Atlanta And Its Builders, Vol. 1 - A Comprehensive History Of The Gate City Of The South. Thomas H. Martin

      CHAPTER 1. WHEN THERE WAS NO ATLANTA

      A city whose non-existence can be remembered by a man who has only reached the psalmist's allotted span of life is entitled to the designation of new, especially in a section of the country first to be explored by the Spaniard and which boasts of the oldest town in North America. Savannah, rich and proud of her shipping, a miniature Venice, ambitious of international trade exploitation, was one of the growing cities of the thirteen colonies when the region around Atlanta was a howling wilderness, unpenetrated by a Daniel Boone. Augusta, a bustling cotton mart and the outlet of a long-distance overland trade, had been incorporated for a century when the first settler's cabin reared its rude walls on the site of Atlanta. Other leading cities of Georgia had railroad connections and for a generation or more had enjoyed a wide commercial intercourse when the magic word Atlanta first appeared on the map of the old commonwealth. Indeed, the metropolis of the Southeast may truthfully be said to be a post-bellum product, for, search through its length and breadth, and you will with difficulty find a landmark that recalls so recent and momentous an era of history as the civil war — the bloody cradle in which the infancy of Atlanta was rocked. This, anywhere but in the West, is anomalous. Many of the booming Western cities are older than the South's most progressive and quickly growing city. Atlanta is new. The hope of youth is in her heart and the suppleness of youth is in her limbs. She is the civic personification of strength and promise. Her glories are not reminiscences. Her life is all before her, and her achievement but an earnest of what she will do.

      It is appropriate, in setting about the task of attempting to trace the growth and chronicle the annals of so remarkable a city to look somewhat into the environing conditions antedating its birth. In these conditions, themselves anomalous, will be found the reason of Atlanta's comparative newness. When the coast region and low lands of the state were thickly settled, and, in some respects, already effete, the region now immediately tributary to Atlanta — the whole of northwest Georgia, in fact — was a great Indian reservation, to enter which was legally "intrusion," punishable by lines and imprisonment. The Cherokees, the most intelligent and powerful of all the aboriginal tribes, occupied the primeval forests of this half-explored hill country and carried on, in a primitive way, their agriculture and domestic industries. They were not savages, by any means, in the generally accepted view of the Indian. They were not there by sufferance, or as buffalo in a national park, to satisfy a sentimental governmental sense of equity. They owned these lands and had established upon them comfortable, though humble, homes, with occasional villages which supported schools and churches. Since the landing of Oglethorpe they had been the object of the religious solicitude of the missionaries, and may be said to have been quite effectually christianized and civilized. Moreover, they preserved, by virtue of their treaty rights with the general government, a kind of political autonomy that exempted them from amenability to the state laws and left them free to carry on a queer mixture of civil and tribal government. They had the proud characteristics of their race in a superlative degree and were extremely jealous of white encroachment. During those days they amalgamated little with the Caucasian and insisted on their treaty guarantee of social isolation. Every attempt on the part of the "boomers" of that time to break down their Chinese wall of exclusiveness was met with a rude diplomacy in the committee rooms and departments at Washington, creditable to the Cherokee's reputation for statesmanship. They had strong leaders — such men as John Ross and Elias Boudinot — and as the cordon of civilization drew tighter about them their stubborn resistance to the attempt to make them take "the white man's path" was ready for any lengths of patriotic heroism.

      The state of Georgia, during the first quarter of the century, had resorted to every expedient to crowd the Cherokees across its western borders. At first it was successful in obtaining possession of much of their lands through the William Penn policy of "swapping," but in time the Indians came to set the true value upon what was left of their broad acres, and further cessions by one-sided purchase were no longer possible. In northwest Georgia, the tribe made its last stand for a home, begirt by pioneer settlers. The state was determined to oust the unwelcome red men, and, it is easy to believe, prepared to make any means justify the end. The history of the banishment of these Indians from the state is as pathetic as was the exile of the Acadians. The conflict of the laws of the Cherokee Nation and those of Georgia was seized upon by the latter as the easiest method of weakening the tribe's hold on congress. The Georgia delegation in the national legislature began a systematic campaign of dispossession. On the floor and in cloakroom and lobby persistent arguments were advanced and schemes proposed to accomplish the difficult result. The Indians, in an ugly mood, had occasion to resist with force repeated attempts on the part of determined white men to invade their lands. The state of Georgia, restive under the denial of its sovereignty within its own borders on the part of the United States, which the latter's adherence to the Cherokee treaties amounted to, threatened to ignore federal authority to the extent of treating the tribe as amenable to the state jurisdiction, and there were clashes of authority with the view of making test cases of the questions at issue. Indeed, the state legislature did embrace the tribe within the scope of its criminal jurisdiction, notwithstanding the assumption by the central government of the sole right to exercise authority in all matters affecting the Indians, collectively or individually. The tribe had its own legislative council and machinery of local government, modeled, in the main, after white administration, and the supervisory office of the powers at Washington was nominal, except in extraordinary emergencies. The Indians punished their own criminals, and cases involving offenses between the races were adjudicated by federal courts. The United States were pledged to exclude from the Cherokee reservation all white people who had not been permitted to enter by permission of the tribal council. The triangular conflict of authority extended through several years, becoming more aggravated each year, until, to make a long story short, Georgia succeeded in inducing congress