956 Martin D-28, or a first edition of Absalom, Absalom. It may not be the most useful thing in the world, but it’s so . . . irreplaceable, beautiful, timeless . . .

One of Bill Oyster’s bamboo rods built for Jimmy Carter. Photo shamelessly cadged from OysterBamboo.com

And Bill Oyster makes some of the most beautiful bamboo rods in the world. He made two for Jimmy Carter, who was a serious fly fisher. They were gorgeous things, with gorgeous engraving. Oyster told a story to the American Fly Fishing Museum about how he made the first rod for President Carter, and how Carter was going to fish it a bit, sign it, and then it would be sold as a fundraiser for the Carter Presidential Library. Carter fished it a bit and then told the Library that they’d better buy another because he wasn’t giving back the first.

I remember talking to Kris after Bryan went to Blue Ridge, and she just didn’t get it. Why would somebody pay good money to build something, when for the same money they could buy a rod from a real builder? I’m still baffled by her response. Why wouldn’t you want to build your own bamboo rod? And also the prices aren’t the same. The rod class currently costs $2,950–and almost all the classes for 2024 are full. Oyster also has some fly rods listed for sale online, and an 8′ 5 weight lists for $5,760. The cheapest rod listed is a 8′ 9 weight saltwater rod for $3,320.

8 5-weight Bill Oyster Master, photo shamelessly cadged from OysterBamboo.com

Isn’t that rod-building class a bargain?

I don’t know though. That 8′ 5 weight looks pretty sweet. I might have to get a prettier reel though. And I might have to give up some stuff, like food.

Benedetto Guitars are made in Savannah, but I’m afraid they’re out of my league. I guess Oyster fly rods are also out of my league.

Playlist

Georgia had a great music playlist. Blind Willie McTell, Gnarls Barkley, Harry James, R.E.M., Cat Power, James Brown, Trisha Yearwood, Gladys Knight, Little Richard, Fletcher Henderson, Otis Redding, The Allman Brothers, The B-52s, Ma Rainey, Indigo Girls, Jessye Norman, Robert Shaw, Robert Cray, Kaki King . . .

There’s also Atlanta HipHop, plus there all those great songs about Georgia. I could listen to Rainy Night in Georgia once a day from here on out, and never get tired of it. There’s Georgia on My Mind, I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train, Midnight Train to Georgia, The Devil Went Down to Georgia, and if you get tired of those there’s Moon River and Skylark.

That playlist is good enough to keep me happy on a six-hour drive, through Georgia, on a rainy night.

Blind Willie McTell

Guitar

I took the Kohno and practiced some. I should have found a transcription of Moon River.

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Georgia

Scarlett O’Hara’s Bosom and Early Georgia History, in Order of Personal Significance

I figured that if we were going to Georgia I should re-read Gone with the Wind. I hadn’t read it since I was 12, and when I was 12 I liked it, or at least I liked having read it. All that Southern splendor was mighty fine, plus there was that movie poster featuring Scarlett O’Hara’s bosom. What Southern almost-adolescent boy could ignore the drama inherent in Scarlett O’Hara’s bosom? I had a copy of that poster on my wall, and I suspect it was years before I noticed that Clark Gable had a moustache.

My notion before our trip was to determine whether Gone with the Wind was anything more than a Lost Cause romance. After all, no book except the Bible has sold more American copies than Gone with the Wind. It won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize, so somebody once thought it was important literature. The movie won the 1939 Oscar for best picture, and adjusted for inflation, it’s still the highest grossing movie ever.

I downloaded a free copy of the novel on Audible, but I couldn’t listen past the second chapter. What my 12-year old self admired, my 67-year old self found dreadful. Lost Cause propaganda? Who knows–I never got that far. These characters were all of them idiots. They were annoying and unlikeable and inane. Maybe Margaret Mitchell intended that they be annoying and unlikeable, but I don’t think they were supposed to be boring. I was unmoved by the set-up, despised the dialogue, and found Scarlett, cleavage or no, to be a ninny. I wanted to waste no more of my life with Mammy or the twins or Ashley or Melanie. I didn’t give a damn about Scarlett, or for that matter about Rhett.

So I can’t really tell you anything about Gone with the Wind, except I’d advise don’t bother. It had its moment, but that was when I was 12.

Still, that’s the best movie poster bosom ever. It’s Stereophonic.

I did read a good book about Georgia, Georgia, a Short History, by Christopher Meyers and David Williams, and there was some interesting stuff to learn.

Georgia was the youngest of the Thirteen Colonies, founded by James Oglethorpe in 1732 as a second chance for British debtors and a buffer against Spanish Florida. Settlers were from England’s poorest, and Oglethorpe prohibited hard liquor, slaves, and lawyers. Land was to be owned by the colony. Each immigrant’s tract was limited to 50 acres.

