Chapter One Early Savannah
The sun was shining brightly as Gazaway Lamar, vibrant and handsome, stood on the top step to the entrance of his home at 44 East Broughton Street, the finest address in Savannah. Lamar was one of the city’s leading citizens, and certainly one of the South’s most successful and wealthiest businessmen. And now, as he hurried down to the riverfront to catch up with his eldest son, Charles, and the rest of his family, he felt his life was about to reach the peak of satisfaction.
In 1838, Savannah was even then a city of trees and squares, large opulent homes, and an indelible sense of history. William Oglethorpe had planned the town around a series of squares, leaving two sides for public buildings and two for private homes. From this came the fundamental symmetry upon which the beauty of Savannah was based.
For years following Oglethorpe, Savannah retained the rustic character of its colonial past. Even in 1838, the squares were enclosed with split-rail fences. Cows lolled in the lanes. The streets were lit, if at all, by oil-burning lamps. The city market bustled with customers and produce of all kinds, which was brought into town on creaking wooden carts from the country. And everyone paid with English coins—mostly shillings and pence. The only U.S. currency available at the time was a big copper one-cent coin.
At the east end of Bay Street, on the bluff that became Emmet Park, people would gather to see the ships departing, carrying cotton and rice, and arriving, bearing with them the commercial treasures of the world. Some fifty feet beneath the bluff was the riverfront, where all was alive with activity: horses and mules, carts and buggies, men carrying sacks in every direction, bales of cotton creeping to the edge of the wharf, awaiting the hooks that would lift them, swinging slowly, into the ship’s holds.
Hand-pulled fire wagons were sometimes seen dashing about as well. Savannah was still built mostly of wood, and had suffered a disastrous fire eighteen years earlier. At the sight of a fire, the watchman at the top of the City Exchange would ring his bell furiously, and, if night had fallen, thrust a lantern on a pole in the direction of the blaze. Then the citizens would tumble out of their homes, their shadows leaping off the walls, grab the leather buckets by the handles, form a double-line brigade, and pass the water from the cisterns to the flames and then back again to the well.
The roads were unpaved, of course, and the carriages rolled softly across the tawny sand. “The first thing that struck me on landing was the absence of noise. Everything seemed so quiet,” Sara Hathaway, a visitor from New York, remarked in 1833. “Even the carriage we rode in, as well as the others which were about us, gave us no sound, for their wheels sank into the sand, which appeared to be bottomless.”
Harsh sound was also softened by an abundance of trees, creating the impression of a city tucked into a forest. South Broad Street, in particular, was lined by towering chinaberry trees, many of them with limbs extending thirty or forty feet, creating more than a half mile of elegant shade. “Long limbs were thrown out on every side,” recalled Charles Hardee, who was a boy in Savannah in the 1830s, “some of them interlocking with the limbs of trees on the other side, furnishing a dense shade, which was a very pleasant protection from the midsummer heat.” The flowers, which grew in clusters from the tips of the branches, were of a lilac color, and their perfume filled the air.
To be sure, a remarkable sight rose above this rich canopy: the Grecian pediments of theaters and banks, the spires of churches, white towers with bells ringing, and along the bluff, warehouses and offices that stretched from one end of town to the other. Still, the quiet beauty of the place, with its heavy perfume, overhanging branches, and omnipresent midsummer heat was almost sleep-inducing. Perhaps this was why “Southern people have one marked peculiarity—they almost always move slowly,” as one visitor marveled. “The ladies have a natural loveliness and grace, an ease of manner and self-possession, soft and gentle ways. And the gentlemen: They are so courteous and chivalrous in their bearing, so deferential to the ladies.”
However dreamy that impression may have been, by 1838, Savannah was beginning to awaken from its slumber. Something new was afoot. Its presence was causing old salts to cuss, horses to rear in alarm, and men to start dreaming of bigger and bigger things: paddle wheelers, railroads, factories—steam! After falling behind the North for at least twenty years, the South’s entrepreneurs were beginning to awaken to the roar of the Industrial Revolution.
In the 1820s, Savannah’s cotton planters began to produce their own hemp bagging, which saved them considerable expense over Northern-made bags. Then, in 1828, a group from Savannah purchased the latest textile-making machinery in Philadelphia, shipped it south, and established a mill. That worked out so well that they added a dye house to the complex, and were soon making denims in stripes and plaids. In 1834, a factory in Augusta began manufacturing its own spindle frames, which had previously been imported from the North. By 1840, when the Georgia census listed nineteen cotton mills in the state, with 42,589 spindles, 779 employees, and two dye-houses, there was no doubt any longer: The South had crossed the threshold from a mere picker of cotton to a maker of cotton goods as well.
