219
23.2 In Opposition to Reverie
Numerous writers and ecologists have sought to re-trace Muir’s ecstatic trails as he
combed voluminously throughout the southeast (as he did in California, Alaska, and
elsewhere).
21
His literary reveries yield a picture that was enshrined five years after
his time in Georgia in the massive two-volume Picturesque America: Or, The Land
We Live In, wherein Savannah is portrayed to resemble the same tonal tropical paradise as the famed “Heart of the Andes” painting by Frederic Church in 1859 and
entered into the exalted interiors of the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
22
But
that paradise had long been tainted, in the case of Georgia. By the time Muir had
reached the borders of the State, like most of the South, the geography and a large
percentage of its inhabitants, human and otherwise, had been grotesquely oppressed,
or eclipsed entirely.
That was the headline for a region whose customs of a century or more had tragically endorsed economic dependence on slave labor in the cotton fields. There were
3.2 million slaves in America by 1850, 1.9 million of those individuals picking cotton.
23
In Georgia, the Trustees Garden in Savannah had received seed specimens
from Chelsea England almost immediately upon colonization. So-called Georgia
cotton had been received back in England as early as 1741. By 1743, despite objections from the colony’s founder, “the use of slave labor [in Georgia] was legalized.”
The vast industries abetting slavery had a rapacious impact on Georgia’s ecosystems, which had co-evolved in an unadulterated spasm of aggressions and indifference. It was, in essence, that very cruelty meted out to much of that natural history
abundance which Muir, and so many others like him, had come expressly to experience, whether they quite grasped the grotesque ironies or not.
24
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Eli Whitney’s 1793 invention of the cotton gin had enabled Georgia to become the veritable fountainhead of the Industrial
Revolution, monetary profits from which propounded the lure of European immigration to unprecedented levels—“6.2 million” in the decade of the 1850s. By the
time the Civil War would devastate commercial cotton, Georgia boasted over 1000
plantations, over 1000 acres each, populated in large measure by slave laborers
doing all the back-breaking work.
25
Emancipation would decrease the size of family
farms, but also provide for a liberated agriculture at odds with native biomes.
21 See https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/geography/retracing.aspx, Accessed April 20,
2019.
22 Edited by William Cullen Bryant, in D. Appleton And Company, New York, 1872, p. 117.
23 See E. J. Donnell, Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton, James Sutton & Co.,
New York, 1872.
24 See Cotton Production and the Boll Weevil in Georgia: History, Cost of Control, and Benefits of
Eradication, by P.B.Haney, W.J.Lewis, and W. R. Lambert, The Georgia Agricultural Experiment
Stations, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, The University of Georgia, Research
Bulletin Number 428, reviewed March 2009, p. 2, https://athenaeum.libs.uga.edu/bitstream/handle/10724/12179/RB428.pdf?sequence=1, Accessed April 20, 2019.
25 ibid., pp. 3–4.
23.2 In Opposition to Reverie
23.2 In Opposition to Reverie
Numerous writers and ecologists have sought to re-trace Muir’s ecstatic trails as he
combed voluminously throughout the southeast (as he did in California, Alaska, and
elsewhere).
21
His literary reveries yield a picture that was enshrined five years after
his time in Georgia in the massive two-volume Picturesque America: Or, The Land
We Live In, wherein Savannah is portrayed to resemble the same tonal tropical paradise as the famed “Heart of the Andes” painting by Frederic Church in 1859 and
entered into the exalted interiors of the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
22
But
that paradise had long been tainted, in the case of Georgia. By the time Muir had
reached the borders of the State, like most of the South, the geography and a large
percentage of its inhabitants, human and otherwise, had been grotesquely oppressed,
or eclipsed entirely.
That was the headline for a region whose customs of a century or more had tragically endorsed economic dependence on slave labor in the cotton fields. There were
3.2 million slaves in America by 1850, 1.9 million of those individuals picking cotton.
23
In Georgia, the Trustees Garden in Savannah had received seed specimens
from Chelsea England almost immediately upon colonization. So-called Georgia
cotton had been received back in England as early as 1741. By 1743, despite objections from the colony’s founder, “the use of slave labor [in Georgia] was legalized.”
The vast industries abetting slavery had a rapacious impact on Georgia’s ecosystems, which had co-evolved in an unadulterated spasm of aggressions and indifference. It was, in essence, that very cruelty meted out to much of that natural history
abundance which Muir, and so many others like him, had come expressly to experience, whether they quite grasped the grotesque ironies or not.
24
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Eli Whitney’s 1793 invention of the cotton gin had enabled Georgia to become the veritable fountainhead of the Industrial
Revolution, monetary profits from which propounded the lure of European immigration to unprecedented levels—“6.2 million” in the decade of the 1850s. By the
time the Civil War would devastate commercial cotton, Georgia boasted over 1000
plantations, over 1000 acres each, populated in large measure by slave laborers
doing all the back-breaking work.
25
Emancipation would decrease the size of family
farms, but also provide for a liberated agriculture at odds with native biomes.
21 See https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/geography/retracing.aspx, Accessed April 20,
2019.
22 Edited by William Cullen Bryant, in D. Appleton And Company, New York, 1872, p. 117.
23 See E. J. Donnell, Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton, James Sutton & Co.,
New York, 1872.
24 See Cotton Production and the Boll Weevil in Georgia: History, Cost of Control, and Benefits of
Eradication, by P.B.Haney, W.J.Lewis, and W. R. Lambert, The Georgia Agricultural Experiment
Stations, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, The University of Georgia, Research
Bulletin Number 428, reviewed March 2009, p. 2, https://athenaeum.libs.uga.edu/bitstream/handle/10724/12179/RB428.pdf?sequence=1, Accessed April 20, 2019.
25 ibid., pp. 3–4.
23.2 In Opposition to Reverie