William P.A. Hunt began work on what became his superb new book on Georgia’s Golden Isles in 2020, when, amid the pandemic, he perceived a hastening in the trend to erase history. Hunt will have none of it. “History is an unchangeable reality — a tapestry woven with both beauty and tragedy,” writes Hunt, whose book, deeply researched yet engagingly written, has its roots in his master’s thesis at Princeton University. “Embracing in its entirety, we can progress by learning from the past.”
Such sentiments once routinely informed works of popular history. But in these days of cultural deletion, Hunt’s book stands out for its neutral, evenhanded approach. Neither glorifying nor glossing over the past, Hunt sketches more than half a millennium of the history of what is, in his telling, one of the glories of the American landscape: the barrier islands — Little St. Simons Island, Sea Island, St. Simons Island, and Jekyll Island — nestled beside Georgia, the coastal city of which, Brunswick, is considered part of the grouping. Besotted by its salt marshes and other features, Georgia-born poet Sidney Lanier was moved to compare the area to “a lane into heaven that leads from a dream.”
Standing higher than sea level, graced with both beaches and maritime forests, the region sounds Edenic. Yet Hunt makes clear that these remarkably beautiful islands were also the site of much complicated history, as is the case on every other spot ever occupied by man. “The history of the region cannot easily be reduced to a snapshot,” writes Hunt, who offers an overview sure to be unfamiliar to anyone who is not a native Southerner.
Hunt begins his account in the 1500s, when assorted European colonizers attempted to gain a foothold in this especially beautiful outpost. Recounting the prehistory of the future U.S. state of Georgia, the book includes accounts of the Spanish seeking (and failing) to find gold and other resources, and seeking (and failing) to catechize the Indian inhabitants in Catholicism. Here and elsewhere, Hunt is attuned to how human endeavors leave physical traces in a place, or not. In contrast to still-standing adobe churches in the American Southwest, “the churches in the Southeast were built from wood and other local materials that were susceptible to the ravages of the humid and punishing environment.”
In the long run, of course, Britain had better luck in imprinting its identity on the New World. In 1732, upon the issuance of a charter to a group of trustees that included British army officer James Edward Oglethorpe, Georgia sprang into existence as a British colony. It was noted, in its early years, not only for its attempts to provide a bulwark against the Spanish but also for its conception of itself as a land free of slavery. “In his efforts to establish a self-sustaining colony not built upon enslaved labor or the slave trade, Oglethorpe brought his sense of morality and his desire to preserve an overseas empire as he attempted to enhance the British Empire’s image,” Hunt writes. As it lays out this history, the book is enhanced by beautiful illustrations, including William Verelst’s depiction of Georgia’s trustees hosting a delegation of Creek Indians in London.
Readers will trace the development and abolition of slavery in the South, always with a particular emphasis on how these great changes in history affected the Golden Isles. On the heels of the legalization of slavery in 1750, rice plantations sprang up, and slaves were sought from areas in West Africa whose inhabitants were familiar with cultivating rice. It’s a grim story. “Armed overseers, both white and Black, used harsh corporal punishment to ensure that all enslaved workers fulfilled their required tasks.” American independence did not change the situation, nor did the emergence of Sea Island cotton as a staple crop on the islands. “Visitors who did not know better assumed that rice and cotton plantations, enslaved Africans, and a handful of elite families had always been the norm in the region,” Hunt writes. During the Civil War, Golden Isles landowners fled in such numbers that much of the black population was left to run plantation affairs, but a wartime measure to redistribute the land to those once enslaved, the “40 acres and a mule” edict, proved short-lived.
THE MALAISE-FREE CARTER ERA IN AMERICAN JOURNALISM
After Reconstruction, the islands became the site of a booming lumber industry, and by the end of the 19th century, they had emerged as a tourist mecca that promised not only scenic beauty but, according to doctors of the day, “healthier humid air.” In the 1880s, the surpassingly swanky Jekyll Island Club was established. By the 20th century, George H.W. and Barbara Bush chose Sea Island to honeymoon, and Sarah Churchill picked the spot to marry. The island’s identity as a destination for movers and shakers remained sufficiently strong that the G8 summit was held there in 2004. Today, the Sea Island Company advances this heritage through its operation of the area’s resorts. Quoting the poet Lanier, Hunt concludes: “The Golden Isles may no longer be ‘debatable land’ sitting on the edge of the great European empires, but it is still very much a ‘world of marsh that borders a world of sea.’”
The genuine advancements of the last few centuries — the march of freedom, both personal and economic — are not to be taken for granted. This book proves that tending candidly to the past can make one all the more grateful for the present. Such is the messy beauty of America — as beautiful and complex and alive, even, as the coast of Georgia’s Golden Isles.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