That bit of social engineering lasted roughly 20 years. There was no debt forgiveness, so not only were the English urban debtors–who had likely never farmed–expected to farm successfully on small tracts in difficult coastal soil, they were expected to repay their English debts from their unsuccessful farming. Many of the debtors skipped out to northern climes, leaving both Georgia and their debts. By the 1750s there was private ownership of large tracts–up to 500 acres–by slave owners. There were probably lawyers, too.

James Oglethorpe, glam rocker and failed reformer.

What was supposed to be an agrarian yeoman farmer utopia became a utopia for wealthy planters. Before the cotton gin, the planters–the large-tract slave-owning landowners–were confined to rice farms near the coast, but with cotton production Georgia became part of the Cotton Kingdom. The Trail of Tears and railroads opened upland Georgia to white settlement, and large landowners brought slaves and cotton to the upper Coastal Plain and the Piedmont to fill the void.

Georgia also achieved land fraud on a massive scale. After the Revolution, counties and the state sold land to new settlers and speculators, but they got into the habit of selling more land than there was actually dirt. The worst offender, Montgomery County, issued land warrants for 7,436,995 acres of land, which was 7,029,315 more acres of land than Montgomery County actually contained. By 1796, Georgia county officials had issued warrants for 29 million acres. Georgia then contained only 9 million acres.

The State Assembly was good at land sales, too, and in exchange for bribes (which in addition to money included nifty stuff like land, guns, and slaves) sold 50 million acres of Indian land for about a penny an acre–a ridiculous price for land that they had no right to sell. The sales were rescinded by the next Assembly, but were then found valid by the Supreme Court under the Contract Clause. The U.S. Congress ended up buying out the purchasers for $4.25 million. No Georgian should ever complain about federal buy-outs. Their’s was one of the first, and in inflation-adjusted dollars probably rivals anything that came later.

No state’s early American history was as governed by class hierarchy as Georgia’s, and how you see Georgia’s early history really does depend on where you stand. If you look at Georgia from the planters’ eyes, by the 1850s it was an economic dynamo powering a thriving economy. In 1860 Georgia’s per capita wealth was nearly double that of New York, which is pretty impressive, but on the other hand only six percent of white Georgians controlled about half the state’s wealth, which is pretty one-sided.

A lot of plain white folk saw Georgia differently from the planter class, particularly in the northern mountain portion of the state where there were few slaves, and in the southern Pine Barrens which couldn’t support big agriculture. In Georgia cities, slaves devalued free labor, and other than the rice and cotton planters, Georgia agriculture was largely small-parcel subsistence farming. In 1860, Georgia’s slaves were valued at about $400 million, about half the state’s wealth, but only about 37% of the white population owned any slaves, and planters were a sliver of that 37%.

Carrying Cotton to the Gin, Harper’s New Monthly, March, 1854.

And Georgia slaves like as not saw Georgia differently from their owners. When Georgians voted to secede and join the Confederacy, the measure passed by about 1000 votes, 42,744 to 41,717–but remember, these voters could only be white male property-owners. Slaves, who were 44% of the roughly one million Georgians, had no votes, and while one can never be certain, I’d bet good money that the slaves would have voted en masse to stay in the Union. Lincoln may not have planned to free the slaves, but apparently slaves throughout the South were convinced–along with the secessionists–that freedom was Lincoln’s plan.

Among plain white Georgians, the Civil War was increasingly seen as a rich man’s war fought by poor men, and throughout the war there were large numbers of deserters, draft dodgers, and even Union volunteers. In Georgia there were food riots, draft rebellions, and the formation of an active and vocal Peace Society. The cotton class may have seen the War as necessary and righteous, but to support the war effort they kept planting cotton instead of corn, hence the food riots. Wealthy planters were largely exempt from the draft and generally weren’t doing the actual fighting. Whatever else can be said about the South, the Confederacy was badly managed on the home front. By the end of the War, it’s estimated that nearly half of the Confederate army had deserted.

18,250 Georgian Confederates died in the Civil war, roughly a fifth of those who served. Georgia was also a battlefield from Chickamauga in 1863 in northwest Georgia to Sherman’s March to the Sea.

Georgia Geography

Pamela W. Gore, Geographic Regions of Georgia, from the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

By area, Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi, and 24th overall. It divides into five geographic regions. The Coastal Plain is in the south, and the southeastern border of the Coastal Plain is the Atlantic Ocean. The Piedmont is north of the Coastal Plain, above the fall line where rivers tend to rapids and the sedimentary rock of the Coastal Plain gives way to the harder crystalline rocks of the uplands. Generally the Piedmont soils are richer than the soils of the Coastal Plain, and Georgia’s southern Coastal Plain, the Wiregrass Region, is one of Georgia’s poorest regions. The exception for richer Coastal Plain soils is the rich black soil immediately below the Piedmont, the Black Belt that stretches from Georgia through Alabama to the Mississippi Delta. Along with the Delta became the Black Belt became the cotton-producing heartland for the South. The Black Belt was named first for the color of its soil, but the identification took on a new meaning because of the concentration of slaves. Big cotton thrived on black soil and slavery.