Meanwhile, railroads began to catch the eye of the Southern industrialists. The North had two experimental lines, the Rocket and the Tom Thumb. But Charleston snatched the lead with what was dubbed the nation’s first regularly scheduled line, the South Carolina Rail Road, which ran from Charleston to Hamburg, South Carolina. Pulling the passenger cars was the first American-made locomotive, the “Best Friend,” soon to be equipped with a very useful embellishment, thanks to inventor Isaac Dripps—the cowcatcher.
Challenged by Charleston’s leap into the railroad business, Savannah laid the first rails for its Central of Georgia Railroad in 1836. The locomotive was an ungainly looking contraption that belched smoke and covered the wagons rattling behind with black soot. But you couldn’t convince anyone in Savannah that their railroad was anything short of a technological miracle. “As the people were coming in from the Commons, where they laid the first rail,” the wife of Savannah’s mayor wrote ecstatically, “it was more like Broadway than anything I have ever seen . . . from Broughton Street all the way to our house both sides of the street were crowded.” At 10 p.m., she added, “they came before our door and called out distinctly, ‘Nine cheers for the railroad and Mayor Gordon!’ And they gave the full number, for I counted to see if they did.”
Nine cheers were about right, for in this progress the South saw new economic life. Georgia’s banks “will bear an honorable comparison with those of similar institutions in perhaps any state of the Union,” Georgia governor Wilson Lumpkin declared in 1834. Her schools of higher education were destined “in no distant day . . . to be justly considered a rival of the best literary institutions in our widely extended country.” Lumpkin had a similar confidence in the railroads. “The superior advantages of rail road, over every other description of expensive works of internal improvement seems now scarcely to be questioned,” he stated. “The day is not far distant when the commercial advantages and disadvantages of all the principal Atlantic cities will approximate much nearer than they do at the present.”
In all this excitement, an even bigger, even more complex possibility began to glimmer. “Having a day or two since visited the plantation of the Honorable L. Cheves,” a reader informed the Savannah Daily Georgian in 1838, “my attention was called to the operation of a newly constructed engine known as Avery’s Rotary Steam Engine. This engine propels two threshers, two fans, and two rakes . . . Mr. Richardson, the overseer of the plantation, informed me that the straw alone would generate all the steam and more that could be used, and with the labor of just one Negro man. Rice planters would do well to examine this marvel for themselves!”
If the South was about to embrace the Industrial Revolution, and the evidence showed that she was, this was a radical shift in thinking. Thomas Jefferson had counseled his fellow Southerners to adhere to the “Agrarian Ideal,” which emphasized a life of farming and agriculture over that of industrialization. Georgia’s founder, James Oglethorpe, preached the same message: There would be no manufacturing in his Georgia colony, he declared, no industrial class to be downtrodden like those poor souls in England. What should Georgians do then? Be happy. Make wine, silk, and oil, he replied.
For many years following Oglethorpe’s remarks, adherence to the Agrarian Ideal was not difficult to achieve. Following the War of 1812, cotton prices rose, and continued to do so, with a few twists and turns, for the next twenty years. With cotton booming, the South was rich. Concert halls and plantation homes were her style. Let the North play the industrial giant, with all the social ills and miserable mill towns that industrialization entailed.
But when cotton prices slumped in 1833, tumbling even harder in 1839, and finally reaching their nadir in 1845, the South was stricken with remorse. The South had allowed itself to become a one-crop economy. Facing possible bankruptcy, the South’s financiers and businessmen began to reconsider the merits of “progress.” It might not be such a bad thing after all. In fact, they realized, factories might make them even more money than they could make from cotton alone.
In Savannah, the city’s citizens had always considered their town a worldly, cosmopolitan place—a leafy little Athens, a seaport city where commerce and the arts commingled. But now they dreamed that Savannah might become bigger still, a nexus of commerce and culture—on the scale of New York City itself.
