A valuable document from the Reconstruction era, The Journal of Archibald C. McKinley offers the modern reader a rare glimpse of daily life on Sapelo Island, Georgia, as seen through the eyes of an upper-class farmer. A descendant of Scottish settlers, Archibald McKinley was born in Lexington, Georgia, in 1842 and served as a Confederate officer during the Civil War. Just after the war, he began farming near Milledgeville, Georgia, and within a year had met and married Sarah Spalding, a granddaughter of Thomas Spalding, who had built his plantation empire on Sapelo Island. In 1869, the McKinleys moved to Sapelo to raise cotton, sugar cane, and other crops. The bulk of this journal is a sustained account of their sojourn on the island through 1876, before their return to Milledgeville. The brief, matter-of-fact entries that make up McKinley's journal focus mainly on the small occurrences that filled his days: farm work, hunting and fishing expeditions, sailing excursions, church services, changes in the weather, the disposition of his crops, the development of the Darien timber shipping trade. Scattered throughout, however, are intriguing references to dramatic events--shootings, trials, tensions between whites and the recently freed blacks--and to the processes of Reconstruction, as when McKinley notes that "a company of Yankee soldiers" had arrived at the penitentiary to ensure equal treatment of black and white convicts. The longest entry in the journal is a eulogy for a freedman named Scott, who, as McKinley's slave, had remained "true as steel" during McKinley's service in the Civil War. Editor Robert L. Humphries has included with the journal several of the McKinley family letters, written after Archibald and Sarah left Sapelo Island. In the introduction, historian Russell Duncan places the story in context, focusing on the larger events of Reconstruction as they pertained to Sapelo Island and to the relations between blacks and whites there.

The story of Sapelo Island, Georgia, in the half-century following the Civil War, featuring the daily journal of Archibald C. McKinley, one of the island's residents.

Darling, I never wanted to gow home as bad in my life as I doo now and if they don’t give mee a furlow I am going any how. Written in December 1862 by Private Wright Vinson in Tennessee to his wife, Christiana, in Georgia, these lines go to the heart of why Scott Walker wrote this history of the Fifty-seventh Georgia Infantry, a unit of the famed Mercer’s Brigade. All but a few members of the Fifty-seventh lived within a close radius of eighty miles from each other. More than just an account of their military engagements, this is a collective biography of a close-knit group. Relatives and neighbors served and died side by side in the Fifty-seventh, and Walker excels at showing how family ties, friendships, and other intimate dynamics played out in wartime settings. Humane but not sentimental, the history abounds in episodes of real feeling: a starving soldier’s theft of a pie; another’s open confession, in a letter to his wife, that he may desert; a slave’s travails as a camp orderly. Drawing on memoirs and a trove of unpublished letters and diaries, Walker follows the soldiers of the Fifty-seventh as they push far into Unionist Kentucky, starve at the siege of Vicksburg, guard Union prisoners at the Andersonville stockade, defend Atlanta from Sherman, and more. Hardened fighters who would wish hell on an incompetent superior but break down at the sight of a dying Yankee, these are real people, as rarely seen in other Civil War histories.

In 1877, John Girardeau Legare of Adams Run, South Carolina, arrived in Darien on the Georgia tidewater. Legare managed Darien-area rice plantations, first at Generals Island, then at Champneys. Nearby was Butler's Island, made famous by Fanny Kemble Butler in her antebellum Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation. Legare also served as the clerk of the city of Darien during the first three decades of the twentieth century, maintaining detailed records of public business and documenting local commercial and civic affairs. Almost to the day of his death in 1932, Legare kept a journal containing his observations and commentary on the development of Darien as a center for timber exports and the gradual decline of the rice industry. South Carolina and Georgia led the world in rice production in the mid-nineteenth century, and Legare's detailed accounts of planting and management provide one of the outstanding contemporary sources for what was becoming a vanishing way of life in tidewater Georgia. Legare's journals are a microcosmic history of Darien and its environs during a time that was perhaps the most compelling in the town's history. The industrial development of Darien in the postbellum era was the essence of Henry Grady's vision of the progressive New South, a factor not lost on Legare. He reflects on the difficulties associated with rice planting; Darien's soaring, then plummeting, fortunes with yellow pine timber; prominent community members; and the development of local railroads. Legare records these developments against the larger backdrop of America, as his journal contains many observations on contemporary national events. Buddy Sullivan has placed the Journal in context with an introduction and comprehensive endnotes identifying the people and events referred to by Legare. There is also considerable African American history in the volume, as reflected both in Legare's writings and in the editor's introduction and supplementary notes.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in HistoryCo-winner of the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American HistoriansWinner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Prize from the Agricultural History Society Deep Souths tells the stories of three southern regions from Reconstruction to World War II: the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, the eastern Piedmont of Georgia, and the Georgia Sea Islands and Atlantic coast. Though these regions initially shared the histories and populations we associate with the idea of a "Deep South"—all had economies based on slave plantation labor in 1860—their histories diverged sharply during the three generations after Reconstruction. With research gathered from oral histories, census reports, and a wide variety of other sources, Harris traces these regional changes in cumulative stories of individuals across the social spectrum. Deep Souths presents a comparative and ground-level view of history that challenges the idea that the lower South was either uniform or static in the era of segregation. By the end of the New Deal era, changes in these regions had prepared the way for the civil rights movement and the end of segregation.

Hog Hammock, located on Georgia's Sapelo Island, is only accessible by ferry or private boat. It is one of the last island-based Gullah-Geechee communities in America--a living connection to West African languages, folkways, and spiritual traditions. With its dirt roads and tin-roofed houses, Hog Hammock is the site of a social hall, two historic Baptist churches, and a former schoolhouse, all built by descendants of slaves. The nearby Behavior Cemetery has burial sites that date back 200 years. Much has been written about the people of Hog Hammock and Sapelo Island, mostly documenting their lives as slaves and then as landowning free people working for millionaires who reshaped Sapelo Island into their own personal retreats. But there is another part of the island's story, one filled with entrepreneurs, skilled craftsmen, and community leaders, that is told here in Images of America: Sapelo Island's Hog Hammock.

Sapelo, a state-protected barrier island off the Georgia coast, is one of the state’s greatest treasures. Presently owned almost exclusively by the state and managed by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Sapelo features unique nature charac­teristics that have made it a locus for scientific research and ecological conservation. Beginning in 1949, when then Sapelo owner R. J. Reynolds Jr. founded the Sapelo Island Research Foundation and funded the research of biologist Eugene Odum, UGA’s study of the island’s fragile wetlands helped foster the modern ecology movement. With this book, Buddy Sullivan covers the full range of the island’s history, including Native American inhabitants; Spanish missions; the antebellum plantation of the innovative Thomas Spalding; the African American settlement of the island after the Civil War; Sapelo’s two twentieth-century millionaire owners, Howard E. Coffin and R. J. Reynolds Jr., and the development of the University of Georgia Marine Institute; the state of Georgia acquisition; and the transition of Sapelo’s multiple African American communities into one. Sapelo Island’s history also offers insights into the unique cultural circumstances of the residents of the community of Hog Hammock. Sullivan provides in-depth examination of the important correlation between Sapelo’s culturally significant Geechee communities and the succession of private and state owners of the island. The book’s thematic approach is one of “people and place”: how prevailing environmental conditions influenced the way white and black owners used the land over generations, from agriculture in the past to island management in the present. Enhanced by a large selection of contemporary color photographs of the island as well as a selection of archival images and maps, Sapelo documents a unique island history.