CHAPTER 1

The Status Quo Made Picturesque

Nineteenth-Century Macon, Georgia, and Its Garden of the Dead

SCARLET JERNIGAN

“Behold a new city which we now consecrate to the dead! Behold its walls, its gates, and its streets!” wrote one nineteenth-century southerner of the new cemetery in his town. In Macon’s municipal rural-style cemeteries Rose Hill and Oak Ridge, “the city of the living clearly rearranged itself in the city of the dead.”¹ There, the antebellum town’s white citizens both high and low, as well as African Americans both enslaved and free, were to find rest—not side by side exactly but at peace with each other and their respective places in society. These new gardens of the dead—in keeping with the rural cemetery movement—were to be not only picturesque but also class conscious, serving as a “didactic landscape” that would instruct those perambulating there on sunny afternoons.² Mapping reveals that Macon’s necropolis mirrored the patterns of hierarchy and marginality found in the town’s streets. Through Rose Hill and Oak Ridge, white Maconites, including the city’s slaveholders, sought to prescribe how the world viewed them and southern civilization. In the postbellum period, both cemeteries underwent significant changes in line with Maconites’ altered circumstances.

The City of Macon: Its Antebellum Demography and Urban Geography

The makeup of antebellum Macon was a predictor of its deathways geography. From Macon’s founding in 1823 on the “fall line,” directly on the banks of the Ocmulgee River, the town gained importance as an “agrarian city” where commission merchants stored cotton before they shipped it to the coast.³ Macon functioned as a market town for central Georgia, selling just about everything needed for both farm and household—items brought upriver on the Ocmulgee and later overland on the railroad. To bolster the city’s commerce, Maconites embraced telegraph service as well as a number of manufacturing establishments. The town’s antebellum growth and diversification made the larger rural-style cemeteries Rose Hill and Oak Ridge necessary. As the fifth largest city in Georgia in 1860, Macon had a population of 5,337 whites as well as 33 free and 2,664 enslaved African Americans.⁴ In Macon, as in many southern cities, “slave labor could be found nearly anywhere there was a task to perform,” as white urbanites modified slavery to suit their needs.⁵ Though both free and enslaved African Americans would have been ubiquitous on Macon’s streets, in the 1860 city directory, which was the principal source for this mapping project, Macon’s people of color were virtually invisible.⁶ As scholar Angelika Kruger-Kahloula observed of another slaveholding city, for African Americans “the abodes of the living and the dead were both on the periphery.”⁷ Many of the enslaved in the city would have resided in the homes or shops of Macon’s slaveholders, in back lots or “yards” behind slaveholders’ residences, or in small houses or shanties squeezed into alleys. “Living out” in locations away from slaveholders even under the least favorable conditions provided a measure of independence. An enslaved community formed in East Macon around the Central Railroad depot, allowing for some fellowship, mutual support, and “quasi-freedom.”⁸ Even free African Americans did not appear in the 1860 Macon city directory. A similar dearth of records obscures the exact resting places of most people of color within the city’s antebellum cemeteries.

For Macon’s white population, the 1860 directory reveals the residential patterns of different occupational groups, providing invaluable information necessary for analyzing Rose Hill on Macon’s north side. The cemetery mirrored in many ways the socioeconomic patterns in neighborhoods. Dividing white Maconites into seven socioeconomic groups, from most to least prestigious, allows for closer analysis of these groups in both city and cemetery. (See the appendix for a review and explanation of these categories.) Mapping the city shows that those at the lower end of this scale—groups 4 to 7, namely Macon’s clerks, middle-class professionals, and skilled and unskilled laborers, who made up over three-quarters of the population—often lived side by side with the more prosperous. (See figure 1.1.) Yet, further inquiry demonstrates that in both city and cemetery, greater wealth—often aligned with slaveholding—often equaled residency in the city’s more fashionable areas.

Being a part of the slaveholding class meant a greater likelihood of living in elite areas of town and of being interred in the city’s rural cemetery. Macon’s antebellum geography, or “unwitting biography,” encompasses the residential choices of the 336 Maconites in the 1860 city directory who either hired enslaved laborers from slaveholders or used their own.⁹ The greater their wealth, the more likely Maconites were to be slaveholders or hirers. Of Maconites with residential information gleaned mostly from the 1860 directory, 88 percent of greater merchants and planters in group 1 owned or rented enslaved laborers. In comparison, 58 percent of those in group 3, middling proprietors and city officials, utilized enslaved labor, compared to 7 percent of the skilled laborers in group 5 who were slaveholders or hirers. Though there was no obvious separation between slaveholders and nonslaveholders on Macon’s streets, a closer look at the residential topography within the same occupational groups reveals a single pattern. Occupational group 3 had seventy-five slaveholders residing in the city in 1860, compared to fifty-six nonslaveholders. The plotted points in figure 1.2 show the residences of these men and women, while the ellipses indicate clustering. Slaveholders in group 3 were more likely to be living above First Street at higher elevations outside the business district. The data for the sixty-two slaveholders and six nonslaveholders in group 1 denote the same pattern, which also held true for all 336 slaveholders and 1,494 nonslaveholders residing in the city. In all occupational groups, there were fewer slaveholders living in the less affluent areas on the city’s perimeter in East Macon, south of Oglethorpe Street, or east of the Southwestern and Central Railroad tracks.¹⁰ (See again figure 1.1.) This trend toward the fashionable was more pronounced in Rose Hill, where slaveholders appeared in numbers that far exceeded their proportions of the population. Though socioeconomic groups 1 through 3 made up only 16 percent of Maconites listed in the 1860 directory, this same bloc constituted almost half of the antebellum lot purchasers in Rose Hill, highlighting the cemetery’s elitist leanings.¹¹

