Death of a Confederate

Introduction

Our purpose in this introduction is to provide enough background on the Smith family of Roswell, Georgia, to enable the reader to appreciate their Civil War correspondence, particularly with their eldest son, Willie. Wewill also survey extant family letters and recollections to the year 1864, when dislocation and war tear the family apart. At this point we will allow the Smiths to speak for themselves, editing their correspondence lightly and providing explanatory notes. In late December 1838 a planter named Archibald Smith (1801-86) led his family from Camden County on the Georgia-Florida line into the foothills of north Georgia,just over the Chattahoochee River, into an area that had been ceded by the Cherokee Nation only three years before.1 In the wagons approaching the new village of Roswell were his wife, Anne Magill Smith (1807-87); their daughter, Elizabeth Anne Smith (1831-1915); their son, xv Introduction William Seagrove Smith (1834-65); and two of Mrs. Smith's sisters: Helen Zubly Magill (1812-87) and Elizabeth Pye Magill (iSis-go).2 They were leaving two failed plantations: Appenzelle, several miles up the St. Marys River from the Atlantic Ocean and named after the Swiss canton from whence both Archibald Smith and his wife's Zubly ancestors had come; and Jersey Point, north of St. Marys on King's Bay.3 Smith had tried to grow rice at Appenzelle and cotton at Jersey Point. Contributing to his problems had been a failed effort to educate and to free his slaves.4 Although the Smiths were slaveholding planters, theywere hardly genteelgrandees unaccustomed to work, and although they were an old coastal family, they hardly represented "old money." The family wasjoining five other planter families from the Georgia coast in an almost Utopian experiment that had been inspired by Roswell King (1765-1844), who, in early travels into the north Georgia gold country as a representative for the Bank of Darien, had noted the industrial potential of the water power available from Cedar (Vickery) Creek as it plunged into the Chattahoochee. Roswell's son Barrington (1789-1866) would soon become the leader of this group of families—known as "The Colony"—who were not moving simply to escape the sickly climate of the coast. They wanted to build a community that would combine industry and agriculture. Because they were all Presbyterians, their vision included an ideal religious community as well, and they founded the Roswell Presbyterian Church in 1839, the same year they began the Roswell Manufacturing Company, which soon began producing cotton goods and, by 1846, woolens. Archibald Smith was to maintain his agricultural ways long after the other families moved into the center of the village and built beautiful Greek Revival homes there. Roswell King and his daughter Eliza Hand built Primrose Cottage. King's son Barrington, after first living in a cabin whose frequent additions earned it the sobriquet of "The Labyrinth" or "The Castle,"built the superb Barrington Hall. James Stephens Bulloch (1793-1849 ) moved his family into Bulloch Hall; the family of John Dunwody (1786-1858) occupied Dunwody Hall (later Mimosa Hall); and the Reverend Nathaniel Alpheus Pratt (1796-1879), called to be the minister at the Presbyterian Church, built Great Oaks. These homes were finished before Archibald Smith built his farmhouse— not a mansion like the others—a mile north of the center of the village, a symbolic distance that indicated not only his wish to maintain his agricultural ways but also a desire for the privacy that would always characterize his descendants. He had first fanned a plantation to the north in the community xvi The Deathof a Confederate Archibald Smith (1801-86) and AnneMagill Smith (1807-87). Courtesy of the GeorgiaDepartment of Archives and History Willie Smith with his sister Elizabeth Anne ("Lizzie") Smith (1831-^15). Archibald ("Archie") Smith (1844-1923), with his sister Helen Zubly ("Sissie") Smith (1841-96). Courtesy of the Georgia Department of Archives and History of Lebanon before he purchased land lot 413, a forty-acre tract, and completed his plantation home on it in July 1845. By the time the Smiths had moved into their home, the family had grown with the birth of two more children, Helen Zubly (1841-96) and Archibald (1844-1923), always called Archie or Sonny. The Smiths obviously intended the older son, Willie, to inherit the plantation, for they sent him off for a gentleman's education at Oglethorpe University...