After all, New York and Savannah were already partners in business. Savannah’s cotton row was filled with New York businessmen, who, from their brick offices overlooking the Savannah River, could see the ships crowding in below. New York’s best hotels, meanwhile—the Astor, the St. Nicolas, the Clarendon, the Metropolitan—were always booked with Savannah’s merchants and planters, and, in the sultry months of July and August, their families as well. The social links between the two seaports were extensive, and would remain so right up until the Civil War. As the Savannah Daily Morning News reported:
The “gay season” in New York, according to some of our exchanges from that great metropolis, promises to be particularly brilliant this winter . . . This year a gala opera season led off, any number of weddings followed, and now the party and ball season is commencing with vigor . . . A great many invitations are said to be out for entertainments to be given during the present month, many of them large private balls, and others, where amateur theatricals, music and acting charades are to be the principal amusements offered . . . the initiatory steps have also been taken for periodical soirees, by some of the leading ladies in New York society, which are partly literary, partly musical, and wholly delightful . . .
Indeed, they had so much in common. One could find the best Tenerife wines or Irish linens in New York City, and buy them in Savannah as well. One could read the latest dispatches about the possible marriage between the Duke d’Aumale and the infant queen of Spain (or of the expedition from Toulon to Antarctica) in the New York dailies, and find them in the Savannah newspapers as well. And if one had missed the luminaries of the stage—Edwin Booth, Charlotte Cushman, and Edwin Forrest—in New York, you could always catch their performances in Savannah instead.
In 1838, then, it took no great stretch of the imagination to see Savannah catching up—a social equal, a cultural equal, a mercantile equal to the great Gotham. That idea soon caught on among the Georgia newspapers, and before long they had hatched a new moniker for their state, “Georgia, the Empire State of the South.”
Ever since colonial days, of course, the North and South had found points of contention and places of dispute. They had quarreled over the expansion of slavery, and its place in the Constitution; over the placement of the nation’s capital—Virginia or Philadelphia; over federal tarriffs; over the removal of the Indians. But in 1838, the nation seemed to take a breather: Americans were more interested in speculating in railroads, steamboats, canals, roads—and fighting Indians—for a change, than fighting each other.
In fact, when a conclave of Southern businessmen finished their meeting in Savannah in 1837, they offered a series of toasts—to railroads, to steamboats, to free trade, and, of course, to the ladies of the city. Then one delegate stood. Raising his glass, he proclaimed, “To the Northern states! Let us show that in honorable enterprise, brothers may compete—and be brothers still!” The whole room cheered.
Sitting in their clubhouse on the banks of the Savannah River, all this talk of sporting competition gave the members of the Aquatic Club of Georgia an idea. Since Savannah and New York were such gracious competitors, why not a friendly race to extend relations even further? Henry du Bignon and Charles Floyd, the club’s secretaries, immediately penned a challenge to the Knickerbocker Club, a Manhattan sporting society, and placed it in one of New York City’s newspapers:
Gentlemen, The Aquatic Club of Georgia, having frequently heard of the fitness of your Boats and skill of your Oarsmen, are desirous of comparing the speed of one of their Boats with the speed of one of yours, on the following terms: We propose to run the four-oared Canoe Boat “Lizard” one straight mile opposite the city of Savannah, in fair and calm weather, against any four Oaked Plank Boats built in the City of New York, not over 27 feet 3 inches on the keel (which is the length of the Lizard’s) for Ten thousand dollars a side—Two thousand forfeit . . . Should those terms proposed be acceptable, address Cas. Ro. Floyd, Jeffersonton, Camden County, Ga., and particulars can be arranged by correspondence.
Competition, fair and square, with big stakes. That was the kind of challenge that attracted the southern scullers, and it was the kind of challenge that excited Gazaway Lamar as well. In fact, it was exactly the kind of challenge that made him quicken his pace as he hurried down the steps of his house, across Broughton Street, and into a carriage that would take him down to the wharves on the Savannah River.
If the embodiment of all the excitement and energy that was coursing through Savannah could be found in one man, that man would have been Gazaway Lamar. Gazaway was born on October 2, 1798. He was the third of twelve children born to Basil and Rebecca Lamar, whose great-grandparents, French Huguenots, had fled France in 1660. Gazaway was married to Jane Meek Cresswell, and by 1838, had six children. Gazaway had made his first fortune in banking and cotton in Augusta. In 1833, he moved the family to Savannah, placed his eldest son, Charles, in Reverend White’s prestigious Chatham Academy, and set about enlarging his fortunes. It didn’t take long.
Gazaway bought one warehouse on the river, then another, and soon had a row of brick buildings collected under the inscription, in big white letters, lamar’s wharf. At the east end of Broad Street he added a cotton press to the enterprise, an operation employing steam presses to compact loose cotton into bales. But this was just the beginning. Lamar also founded the Bank of Commerce, situated on Drayton Street. He had the pediment of the building ornamented with beehives, carved of granite, to emphasize the industriousness within. The Bank of Commerce soon became Savannah’s second largest bank.