The wealthiest of these slaveholders included not only planters but also nonagricultural businessmen who sometimes lived alongside planters in the city’s most exclusive sections and were subsequently laid to rest beside them in Rose Hill. A number of planters whose agricultural operations were far removed from Macon built mansions in the city and bought lots in Rose Hill instead of choosing residence and interment on their plantations elsewhere. They chose Macon to display their wealth, take advantage of social opportunities, be closer to educational choices for their children, avoid hotels when on business, and secure more stable and visible burial locations. With higher elevations and larger lot sizes, “uptown” College Street and Georgia Avenue in particular boasted a number of “superblocks” with the private mansions of the agricultural and nonagricultural crème de la crème.¹² Living on prominences such as these removed residents from city smells and high-traffic dusty streets and allowed them to enjoy any fresh breezes that might be wafting through central Georgia. Though nonagricultural businessman William Butler Johnston built the most spectacular antebellum residence in Macon, the aptly named Italian Renaissance Revival “Palace of the South,” his mercantile peers were more likely to live at less fashionable addresses closer to the city’s business district, as seen in figure 1.3. Most wealthy planters resided outside the business district uptown; twelve of sixteen planters with homes in the city in 1860 lived above First Street, where the congestion of city businesses started to thin. In comparison, thirty of fifty-two nonagricultural businessmen did so. Almost half of the city’s wealthy planters resided above Spring Street, while only 23 percent of greater merchants and proprietors did so. Though this variation could have been due to differences in status consciousness, there were pragmatic reasons why some of the city’s wealthiest merchants chose to live downtown, such as the desire to be in proximity to their shops and warehouses.¹³ In Rose Hill, the bones of planters and nonagricultural businessmen mingled without the impediment of these pragmatic considerations.

Antebellum Macon’s deathways geography imitated in many ways its residential patterns regarding both race and class. The growing number of white planter, commercial, industrial, and transportation workers listed in the 1860 city directory lived in close proximity. There was substantial spatial overlap present among all white occupational groups in the small antebellum city, though slaveholding bestowed an economic advantage, making slaveholders more likely to lay their heads in more fashionable surrounds in both life and death. These slaveholders included agricultural and nonagricultural elites who mingled in both city and cemetery. In contrast, African American Maconites’ final resting places were often unknown and unknowable.

Rose Hill: Class in the Elitist Rural Cemetery

In the rural cemeteries Rose Hill and Oak Ridge, Maconites made class and racial disparities as beautiful as possible, even as they sought to bolster the southern way of life and to gloss over the unpleasant realities of life in antebellum Georgia. Maconites patterned these burial grounds, with Rose Hill for the white population and Oak Ridge for people of color, after the popular rural cemetery movement. Lasting from 1831 into the 1870s, the movement naturalized and beautified burial grounds by placing them on the edge of town, literally in the woods. Each of these picturesque cemeteries was to be a carefully curated wilderness in a style borrowed from eighteenth-century English landscape design used to transform the nobility’s great landed estates. This elitist form, transplanted across the Atlantic, aimed to refine Americans, who, according to one concerned writer, “vie with Goth or Vandal in apparent hate of cultured arts.” The movement was appropriate for the slaveholding class’s purposes, for it was a conservative reform aimed at literally enshrining hierarchy and the status quo.¹⁴ For generations, the dead had packed older city and church graveyards in both North and South, with the high and low of society often lying “indistinguishably intermingled. Magistrates and criminals, preachers, soldiers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, colonial dames . . . [were] all consorting together in promiscuous companionship.”¹⁵ “Reform-minded proprietors” in rural-style cemeteries wanted “to avoid such indiscriminate mingling” and instead to establish a more delineated “mirror image of the social groups existing in town.” Though Mount Auburn Cemetery outside Boston was the original rural cemetery, southern cities and towns quickly founded their own and modified “cemetery landscape design and use in ways that were distinctive to the region.”¹⁶ These variations came into play concerning both the unique white southern hierarchy and the place of free and enslaved African Americans in the South.

Macon’s rural cemetery stayed true to both the movement’s expansive picturesque model and its class obsession. In the late 1830s, Macon decided to open a new burial ground for its white residents because the Old Macon Cemetery, located on the eastern edge of the city grid, neared capacity. To replace this four-acre utilitarian graveyard, a town committee selected a fifty-acre site on the Ocmulgee River, one-half mile northwest of the city center. Its ridges, dells, and rocky cliffs above the river set it apart from the Old Macon Cemetery’s flat landscape. Macon’s Georgia Citizen described the ambience of Rose Hill with its “various marble monuments, many of them hidden in the depths of the dark green forest, and which can only be found by the intricate windings of various bye-paths.”¹⁷ These marble monuments often belonged to the affluent within Rose Hill. Many white working-class and poor Maconites found “some less genteel place of burial,” which included the margins of Rose Hill itself.¹⁸ Antebellum Rose Hill had over two hundred recorded white burials in what the interment book often referred to as “Strangers Row.” Antebellum Rose Hill’s formal, landscaped sections received approximately 1,100 burials, revealing that almost one of every five interments during this period was in Strangers Row. Beyond a minority listed as paupers, there are twenty-seven Strangers Row burials with known occupations. These working-class whites found rest in “ranges” set aside for the “burial of strangers” or for white Maconites who needed to “select a free lot.” These ranges existed along the verges of established burial sections.¹⁹

The ownership of purchased plots within the cemetery’s terraced grid resembled the residency patterns of the living. Those of modest means were often in proximity to the affluent, though they did not mingle “indistinguishably.” Certain sections in the burial ground had higher status than others, as the lists of antebellum lot purchasers attest. Holly Ridge was the most exclusive section, with 75 percent of its purchasers in occupational groups 1 to 3. Magnolia followed close behind with 72 percent of the lots held by groups 1 through 3. Honeysuckle and Pine Ridges skewed toward those less well off, with 61 percent of Honeysuckle and 50 percent of Pine’s lots purchased by Maconites in occupational group 5, 6, and 7. (See figure 1.4.) As noted above, slaveholders were overrepresented in the cemetery, purchasing over half of the 375 lots sold in the antebellum era. The sections with lot purchaser majorities in socioeconomic groups 1, 2, and 3 also had slaveholding majorities.²⁰

