Savanna Now: Speaker revisits onset of American revolution in Georgia
By Larry Peterson Copyright 2011 . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
They came to celebrate something that happened long ago, but were reminded of how new Georgia was then.
About 80 people gathered Monday for the annual laying of wreaths at the monument to Button Gwinnett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
The Colonial Cemetery observance - sponsored by various chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution - lived up to its billing.
It featured bagpipe music, patriotic songs, prayers and dessert snacks, including cupcakes with tiny American flags.
But the main course was a talk by Scott Smith, executive director of the Coastal Heritage Society.
Smith stepped away from a lectern to be near a sparsely leafed, Spanish mossed-draped tree under which many in the audience sought shade.
Describing Savannah at the outbreak of the revolution, he spoke of a fledgling society on the edge of something big.
Georgia, last of the 13 colonies to be founded, was just 43 years old.
"How many of you remember 1968?" he asked.
That, he said, is a present-day way of understanding how new Georgia was at the time.
As some people shooed away gnats with their programs, he listed the ages - none over 70 - of several revolutionary leaders.
"Most of these men were talking about ideas younger than themselves," he said, referring to the principles of the revolution.
He noted that, at the time, James Watt was developing the steam engine, which would power the industrial revolution.
Publication of "The Wealth of Nations," a capitalist manifesto that many still embrace, was less than a year away, he said.
"The world was on the brink of cataclysmic rapid change, but that was not known," Smith said.
Little was known very quickly those days; it took 37 days for word of the declaration to reach Savannah, he observed.
On today's scale, few Savannahians were directly involved in the conflict, he said.
On one side were about 200 members of the Sons of Liberty; on the other, "40 or 50 men of substance and ships' captains."
But that was "almost all the grown men of Savannah," he said.
Like those of other colonists, he said, the loyalties of Georgians were divided.
Some had benefitted from the rule of King George III and James Wright, the royal governor.
But others chafed at royal restrictions on trade "and having to claim their land through the crown and pay some shillings for their acres," he said.
Still, Smith added, "many people tried to live their lives and did not want to take a side until they suffered an injustice."
"If ... 15 or 20 armed men came up to your farm and kidnapped one of your sons to go with them as a soldier, took your extra horses ... and burned your barn," Smith said, it didn't matter which side they were on.
"They had created an injustice," he said, "and you would find vengeance."
"... We know how it ended, but we lose the concept of what it meant to the small people of the state."