Yet Gazaway was more than a mere merchant. The Dictionary of American Biography (New York, 1933) described Gazaway Lamar as being “quick to discern the trends of the time.” Indeed, he was a visionary. When steam locomotives were making their first appearances in America, for instance—as strange and irritating an object as anyone had ever seen—Lamar immediately recognized their potential. Savannah needed a “rail road,” he argued, one that would run from the city to the vast new cotton fields near Macon. At the time that Lamar was promoting the idea of this “iron horse”—in 1836—Savannah was nearly broke, having been battered by a recession. When the mayor balked, Lamar offered to finance the downtown spur of the line himself.
But railroads weren’t the only new technology that fascinated Lamar. Steamboats were another. At the time, Savannah’s steamboat traffic was ruled by Laurel Howard, an entrepreneur who had sewn up the rights to steam navigation on the river from 1814 to 1834. But now that Howard’s franchise was finished, Gazaway decided to put the monopoly to the test. Howard’s stern-wheelers were bulky vessels. When the Savannah River drew itself down in the dry season, Howard’s steamboats couldn’t get all the way upriver to retrieve the bales of cotton waiting inland, leaving them to rot.
But Lamar had an idea. He knew of an English inventor, John Laird, who had built a new kind of steamboat: Its hull had been crafted from iron plates, less than a half-inch thick, rather than the traditional wood. Not only was the hull stronger than one of wood, but lighter. And since it was lighter, it could float in shallower waters. The Englishman’s first iron-hulled ship, the Alburka, had been used to take explorers far up the Niger River, to areas that had never been navigated before. The second ship, the Lady Lansdowne, had a similar iron hull, but was exceptional in another manner: She had been built modularly, so that she could be shipped in parts from Liverpool to Dublin—and then reassembled by workmen there.
If an iron-hulled steamship could be sent across the North Sea, why couldn’t one be sent across the Atlantic as well? Most people at the time would have hesitated at the notion of a cast-iron boat, let alone one that would be built in pieces in England and reassembled thousands of miles away. But Lamar snapped his fingers in delight. He ordered the ship, had it sent across the Atlantic on a sailing brig—all 100 tons of it—and then reassembled it in Savannah. A few British workmen came over with the steamship to help with the assembly. But Lamar declined their assistance: Southern workmen could do the job just as well, he insisted—and they did.
The John Randolph, as she was named, was remarkable in every way. She was 100 feet in length, 22 feet in beam across the hull, and had two paddle wheels. Her bottom and lower strakes were of the best English-rolled boilerplate iron, 5/16th of an inch thick. Above that, the skin plates were a 1/4-inch thick. She was powered by a condensing engine, the cylinders of which were 30 inches in diameter. The piston itself had a five-foot stroke. The total weight of the machinery was seventeen tons.
On her maiden voyage on July 15, 1834, she created a sensation. “As might have been expected, the novelty of a boat constructed of iron, which had generally been considered too heavy even to float, attracted very considerable attention and curiosity,” the Augusta Daily Constitutionalist exclaimed. The John Randolph not only floated through the shallows on her maiden voyage, she pulled two heavily loaded barges. Her paddle wheels, turning at eighteen revolutions per minute, setting her speed at a remarkable five miles an hour, upstream.
Augusta’s city dignitaries boarded the John Randolph that evening to celebrate. As she passed the Citadel, in nearby Hamburg, the cadets fired off the school’s cannons in salute. The crowd aboard the John Randolph cheered in reply. “We entertain a high sense of respect and regard for Mr. Lamar—who indeed ran a great risk in this enterprise, and has rendered a great service to the country in general by this experiment,” the Augusta Chronicle said the next day. “We sincerely hope that it may prove a successful and profitable one . . .” It did. The John Randolph went down in the history books as America’s first commercially successful, iron-hulled vessel. Not surprisingly, Lamar soon expanded the Iron Steamboat Company of Augusta to include six iron-hulled steamboats, including one that he named the Lamar.
The John Randolph was a commercial success, but it was a mere inland waterway vessel. What Lamar dreamed of next was an oceangoing steamer, one to compete with the Northern steamers that went up and down the East Coast, collecting riches in passengers and freight. She would be a grand ship, with the greatest technology—a ship that would bring honor and wealth to Savannah and the South. And her name would be the Pulaski.
Copyright © 2006 by Erik Calonius. All rights reserved.