Both planters and nonagricultural businessmen, mostly slaveholders, chose high-status locations in Rose Hill. They did so even if they lived in less fashionable surroundings in the city. For example, wealthy grocer John H. Damour resided in the midst of the city’s business district but chose a lot at the base of Central Avenue on the Ocmulgee near the Powers, Lockett, and Holt planter family plots. (See figure 1.5.) In many sections of Macon’s necropolis, the affluent selected lots near the carriageways or on high ground. It appealed to them that their visitors would have a view from their plot, and “being seen” could continue decades after death if the wealthy chose the most opportune spot for personal or familial memorialization. Favored locations for both the agricultural and nonagricultural elites to cluster included Central Avenue District, block 1, at the cemetery’s entrance, which was also at the burial ground’s highest elevation. A number of the affluent grouped at the northern edge of Magnolia Ridge. The most exclusive section in the cemetery was Holly Ridge’s block 3, where wealthy planters and nonagricultural businessmen were undisturbed in their rest by the less affluent. Separated from the remainder of the cemetery by ravines on either side, “Cowles Hill” monuments were visible from a number of vantage points along the Ocmulgee both inside and outside the cemetery. Merchant and railroad promoter Jerry Cowles of New York and his family lie but a few feet from planter Joseph Bond. Notably, a few years before his demise Bond had purchased Cowles’s Greek Revival mansion in northwest Macon after financial reversals had forced Cowles to sell. Bond’s lot is adjacent to that of businessman William Butler Johnston, who built the “Palace of the South” in uptown Macon. Upon Bond’s unexpected death in 1859, Johnston oversaw the creation of both the Bond and Johnston lots. He hired architects, stone setters, and brick masons to create a “bold bluff” overlooking the Ocmulgee River, accomplished with approximately twelve-foot-high brownstone retaining walls. Stairs leading down to the river connect the Bond and Johnston lots.²¹

Rose Hill burial patterns illuminate how white Maconites organized themselves in regard to status. Though the remains of the rich mingled with Macon’s middling sort in many cemetery sections, a healthy proportion of the working class and poor found rest on the “unincorporated” margins, just as the nonslaveholding poor were more likely to live along the city’s unfashionable edges.²² The rural cemetery movement’s preoccupation with social rank accommodated well the slaveholding class within the cemetery. The exclusivity of Holly Ridge’s block 3, the mixture of both elite businessmen and planters interred there, and Johnston’s construction of adjoining lots for the Bond and Johnston families all represent the merchant-planter symbiosis in southern cities such as Macon.

Rose Hill: Slaveholding and Gender in the Rural Cemetery

A closer look at how white slaveholders chose to represent themselves and their peers in Rose Hill denotes particular narratives about slavery that they subtly or not so subtly promoted. Throughout the cemetery, the slaveholding elites encouraged the less privileged to draw close to the fine monuments in these large family lots and marvel not only at the culture exhibited in sepulchral and lot improvement choices but also at the good deeds of the dead proclaimed in the epitaphs. Of special note were inscriptions citing the upper class’s achievements as both “affectionate fathers” and “humane masters.” Middling slaveholders contributed more humble and mundane headstones with epitaphs extolling their dead as good Christians and honest neighbors—eulogies often found in nineteenth-century rural-style cemeteries. The prevalence of these epitaphs shored up late-antebellum dogma proclaiming that slavery was not damaging to either slaveholders or the enslaved.

Though Macon’s planters did not stand apart as a group from other elites, there are a handful of planter lots in Rose Hill that deserve closer scrutiny because their sepulchre arrangements proved unique in certain respects. The Macon city council noted in 1859 that many non-Maconites “during the last year have been brought from great distances to be deposited” in Rose Hill.²³ Of these, planters were a notable segment as well as the largest group of slaveholders entombed in the necropolis. In Rose Hill, planters attempted to construct a favorable narrative concerning the “peculiar institution,” in the Lockett, Powers, and Bond lots particularly.

Antebellum Americans carefully chose epitaphs that society considered “required reading.” These seemingly benign verses could be both a form of social control and propaganda, as evinced by a couple of inscriptions in Rose Hill that directly refer to the deceased’s role as “master.”²⁴ Planter John Powers died in Monroe County in 1854 and was interred in the Central Avenue District near the Ocmulgee. Powers’s tall pedestal monument in marble includes the following inscription: “The deceased was a strong minded sensible and humane man, as Husband, Parent, Master & Neighbour just and kind.” Nearby, Maconite planter Benjamin G. Lockett created a terraced lot complete with fancy wrought-iron fence and impressive retaining wall a number of levels above the nearest carriageway. His kinsman James Lockett died in 1844 in Crawford County. Lockett’s epitaph reads in part: “He was a kind husband. Affectionate Father. Humane Master. Charitable Neighbor. Faithful Friend and an honest man.”²⁵ Though these epitaphs have slightly different forms, the messages are fundamentally the same.

Even as abolitionists used “idealized domestic images” to demonstrate the brutality of slavery in contrast to the comforts of a loving family and portrayed slaveholders as incapable of meaningful domestic life, slaveholders employed the same imagery to praise themselves as exemplary family men.²⁶ In antebellum Rose Hill, Maconites lauded four men as “good fathers,” while five were “good husbands.” These family men included “humane masters” John Powers and James Lockett, meaning that half of the epitaphs praising fathers and 40 percent of those mentioning exemplary husband also incorporated references to masterhood. Lockett’s epitaph describes him as “affectionate,” a reflection of the sentimental language associated with the mid-nineteenth-century family, the preservation of which was a foundational purpose of the rural cemetery movement. Not only did these cemeteries include large lots designed to bring generations of kinfolk together in death, but they also promoted intimate nuclear family groupings with the “domestication of death.” This garden-style cemetery promoted family as an oasis, an idealized “sanctuary of love and comfort.”²⁷ Lockett’s epitaph aligned with the sentimental ideal and pointedly challenged abolitionist claims. Though it did not proclaim the enslaved as part of an “extended family,” proslavery advocates certainly did so, as evinced later in the memorialization of Joseph Bond, exposing the slaveholding class’s efforts to reconcile a system of “power, fear, and desire, of mistrust and dissimulation,” with the “romanticized images of home” circulating at the time.²⁸

Both the Lockett and Powers epitaphs use the word “humane” to describe the deceased, an example of proslavery attempts to reconcile slaveholding and virtue. Slaveholders had created an alleged proslavery humanitarianism. Yet, despite their assumed enlightened ideas, even “progressive slaveholders” retained most of the despotic prerogatives over the enslaved.²⁹ Far from being humane, they dehumanized those they had power over. James Oakes notes, “In law and custom, in ideology and practice, the masters did their best to ignore or sidestep the inescapable humanities of their slaves.”³⁰ Here in the Central Avenue District of Rose Hill, the Powers and Lockett families presented, in marble, a sanitized and romanticized vision of their associations with the enslaved, which was how they chose to see themselves and desired others to view them as well.