Abbasi786786, Majority Black Counties Based on the 2020 Census, from Wikipedia.

In Georgia’s far north, the three remaining regions seem to this outsider divided by terrain but otherwise lumped together, and it’s in North Georgia where Appalachia begins. The Appalachian trail starts northward in North Georgia, from Springer Mountain, elevation 3,780 feet, and James Dickey set Deliverance on a made-up river in North Georgia. We will trout fish in North Georgia, somewhat close to Brasstown Bald, Georgia’s highest mountain at 4,784 feet. I’ll take a guitar in case we run into any banjo players, but I’ll be damned if I do any canoeing.

Georgia is water rich. It has 14 major river basins, with more than 44,000 miles of perennial rivers. Its rivers tend to have great names: the Suwanee, the Ocmulgee, the Coosa, the Llappoosa, the Chattahoochee . . . Plus Georgia has about 100 miles of Atlantic coastline. The combination of elevation, coast, and rivers makes Georgia rich fishing. In the north there are native Appalachian brook trout and imported brown and rainbow trout. There are imported stripers in lakes, and redfish along the coast. There are ten species of black bass, including great river bass like the redeye, and bass unique to Georgia like Bartram’s.

We’re going trout fishing instead of bass fishing because we’re going to Atlanta for a wedding, and our friend Shelley (who will also be at the wedding) likes to fish for trout. Still, there’s always a chance of catching a bass in those northern Georgia rivers. I hope I catch a bass. Well, come to think of it, I hope I catch anything at all.

Population

At 21,029,227, Georgia is the 8th largest state by population, bracketed by Ohio at number 7 and North Carolina at number 9. It is one of the fastest growing states since World War II, and us Houstonians see Atlanta as our Southern mirror. Anglos are 50.4% of the Georgia population, African Americans 33.1%, and Hispanics 10.5%. Everybody else is a smidgeon. Most of the population growth is in Georgia’s Piedmont, which is the industrial heart of the state.

Other than the whole slavery thing, the birth of the modern Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow segregation, Georgia’s civil rights history had some positives. Martin Luther King Jr. was a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and Georgians were leaders in the Civil Rights movement throughout the South. Savannah desegregated early, but despite active movements Albany and Atlanta were slow. In 1971, then-governor Jimmy Carter declared a new era of Civil Rights in Georgia, but particularly in the rural areas of the state Jimmy probably jumped the gun.

Valdosta, Georgia Klan Rally, 1922, Georgia State Archives.

Politics

Is any state’s recent presidential politics more interesting than Georgia’s? I don’t pretend to understand what happened in 2020, but I have no doubt that there was no theft of the Georgia election. I’ve officiated over local elections, and massive voter fraud would not be easy. Oh sure, some lone soul might vote twice, or not be registered, but everything in American elections makes massive fraud almost impossible. It certainly couldn’t be accomplished by the efforts of a handful of people. It would take a whole dance card of conspiracy, and people, being what they are, would never be able to hide it. They can’t keep their mouth shut. If there had been massive fraud in Georgia, somebody involved would have bragged about their part over beers, at Thanksgiving dinner, or in their tell-all best seller. Instead as evidence of election interference we have a phone recording of a sitting President urging a governor to manufacture votes.

When you look at how the actual vote went, Georgia’s voting patterns are just like the rest of the country. Urban areas voted Democratic, and outside of the Black Belt, the rural countryside voted Republican. Trump substantially increased his vote totals from 2016, 2,089,104 votes in 2016 to 2,461,854 in 2020, but the Democrats did even better, 1,877,963 to 2,473,633. Democrats mostly carried majorities in the urban areas (as they had in 2016), but more total voters in rural areas also voted Democratic. F’rinstance, Atlanta’s urban Fulton County turned out substantially more Democratic voters in 2020 than in 2016 (529,931 to 334,053), but that trend was true in every Georgia County, even in counties where Trump otherwise had a majority. In the numerous rural counties Donald Trump carried, his margins shrank. Throughout the state voters who would not turn out in 2016 to vote for Hillary Clinton turned out in 2020 to vote for Joe Biden, or maybe to vote against Donald Trump.

From Wikipedia, AdamG2016, Georgia Presidential Election Results 2020.

Where We’ll Fish

Our plan doesn’t involve voting. We’ll fly into Atlanta and do wedding things for three days, then drive north with our friends the Marmons to Ellijay to fish a half day for trout. We’re taking waders and boots and 5-weights. The next day the Marmons head back to Houston, and Kris and I will head south out of Georgia’s Valley and Ridge, through the Piedmont, down to Savannah on the Coastal Plain to fish in saltwater for redfish. I may not catch any fish, but I will see a lot of Georgia. We fly back to Houston from Savannah.