Thomas Spalding of Sapelo
The Spalding of Spalding
Born British Subject on St. Simons Island, GA on 1774, died 1851
Thomas Spalding was one of the most progressive antebellum figures of his time. As the Laird of Sapelo Island, he was one of the most influential agriculturists and political figures of the country. He was a leading planter on the tidewater, an agricultural innovator, amateur architect, astute businessman, and leading citizen of McIntosh County, Georgia. Thomas Spalding devoted his professional energies to the management of his Sapelo Island plantation, where he cultivated what his father had introduced years earlier, Sea Island cotton.He also introduced the growing of sugar cane and its manufacture processes in Georgia. He was relentless in promoting the coastal area of Georgia as the economic center of the southern states.
Thomas Spalding, the only child of Margery and James Spalding and was born at Orange Grove, the home of the Founder of Georgia Gen James Oglethorpe on St. Simons Island March 25, 1774. He was descended from the Spaldings of County Perth, Scotland and the last Spalding of Spalding born British and heir to the ancestral Baronial estates. His mother was the granddaughter of John McIntosh Mohr, leader of the Highland clan of Scots who defeated the Spanish and settled the Georgia colonial town of Darien in 1736. Thomas’ father James Spalding father was one of the earliest planters to experiment with cotton, growing his first crop in 1786 on St. Simons.
Thomas Spalding received his early education in Florida, Georgia, and New England and was admitted to the Georgia bar in 1795. That same year he married Sarah Leake, the granddaughter of Clement Martin who owned Jekyll Island and the only child of Richard Leake a prominent cotton planter who also owned Jekyll Island in its entirety.
Early in his professional career Spalding displayed a propensity for public service. He served a term in the Georgia House of Representatives (1794-95) and the Georgia senate (1803-4), followed by a two-year term in the U.S. Congress (1805-6). In 1798 Richard Leake began negotiations and soon purchased in 1801 large tracts of property on Sapelo Island before his death in 1802. Afterward his son-in-law Thomas Spalding completed the transactions through which he acquired 5,000 acres on the south end of Sapelo, a purchase partly financed by the sale of his late father's St. Simons plantation and his wife’s holdings on Jekyll.
Spalding was an accomplished "scientific farmer" who experimented with an array of agricultural procedures, including crop rotation and diversification, the planting of sugar cane, and the construction of a sugar mill made of tabby, a type of cement made from crushed oyster shells. He cleared large portions of Sapelo Island and eventually became Georgia's leading planter of Sea Island cotton. Spalding pursued a farm-based philosophy predicated not only on the cultivation of his primary staple crops of cotton (on Sapelo) and rice (on the Altamaha River) but also on secondary crops by which he sustained his labor force and livestock. He was a frequent contributor to the farm journals of his day, the Southern Agriculturist and the Southern Cultivator, freely sharing his ideas and farming philosophy with his contemporaries. Planters throughout the tidewater region adopted Spalding's technique of building with tabby, both because of its durability and because oyster shells, one of its main ingredients, was readily available from ancient Native American middens (or trash piles). Ruins of Spalding's tabbys are in abundance on Sapelo Island and on the mainland.
Despite his ownership of more than 400 slaves, Spalding had considerable misgivings about the institution of slavery, exemplified by his reputation as a liberal and humane master, Spalding lands were referred to by slaves and slave holders as black man’s heaven. His forefather’s baronial lands in Scotland were feudal estates, so Spalding consider all his laborers as serfs and they were known as “Spalding people”. He utilized the task system of labor, they worked only 6 hours a day and 5 days a week which allowed his workers to have free time for personal pursuits. A Spalding man or woman outside of their daily tasks had complete autonomy and liberty, they often traveled to the mainland to buy and sell goods that had been harvested or created in their free time. There were no white overseers hired on Spalding lands, Spalding only managed his estates with African managers. The most prominent of the black overseers was Bu Allah (or Bilali). A learned Muslim from the river region of Ghana who spoke several languages, was well educated, and who freely enjoyed Thomas Spalding’s personal library. Bu Allah was second-in-command to Thomas Spalding over the estates both on Sapelo Island and the mainland. The very first Muslim Prayer House in the United States was purportedly built on Sapelo Island where a large percentage of Spalding people practiced their religion openly. Irish workers were hired from the North to dig a majority of the original deep canals on Sapelo Island as Spalding would not allow his workers to do anything he or his sons were not willing to do themselves. Spalding also entered a bill into Georgia Senate directing a law that slaves become serfs tying them and their children to the land they lived and worked on, with eventuality of freedom. His last act as a statesman was as the Chairman of the 185O Convention, with his influence as a Unionist he persuaded Georgians not to dissolve what he had helped to create at Georgia’s Constitutional Convention many years earlier. He died at 76 years of age traveling back to his home on the coast believing he had permanently adverted war between the states.
Politically, Spalding remained a pro-unionist advocate up to the time of his death and certainly would have continued his campaign against Georgia joining any confederacy that divided his beloved Country. Spalding’s sons and grandsons did join the Confederacy at the outbreak of the Civil War but later wrote that there had been no illusion that slavery was a deplorable institution throughout the world and had reached its end but the Spalding family could not raise arms against their friends and beloved State.
Col Charles Spalding, son of Thomas of Sapelo Island, received in 1872 the book Spalding Memorial from the author and he then gave it to his nephew Thomas Spalding ll and inscribed it from Uncle Charles. Written inside are several notes including the newly constituted Spalding of Sapelo Island motto, shown within.
Consistent and characteristic of the his Spalding and Mackintosh family Thomas’ exceptional treatment of his “people” at the time as surfs not slaves mirrored his attempts to change Georgia slavery laws. He openly opposed Georgia Laws “banning manumission of negro slaves, prohibiting any religion outside Christianity and forbidding of slaves to read or write, enter into contracts or buy and sell personal belongings”. Spalding defied the law and his people did in fact practice Islam, were given enhanced education, as well as bought and sold personal goods. He did successfully sponsor and passed the Georgia Bill to stop the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in 1797 and again co-sponsored the same Bill in the US Congress years later. It supported in history that many of the Spalding people were free but Georgia Law was written that “any person of color found to have been given their freedom was under penalty of being sold back into slavery”. Sapelo was never occupied by British forces in the War of 1812 due to the fact Spalding asked the Governor for 300 muskets in order to arm his people against an invasion. They were trained to use the muskets weekly and were considered and formidable force against any British landing for the duration of the War. During most of this time Spalding was serving both his State and US in Congress and only his wife and children remained on Sapelo with 300 armed slaves. When visiting or transacting business on the mainland, Spalding people remained under the protection of the Spalding family, as was the small “free village” near Darien kept insulated from State laws and oversight.
For a historical private tour on Sapelo Island go to: SAPELO.ORG