Similarly, but on a larger scale, the slaveholding class carefully crafted the narrative surrounding the death and memorialization of Maconite elite planter Joseph Bond. Bond owned six plantations in Lee and Baker counties to the southwest of Macon and at least 273 enslaved individuals.³¹ In March 1859, Bond died in an altercation with his brother-in-law’s overseer Lucius Brown after Brown beat one of Bond’s enslaved waggoners bloody. Earlier Bond had threatened to whip the overseer, a sign of his contempt for a “lower-class” male. As indicated by Bond’s threat as well as by his thrashing of Brown with a two-foot-long hickory stick during the dispute, the overseer versus planter dynamic no doubt played a role here. Planters liked to view overseers as the “roughs” whose bad behavior caused “respectables” dedicated to benevolent paternalism to despair.³² Further evidence of the tension between these groups appears in a letter from Macon-born Oliver Hillhouse Prince Jr. to Maconite elite planter John Basil Lamar: “I cannot tell you how shocked I was at hearing of the death of Joe Bond. . . . The overseers will take a large portion of this state after a while and Brown will be the Hero of his clan for having slayed the largest cotton planter in the state.”³³ Yet, in their commemoration, proslavery newspapers in both Macon and Savannah chose not to air the planter versus overseer dynamic, because they had a different point to make.

For white southerners, Bond’s conduct aligned with the prescribed role of not only his class but also his gender and race. Linking Bond’s actions to paternalism, Georgia newspapers asserted that this incident illustrated “in bold relief . . . a domestic tie of great affection and strength but little inferior to that of parent and child.” Savannah’s Daily News directly responded to abolitionists’ accusations, proclaiming that Bond’s death was a truer characterization of “the relations of master and servant in the South, than all the effusions of Mrs. [Harriet Beecher] Stowe [the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin] and the abolition crew combined.”³⁴ Bond died in what white southern observers deemed an active, self-sacrificial, and public manner—a manner appropriate for his race, class, and gender. According to historian Kenneth S. Greenberg, perishing as a man of action was of particular importance to elite southern men, who desired to die in a way that “demonstrated mastery and control rather than fear and submission.” For men such as Bond, the enslaved were the mirror image of their mastery, as these conceptions of manhood connected male power with white supremacy. In this formulation, Bond—a man serving in the role of patriarch—defended an enslaved male whom white society and the law deemed a dependent and thus devoid of manhood rights or masculine prowess.³⁵

Though newspapers did their part to glorify Bond, the most lasting memorial to his heroic act was his grave within Macon’s necropolis. As a rural-style cemetery, Rose Hill was the depository of local history, providing “landscapes of memory” that placed the “dead and the living in a vast historical narrative.”³⁶ As noted above, elite businessman William Butler Johnston, a friend known for his impeccable taste who often advised Maconites concerning their sepulchre choices, oversaw the construction of Bond’s lot overlooking the Ocmulgee. In 1866, a lavish marble funerary monument created by renowned Russian-American sculptor Robert E. Launitz was installed there.³⁷ It climbed twenty-two feet into the air and cost $25,000. Yet, in March 1859, the Macon Telegraph, the “leading voice of the central Georgia plantation interest,” found Bond’s fresh grave, at that point unadorned, most illuminating: “Standing by his grave, how beautiful are the lessons taught by his life and his death—the lessons of Honor and Duty—honor without sully—duty demanding the sacrifice of his valuable life.”³⁸ Here, the editors directly tied Bond’s grave in Rose Hill to a certain narrative about his death, even before his monument and the bluff that would showcase it were in place.

While Georgia newspapers and Macon’s garden of the dead presented Bond as the epitome of southern manhood, femininity had its own role to play in southerners’ narrative of the region. The configuration of the Bond monument itself, with its five life-sized female sculptures representing devotion, memory, hope, Christian faith, and the angel of resurrection, buoyed the masculinity of Bond with their contrasting femininity. These figures personified beauty, mourning, spirituality, compassion, comfort, and the home—all of which were the domain of women in antebellum America. The Bond monument and other gravestones in Rose Hill depicted women as the keepers of the home and the backbone of local churches in the South just as they were in the North, and not as females fundamentally warped by the presence of slavery in their midst.³⁹ In antebellum Rose Hill, epitaphs identified twelve commendable mothers and eight good wives. Thirteen stones hailed Maconite women as good Christians. For instance, the monument to Elizabeth Rosseter Griffin (1813–40) reads, in part, “She was a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church and died resigned to the will of God.”⁴⁰

As antislavery advocates proclaimed the corruption of white southern families and the hypocrisy of the region’s Christians, Maconites created clearly definable family lots, praised fathers and mothers along with “humane masters,” and proclaimed their membership in local churches.⁴¹ An observer can view these inscriptions as simply independent statements made by Maconites or as subtle assertions on their part that they were not devils and that their families were wholesome and good. Whatever their inclinations, white Maconites could “instruct visitors [to the cemetery] in the lessons of history and faith” as well as, if not better than, their counterparts elsewhere. While every rural-style cemetery had societal defects to hide, Macon’s garden of the dead camouflaged a system that viewed certain people as property.⁴²

Though few monuments in Rose Hill broached directly the role of slaveholder, in Macon’s rural cemetery, deathways commemoration was inseparable from slaveholding. Much of the wealth showcased there derived from slavery, as many of Macon’s wealthiest residents, mostly slaveholders, lie in the city’s necropolis. As James Oakes notes, “In the Old South upward mobility . . . was expressed primarily within the slaveholding class itself.” For slaveholders themselves and for those who hoped to one day join them, slaveholding was a symbol of success and financial independence. With its preponderance of the graves of the “master class,” Macon’s garden of the dead was to be an example of the purported urban progress of the city, even as the burial ground glossed over the inherent commodification and cruelty of slavery.⁴³

Oak Ridge: Racial Burial Segregation in the Rural Cemetery

Racial burial segregation in Macon was a reality of life reflected in the best possible light in the town’s northside necropolis, putting to further use the rural cemetery movement’s artful display of the southern hierarchy. Upon the opening of Rose Hill, a separate sister cemetery named Oak Ridge—“for the negro population of the city”—began receiving interments. In 1851 the city officially designated the land for Oak Ridge, and the Macon Committee on Cemeteries noted that the section adjoining on the northwest side of Rose Hill contained about ten acres with a “neat entrance, and is enclosed with a substantial fence, neatly white washed, and presenting an appearance creditable to the city.”⁴⁴ Many of America’s rural-style cemeteries set aside portions for “the remains of deceased persons of color,” such as Savannah’s Laurel Grove, with its fifteen acres in a southwest section earmarked for this use in 1853.⁴⁵ Oak Ridge offered many of the same natural beauties, but without the outlay of resources on lot improvement and monuments found in Rose Hill.

