American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'Street, Julian
General
American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'
Street, Julian
Southern States -- Description and travel; Southern States -- Social life and customs
Neither in Atlanta nor in any other part of Georgia is General Sherman
remembered with a feeling that can properly be described as
affectionate, though it may be added that Atlanta has good reason for
remembering him warmly. The burning of Atlanta by Sherman did not,
however, prove an unalloyed disaster, for the war came to an end soon
after, and the rebuilding of the city supplied work for thousands of
former Confederate soldiers, and also drew to Atlanta many of the strong
men who played leading parts in the subsequent commercial upbuilding of
the place: such men as the late General Alfred Austell, Captain James W.
English, and the three Inman brothers, Samuel, John, and Hugh--to
mention but a few names. The First National Bank, established by General
Austell, is, I believe, Atlanta's largest bank to-day, and was literally
the first national bank established in Georgia, if not in the whole
South, after the war.
Woodrow Wilson was admitted to the bar in Atlanta, and, if I mistake
not, practised law in an office not far from that meeting place of
highways called Five Points. Here, at Five Points, two important trails
crossed, long before there was any Atlanta: the north-and-south trail
between Savannah and Ross's Landing, and the east-and-west trail, which
followed the old Indian trails between Charleston and New Orleans. When
people from this part of the country wished to go to Ohio, Indiana, or
the Mississippi Valley, they would take the old north-and-south trail to
Ross's Landing, follow the Tennessee River to where it empties into the
Ohio, near Paducah, Kentucky, and proceed thence to Mississippi.
In the thirties, Atlanta--or rather the site of Atlanta, for the city
was not founded until 1840--was on the border of white civilization in
northern Georgia, all the country to the north of the Chattahoochee
River, which flows a few miles distant from the city, having belonged to
the Cherokee Indians, who had been moved there from Florida. Even in
those times the Cherokees were civilized, as Indians go, for they lived
in huts and practised agriculture. Of course, however, their
civilization was not comparable with that of the white man. If they had
been as civilized as he, they might have driven him out of Florida,
instead of having been themselves driven out, and they might have driven
him out of Georgia, too, instead of having been pushed on, as they were,
to the Indian Territory--eighteen thousand of them, under military
supervision, on boats from Ross's Landing--leaving the beautiful white
Cherokee rose, which grows wild and in great profusion, in the spring,
as almost their sole memorial on Georgia soil.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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