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CHAPTER 9 1831 HE day of the stagecoach and canal tow boat made progress in the direction of its end during 1831 when the "West Point", second locomotive built in America, made its first trial trip on the South Carolina Railroad and the "DeWitt Clinton", the third, made a run on the Mohawk and Hudson, now a segment of the New York Central System.1 The year also witnessed an underscoring of the slavery issue, both in print and in blood. On January 1, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison began publication of the Liberator, in Boston. Later, on August 22, more than sixty white persons were massacred in Southampton County, Virginia, during a slave insurrection led by Nat Turner, himself a slave.2 Turner, a religious fanatic, believed himself chosen of the Lord to lead his people to freedom. He was hanged for his trouble, ironically enough, at Jerusalem, Virginia. The trouble he fomented in Virginia spread terror through the states as far west as Kentucky and south and southwest to Georgia and Louisiana; but no evidences were ever discovered of a concerted movement among the slaves.3 Even so, the incident was not soon forgotten in the South. Before the year was out De Kalb County found itself bordered entirely on the northwest by a newly organized county, Cherokee, named for the Indian Nation which, technically at least, still held title to the ground. An Act of the State Legislature, assented to on December 26, 1831, by Governor Wilson Lumpkin gave birth to the new county. This Act provided authority "to lay out and organize a new county, to be comprised of all the lands lying west of the Chattahoochee River and north of Carroll County line, within the limits of Georgia."4 The county thus created was massive. It contained some 6,900 square miles, compared to its present 429. It comprised all the Indian lands then remaining in Georgia.5 Even so, Cherokee was not an original county for we have already seen that by legislative act in 1828 the territory had been apportioned to the counties of Carroll, De Kalb, Gwinnett, Hall and Habersham. The Act of 1831 did however, subtract the territory from these five counties. By the end of July following, surveyors had finished the work of laying off the land into divisions suitable to Georgia's lottery system of awarding land to new settlers. The whole of Cherokee County was laid out in four sections. The sections were divided into districts, nine miles square, and the districts into lots of forty acres, known as gold lots, and into regular land lots of one hundred sixty acres. Drawing began October 22, 1832.6 All of this activity however, did not conclude the frontier era for De Kalb County. The final Cherokee cession was four years in the future and their removal seven. On September 3, 1831, the tireless patriarch of Standing Peachtree, James McC. Montgomery, was again launched upon the tide of public service. Upon that date he received official notification from Lewis Cass, Secretary of War, that he had been appointed by President Jackson an "appraiser to assess the value of the property, which may be abandoned by such of the Cherokee Indians, within the chartered limits of Georgia, as may be disposed to migrate T 100 ATLANTA AND ITS ENVIRONS to the country west of the Mississippi", with pay at the rate of $1,000 per year. He left home on the 5th of December to commence the business of valuation.7 Georgia politics during this period were in a state of transition. Influence of Calhoun's Nullification doctrine was growing and was sharply brought to the fore in the dispute between the United States and the State of Georgia upon the Cherokee Indian question. The people of Georgia were becoming more and more interested in regional vs. national politics and problems.8 Out of the Clarke-Troup factions grew the Union (Clarke) Party and the State Rights (Troup) Party. In 1831 the Union Party put Wilson Lumpkin up for Governor against the incumbent George R. Gilmer, a State Rights man. De Kalb County, in this election, supported the Union Party and Lumpkin with seventy-five percent of its total vote. In the neighboring counties of Campbell and Gwinnett, Lumpkin polled a bare majority, while Newton County bordering De Kalb to the southeast, capitulated to the State Rights Party and George Gilmer. Lumpkin was elected.9 Both of the 1831 gubernatorial candidates had...

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