The antebellum period saw both enslaved and free people of color laid to rest in Oak Ridge. City records reveal that “a free man of color Hannibal Roe” was interred in Oak Ridge in 1846. Yet, surviving evidence suggests that wealthier African Americans, such as grocer, middling cotton factor, and landowner Solomon Humphries (1801–55), chose burial elsewhere. The overwhelming majority of the antebellum dead entombed at Oak Ridge were enslaved. Monthly sexton reports to the Macon city council indicate at least 950 African American burials from 1840 through 1865. The yearly numbers from that period indicate both uneven reportage and a growing dependence on the cemetery in the 1860s.⁴⁶ Macon’s slaveholding class met its deathways responsibilities by providing a decent graveyard and paying the appropriate burial fees. With this burial ground, slaveholders demonstrated that they provided for the enslaved in death as they had in life—such was their view of the world. In life, they supplied shelter, food, and clothes. In death, the slaveholding class provided Oak Ridge, which offered an unadorned version of the picturesque.⁴⁷ Though antebellum evidence of enslaved Maconites’ attitudes toward Oak Ridge is thin, testimony from elsewhere reveals that an intermingling in death was often not what enslaved African Americans desired any more than their white counterparts did, because interment next to slaveholders might link them for eternity. As one formerly enslaved man put it, the grave was “the only resting place of the poor slave.”⁴⁸

No matter how African Americans felt about their place in Macon’s necropolis, white Maconites, whether they were slaveholders or not, probably viewed Oak Ridge as part of a cemetery complex to be proud of—separate and unequal. Though white Maconites founded Rose Hill’s sister cemetery in the 1840s along the northwest edge of Rose Hill, it was not included in the 1854 map of the city, which is an indication of Oak Ridge’s place in the minds of white Georgians. As scholar Angelika Kruger-Kahloula observed of American cemeteries writ large: “Hierarchy and marginality are very often displayed in a literal sense.”⁴⁹

The antebellum slaveholding class carefully curated their memorialization in Rose Hill, and Oak Ridge was vital to their benign and paternalistic narrative. In the postbellum period, Macon’s former slaveholding elite and Rose Hill declined to some extent, even as the city’s people of color claimed autonomy in both life and death upon the abolition of slavery. Oak Ridge, which had been a symbol of African American subordination, became an important repository of family history and heritage as people of color built or shored up communities as well as burial places.

Oak Ridge and Rose Hill: Postbellum Changes in the Rural Cemetery

From the city directory to the town’s cemeteries, Maconite people of color were more visible after emancipation. Postbellum Macon was a city of red dirt streets, along which whites and a growing number of African Americans lived and worked as there was a “flowering of political, religious, and educational activity” among people of color in the city. In 1878, A. E. Shole published a city directory that included both white and African American Maconites, with people of color identified throughout with a “c” for “colored.” Postbellum pallbearers continued to carry the dead to clearly segregated burial grounds, including Oak Ridge.⁵⁰ Though one would assume that postbellum freedmen would distance themselves as much as possible from all reminders of slavery, people of color embraced Oak Ridge “as a site for remembrance of lives lost during slavery and identified with this history as their heritage.” Organizations such as the Order of the Good Samaritan, the Independent Society, and the Daughters of the Good Samaritan purchased lots for their members. Fashionable and expensive memorials such as that to the Rev. Henry Williams (1843–86), erected by Cotton Avenue Baptist Church, reveal that people of color used the cemetery for their own purposes in the postwar era. A number of notable local African American families are interred there, including that of Professor H. J. T. Hudson, who founded the city’s first public high school for African Americans. Oak Ridge’s family lots brought together loved ones as freed men and women strengthened family bonds made tenuous by slavery, which had often separated parents from children and wives from husbands. In Oak Ridge, people of color tapped into the sentimentalism of the era that highlighted the precious ties of family. For instance, the epitaph on the obelisk to William B. Clark (1845–88) includes the words “Loving Husband.”⁵¹

Meanwhile, white representation in the city and cemetery also changed. Short story writer Brett Harte wrote of Macon in 1874: “The cemetery seems to cover the whole town.”⁵² Here, Harte did not present Rose Hill as a place of pride but of melancholy. Postbellum Rose Hill held the handsome, costly monuments and expensive retaining walls of the antebellum slaveholding class who were most invested in the cemetery; however, the wealthy families who had built many of the enclosures were either no longer around to mend them or lacked the funds or interest to do so.⁵³ For Macon’s surviving remnants of the former slaveholding class and their descendants, the decay of Rose Hill possibly fed both nostalgia and resentment.

