Part I of this column was published in the March 16, 2022 edition.

By Dr. Charles Pendley
Contributing Writer

By 1872, Georgia politics was under the control of the “Redeemers,” as the state’s Democrats were called. A Democrat, James M. Smith, former Confederate officer and congressman, served as Georgia’s Governor from 1872 to 1877. Smith rode on the tide of reaction against radical Republicans. His election marked the end of Reconstruction in Georgia and the beginning of more than a century of Democratic dominance in the state. No Republican would serve as Governor of Georgia again until Sonny Perdue in 2003.

In the next Presidential election in 1872, Henry County voted by a narrow margin for Horace Greely of New York, the Liberal Republican Party’s candidate. This strange bedfellow was because the Democratic Party decided to support the Liberal Republican Party in an unsuccessful attempt to try to defeat the very unpopular Ulysses S. Grant. It would be the last time a Republican presidential candidate carried Henry County for almost 100 years.

Reconstruction and The Freedmen’s Bureau
Reconstruction in Georgia and Henry County from 1865 to 1876 had a short and rocky history. Georgia was the last former Confederate state readmitted to the Union in July 1868. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands was established in the War Department in March 1865. It was known as the Freedman’s Bureau and was responsible for managing and supervising matters relating to displaced people, freedmen, and abandoned plantations throughout the former Confederacy.

The Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgia was under the Assistant Commissioner, U.S. General David Tillson. The Bureau issued food rations and provided medical assistance to both freedmen and displaced people, drafted and enforced labor contracts between employers and freedmen, administered justice, and worked with charities and benevolent societies to establish schools and hospitals.

The Freedmen’s Bureau could create military tribunals to resolve disputes between newly freed people and their employers. The Bureau also helped former slaves register to vote, legalize marriages and find children and family members who had been separated before and during the Civil War. Where jobs were not available in this part of the state, the Bureau offered transportation to south Georgia and as far away as the Mississippi Valley where new lands were being opened up for growing cotton and there was a demand for farm workers and wages were higher. In areas including Henry County, Tillson instructed Freedmen’s Bureau agents to secure labor contracts paying men $12–$13 per month and women $8–$10 per month.

Not surprisingly, the Freedmen’s Bureau was not appreciated by everyone in Georgia and Henry County. The Freedmen’s Bureau’s office in McDonough had the unenviable task of handling complaints by freed men and women about the payment of wages, mistreatment, kidnapping and other violations, and complained that the sheriff and courts often failed to arrest, charge and punish alleged offenders.

The Bureau’s report in 1866 states that there were frequent complaints from Henry County about violations against colored people and even a violent attack on the Bureau’s Agent and his office in McDonough. General Tillson sent federal troops to Henry County to apprehend the offenders. Five men were captured and incarcerated in Fort Pulaski near Savannah and eventually turned over to civil authorities in Henry County for trial. Their fate is unknown.

In his book, ‘True Southerners: A Pictorial History of Henry County, Georgia,’ Henry County’s historian, Gene Morris, quotes the Congressional testimony of Mr. James Atkins who was born and raised in Henry County in the years before the Civil War. Mr. Atkins says of the Freedmen’s Bureau, “At first I was very much averse to the Freedmen’s Bureau … but it brought men face to face with the difficulties that surrounded them and made them solve them in a manner they never otherwise would have done. Whether it is wisest for Government, with a strong hand, to reach down into these states to correct these evils or leave them to correct themselves, is a problem about which my mind hesitates.”

In 1872 the Freedmen’s Bureau’s short and tumultuous history came to an abrupt end when its charter was allowed to expire by the US Congress. By 1876, Reconstruction in the South had also ended, leaving undone for almost 100 years many of the tasks that it had hoped to achieve.