The Civil War and Reconstruction brought much upheaval to the lives of white and African American Maconites alike, though the rural cemetery remained fertile ground for constructing a usable historical narrative. Rose Hill persisted as an exclusively white domain and, as such, was a “vehicle for the expression of public memory,” fulfilling its purpose as that “cultural institution,” the rural-style cemetery.⁵⁴ In 1872, the white editors of the Telegraph resumed their glorification of Bond and his manner of death in two articles. They began, “In Rose Hill Cemetery . . . overlooking the placid waters of the Ocmulgee . . . a massive monument rears its magnificent proportions, inscribed in large letters with the name of ‘Bond’.” The authors asserted, “The marble monument nor the green sod does not rest upon a form in our beautiful cemetery that, at one time, contained a soul so noble, so generous, so brave, and so true to the responsibilities of the hour as the soul of Joseph Bond.” The editors pronounced, “The world should be again reminded of how he [Bond] died, and what he died for.”⁵⁵ The Telegraph articles used the Bond monument in Rose Hill as a springboard to promote “a compassionate portrait of slavery” that served a postemancipation purpose. This trend honored the dead not as individuals but as ideals and as a means “to represent a way of Southern life forever lost through the end of slavery.”⁵⁶ This retelling promoted a collective memory of what W. Fitzhugh Brundage has called the “willfully recalled and deliberately forgotten past,” which included “historical silences” that “omitted slave auctions, beatings, and uprisings” as well as “more mundane hardships.”⁵⁷ These newspaper articles drew the eye to Bond’s grave in Rose Hill and attempted to justify white Georgians’ postwar actions. As historian Susan E. O’Donovan notes in her study on the topic, while emancipation had ended the peculiar institution, former slaveholders intended that “the spirit of slavery would outlast the institution from which it had arisen.”⁵⁸ They proclaimed humanitarian intentions similar to those expressed in the antebellum period, but like the institution from which it sprang, the spirit of slavery was not expressed through benevolent paternalism so much as through violence and coercion. Bloodshed marked almost every election in 1870s Macon until whites all but silenced most African American Maconites at the polls.⁵⁹

Both Rose Hill and Oak Ridge are vital to unlocking the social and cultural history of Macon. In their northside necropolis patterned after the rural cemetery movement of the 1830s to 1870s, antebellum southern whites sought not only to make the hierarchy both beautiful and edifying but also to control their image in perpetuity. Memorialization in Rose Hill was not neutral but instead “represented an attempted conservation in the affairs of the living.”⁶⁰ This conservation included slavery, and Oak Ridge was an important facet of that attempt, as it stood in the minds of white Maconites as a symbol of their perceived benevolence. Reconstruction ushered in a new period during which former slaveholders “used institutional ways to reassert their power,” while freed men and women “acted to derail . . . attempts to resuscitate a now outdated system.”⁶¹ In relation to Rose Hill, white southerners waxed nostalgic and continued to promote a particular narrative of the past. Yet, despite white intentions for Oak Ridge, African American Maconites used the cemetery for their own ends, reinterpreting the narrative as their history and transforming a place of subjugation into one of pride.

Appendix

For this project I divided residents into seven hierarchical groups.⁶² This categorization was based in part on the status groupings of Alba M. Edwards featured in his 1917 article “Social-Economic Groups of the United States,” which describes occupational status trends from 1870 to 1910. This is a flawed system, for Charles B. Nam and Mary G. Powers point out that Edwards, though a “renowned statistician,” did not have an empirical structure to classify occupational status in his 1917 attempt. Therefore, I fused this early effort with a largely overlapping system he later devised for 1910 to 1930 occupations, in which he used more scientific classification methods.⁶³ Edwards’s major groupings coincide with Robert A. Margo’s division of common labor, artisans, and white-collar workers for 1821 to 1860.⁶⁴ Combining information from secondary sources with my knowledge of Macon itself, I reclassified occupations based on the realities of antebellum central Georgia.⁶⁵

To determine where to place Maconites in the seven occupational categories, I utilized my project database, populated with information about over nine thousand antebellum Maconites and individuals tied to the city’s history. I extracted data concerning residents’ occupations from the 1850 and 1860 federal censuses. The 1860 Macon census provided the occupations of 1,928 individuals, and the 1860 city directory helped clarify vocational designations and proprietorship. To help differentiate between different levels of merchants/proprietors, planters, professionals, and skilled laborers, I took into account wealth and property from the 1840 and 1857 Macon tax digests, the 1850 federal census’s accounting of real estate, and the 1860 census’s enumeration of both real estate and personal property for Maconites.⁶⁶

In a city with over two thousand enslaved laborers by 1850, the enslaved were a sizable proportion of the property held by Maconites. I utilized the 1840 federal census for Macon, which listed the number of enslaved in each household, the 1850 and 1860 federal slave schedules, and the 1857 tax digest, which listed the number of enslaved people for whom individuals paid taxes.⁶⁷ Many Maconites inherited the enslaved or hired out and leased enslaved laborers, which was evident in sizable discrepancies between the number of enslaved enumerated with individual Maconites on the 1860 census compared to the 1857 tax digest.⁶⁸

Notes

1. Laurel Grove Cemetery!, 17; Wells, Facing the “King of Terrors,” 127. In the first quote, the southerner Henry R. Jackson wrote of the new Laurel Grove Cemetery in Savannah in 1853. In the second quote, Wells refers to the rearrangement of the dead in New York, but the same principle applies here.

2. Sloane, Last Great Necessity, 54.

3. Goldfield, Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers, 30; Eisterhold, “Commercial, Financial, and Industrial Macon.” David Goldfield uses the term “agrarian city” to refer to a town that existed largely to process cotton.

4. Only Columbus and Savannah had higher proportions of enslaved people of color, with 37 and 35 percent respectively, compared to Macon’s 34 percent. Bellamy, “Macon, Georgia, 1823–1860,” 298; Jenkins, “Ante Bellum Macon and Bibb County, Georgia,” 422–23; U.S. Department of the Interior, Census of 1860, compendium for the state of Georgia, table 3.

5. Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 38.

6. Claudia Goldin argues that the institution’s “extreme adaptability” actually made it “more profitable in urban areas.” The only hint at the enslaved population was the business directory listing of “slave depots,” all three of which were on Poplar Street in central Macon. Goldin, Urban Slavery in the American South, 1, 127; Macon Directory for 1860, 98.

7. Kruger-Kahloula, “On the Wrong Side of the Fence,” 141. Kruger-Kahloula writes about New Haven, Connecticut, which she notes had enslaved laborers until 1848.

8. Vlach, “‘Without Recourse to Owners,’” 151, 159; Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 74; Haney, “Understanding Antebellum Charleston’s Backlots,” 87; Reidy, “Masters and Slaves,” 113–14 (quotation).

9. The exact number of slaveholders in 1860 Macon is unclear because, first, by the late antebellum period slaveholders hired out nearly one of every three urban enslaved laborers to other employers. In these cases, slaveholders hired out the enslaved to businesses, governments, and individuals for contract terms such as one year. Second, the 1860 census workers sought to enumerate the enslaved in their place of hire rather than by slaveholder and did not specify their status, recording enslaved “usership,” as scholar Claudia Goldin terms it, instead of ownership. Further, Joseph Reidy notes in his study of central Georgia that the 1860 slave schedules for Macon list 4,143 enslaved laborers, but the enslaved clearly were not all living and working in the city. Lewis, “Axioms for Reading the Landscape,” 12 (quotation); Goldfield, Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers, 47; Goldin, Urban Slavery in the American South, 19; Rousey, “Friends and Foes of Slavery,” 392; U.S. Department of the Interior, Federal Slave Schedules 1860 (hereafter cited as Federal Slave Schedules, 1860); Reidy, “Masters and Slaves,” 126; Martin, Divided Mastery, 109.

10. Macon Directory for 1860; Federal Slave Schedules, 1860; City of Macon, Tax Digest, 1857; U.S. Department of the Interior, Census of 1860, Population Schedules (hereafter cited as Population Schedules, 1860, Macon).

11. Jack Thomas and Katherine Thomas, Rose Hill; Rose Hill Cemetery Interment Book 1840–1848, 1854–1879, MF348, Rose Hill Records, Middle Georgia Archives; Rose Hill Deed Book, Book A, 1840–1891, MF349, Rose Hill Records, Middle Georgia Archives; Macon Directory for 1860.

12. Orange and Madison Streets, where occupational groups 4 to 7 resided, were largely service streets for College Street. At the time, Maconites referred to the area around Madison and Monroe Streets as “Commoners Run” or “Roe.” In this way the “physical organization of households preserved social distance,” despite spatial proximity above Spring Street. Another road with superblocks was Georgia Avenue, running east to west across College. Macon . . . An Architectural and Historical Guide, 77; Grigoryeva and Ruef, “Historical Demography of Racial Segregation,” 817 (quotation). Angelina Grigoryeva and Martin Ruef are referencing African Americans and whites concerning superblocks, but it is applicable here.

13. Lane, Architecture of the Old South, 298; Macon Directory for 1860.

14. Harris, “Cemetery Beautiful,” 104, 111 (quotation); French, “Cemetery as a Cultural Institution,” 70, 89; Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 108.

15. Henry T. Blake, Chronicles of New Haven Green. From 1638 to 1862 (New Haven, Conn.: Tuttle, Morehouse, and Taylor, 1898), 276 (quotation), quoted in Kruger-Kahloula, “On the Wrong Side,” 140n.

16. Kruger-Kahloula, “On the Wrong Side,” 141 (first, second, third quotations); Giguere, “Localism and Nationalism in the City of the Dead,” 850 (final quotation). Here Kruger-Kahloula refers to Grove Street Cemetery in Connecticut, which was a precursor to Mount Auburn Cemetery outside Boston.

17. Earnheart, “Rose Hill Cemetery,” 55–56, 131–32, 143–44; W. M. S., “Macon—Rose Hill Cemetery,” Georgia Citizen (Macon), July 24, 1857. Rose Hill, as a perusal of a map of the cemetery reveals, does not adhere to the rural cemetery ideal of following the natural contours of the topography. Rose Hill is thus something of a hybrid, with the rugged topography and vegetation of a rural cemetery but with a grid layout, resulting in the need for retention walls to create level and stable lots in many areas. Some have compared the effect to terraced gardens in northern Italy. The earliest images of the cemetery, from the late 1800s, show many of these retaining walls. Art Work of Macon, 48, 50.

18. Sloane, Last Great Necessity, 84–85. David Sloane quotes the 1849 edition of the periodical the New Englander, which noted that many had to find “some less genteel place of burial.” In other rural-style cemeteries throughout the United States, those who could not afford a family lot either purchased a single grave along the necropolis’s edge or lay in the cemetery’s potter’s field. These “less genteel” interment locations included Fort Hill Cemetery across the river, which had been an active burial site since the establishment of the frontier outpost Fort Hawkins in 1806. Records show that the less affluent also continued using the Old Macon Cemetery, even as those who were financially able had their deceased loved ones moved to Rose Hill, with over sixty reburials in all. Jack Thomas and Katherine Thomas, Fort Hill Cemetery; Jack Thomas, History of Cherry Street Cemetery, 79–83.

19. Rose Hill Cemetery Interment Book 1840–48, 1854–79; Rose Hill Deed Book, Book A; U.S. Department of the Interior, Census of 1850, Population Schedules, Macon (hereafter cited as Population Schedules, 1850, Macon); A Compilation of the Acts of the Legislature Incorporating the City of Macon, Georgia, and of the Ordinances Passed by the City Council of Macon, to the 14th February, 1858, Now of Force, Passed 23 June 1854, 66–67, Macon City Records, Middle Georgia Archives; Hallman and Hallman, Record of Interments for Rose Hill Cemetery, v–vi. Most of these graves on the verges cannot be mapped. Interment book listings are inadequate and the original sexton’s map is lost. Some of these Strangers Row burials were in areas that cemetery proprietors later officially organized and subsequently sold off to paying customers. For instance, shopkeeper James Hightower received a “free lot” just outside the southwestern boundaries of the Central Avenue District section. A few years later, his lot officially became part of Pine Ridge.

20. Rose Hill Cemetery Interment Book 1840–48, 1854–79; Rose Hill Deed Book, Book A; Jack Thomas, Rose Hill; U.S., Census of 1850, Federal Slave Schedules, Macon, Bibb County, Georgia (hereafter cited as Federal Slave Schedules, 1850, Macon); Federal Slave Schedules, 1860, Macon, Georgia; U.S., Census of 1840, Population Schedules, Macon, Bibb County, Georgia (hereafter cited as Population Schedules, 1840, Macon).

21. Macon Directory for 1860, 29; Rose Hill Cemetery Interment Book 1840–48, 1854–79; Rose Hill Deed Book, Book A; Jack Thomas, Rose Hill; “Late Jerry Cowles,” Macon Telegraph and Messenger, May 17, 1877; Macon . . . An Architectural and Historical Guide, 52; Courthouse records amassed by architects Brittain, Thompson, Olson, and Bray in restoration of Overlook Mansion, March 1980, Joseph Bond Will and Estate Records Collection, Middle Georgia Archives.

22. Laderman, Sacred Remains, 44.

23. City council minutes, December 6, 1859, Book D, p. 361, quoted in Earnheart, “Rose Hill Cemetery,” 72n84.

24. “Epitaph” is defined here as wording on the stone beyond a basic biography of birth and death dates, family connections, and place of birth and/or death. Rainville, “Hanover Deathscapes,” 568 (quotation), 579; Giguere, “Virtuous Women, Useful Men, and Lovely Children,” 1.

25. Rose Hill Cemetery (Macon, Bibb County, Ga.), John Powers and James Lockett headstones, photographed by author, December 21, 2015.

26. Jeffrey Young, Domesticating Slavery, 9.

27. These epitaphal statistics are from my own survey of Rose Hill’s antebellum stones conducted from 2014 to 2018. Rural cemetery founders feared the increased mobility of the antebellum era, when families scattered. The “domestication of death” focused on the nuclear family and entailed giving the cemetery a homelike appearance with flowers, drapery, domestic furniture, and/or epitaphs such as “Gone Home,” intended to make both the deceased and survivors feel at home. Sentimentalism camouflaged death. Linden-Ward, Silent City on a Hill, 221; Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 201 (first quotation), 210–13, 223; Rainville, “Hanover Deathscapes,” 559, 570; Sloane, Last Great Necessity, 11; Jeffrey Young, Domesticating Slavery, 8 (second quotation).

28. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 3 (first quotation); Jeffrey Young, Domesticating Slavery, 7 (second quotation).

29. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 3; Morgan, “Progressive Slaveholders,” 408; Chaplin, “Slavery and the Principle of Humanity,” 300, 303. This was indicative of the increasingly self-conscious proslavery thought of the late antebellum period, in line with spurious declarations that slavery was a positive good as well as the foundation of aristocratic republican freedom. Genovese, Slaveholders’ Dilemma, 79.

30. Oakes, Ruling Race, xx.

31. Scarborough, Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South, appendix C; Joseph Bond will, 1856, Joseph Bond Will and Estate Records Collection, Middle Georgia Archives.

32. “Sketch of the Life of the Late Joseph Bond,” part 1, Telegraph, September 17, 1872; “Sketch of the Life of the Late Joseph Bond,” part 2, Telegraph, September 18, 1872; Collins, White Society in the Antebellum South, 7 (quotation).

33. Oliver H. Prince Jr. to John B. Lamar, March 20, 1859, folder 138, Jackson and Prince Family Papers (#00371), Southern Historical Collection.

34. “A Contemporary, in Noticing the Killing of Col. Joseph Bond by the Overseer Brown, Makes the Following Sensible and Feeling Remarks,” Daily News (Savannah), April 5, 1859.

35. Bloch, Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 140; Greenberg, Honor and Slavery, 91–92; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 20. See Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), which is the classic work on the relationship between honor and slavery as regards attitudes toward death. In his articulation, the enslaved were “socially dead.” In reality, enslaved men of color did not mirror these beliefs that they were socially invisible as men. Gail Bederman points out that Frederick Douglass resisted a lashing due to what Douglass referred to as “a sense of my manhood.” Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 20.

36. French, “Cemetery as a Cultural Institution”; Laderman, Sacred Remains, 72 (first quotation); Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country, 80 (second quotation).

37. Bond’s monument was not erected until 1866 due to its being delayed in Louisville, Kentucky, because of the onset of the Civil War. “The Monument to Mr. Joseph Bond,” Georgia Weekly Telegraph, November 5, 1866, 4; Samuel Thomas, Cave Hill Cemetery, 90.

38. J. A. N., “Col. Joseph Bond,” Telegraph, March 15, 1859; “Monument to Mr. Joseph Bond”; Reidy, “Masters and Slaves,” 178 (first quote); courthouse records amassed by architects Brittain, Thompson, Olson, and Bray in restoration of Overlook Mansion. Voucher 41 shows that in February 1860 Robert E. Launitz received $2,500 from the estate of Joseph Bond as the first payment of a “contract made this day with Mrs. H. S. Bond for a monument.”

39. “Monument to Mr. Joseph Bond.” Mourning, with its emotional messiness, was considered appropriate for women. Lithographs in the mid-1800s showed women as the primary mourners. Others depicted in these lithographs were not “crumpled by grief,” in the words of Mark Schantz. Roark, “Embodying Immortality,” 70, 102; Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country, 166, 172–75.

40. Again, these epitaphal statistics are from my own survey of Rose Hill from 2014 to 2018. In antebellum America, there were clear formulas for epitaphs and grave sculpture that reinforced the prescribed roles for white men and women. Of the 291 antebellum stones with epitaphs in Rose Hill that went beyond the basics of family relationships, place of nativity, and birth and death dates, 129 inscriptions were religious. Giguere, “Virtuous Women, Useful Men, and Lovely Children,” 1; Rainville, “Hanover Deathscapes,” 543; Central Avenue District, block 7, Rose Hill Cemetery (Macon, Bibb County, Ga.), Elizabeth Rosseter Griffin headstone, photographed by author, December 28, 2015.

41. Kruger-Kahloula, “On the Wrong Side of the Fence,” 141; Boles, Irony of Southern Religion, 76–77.

42. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country, 95 (quotation); Berry, Price for Their Pound of Flesh, 3.

43. Oakes, introduction to The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Norton, 1998), xii; Johnson, Soul by Soul, 102.

44. “Council Chamber, Sept. 12, 1851,” Telegraph, September 23, 1851; “Oak Ridge Cemetery 1840 to 1865,” interpretive marker, Oak Ridge Cemetery, Macon, Ga., viewed by author, July 2019.

45. Laurel Grove Cemetery!, 24 (quotation); Giguere, “Localism and Nationalism,” 872–73; Berry, Price for Their Pound of Flesh, 89.

46. “Oak Ridge Cemetery 1840 to 1865”; “Unknown, but Not Forgotten,” interpretive marker, Oak Ridge Cemetery, Macon, Ga., viewed by author, July 2019; Macon’s Black Heritage, 35. For years, there has been talk of the use of ground-penetrating radar to determine how many people lie in Oak Ridge. Experts estimate that many bodies were probably buried on top of each other and that there are probably between eight hundred and fourteen hundred unmarked burials. “Finding the Forgotten,” Telegraph, March 5, 2004; Stanley Dunlap, “Unknown, Forgotten Could Be Recognized at Historic Macon Cemetery,” Telegraph, July 2, 2016.

47. Roediger, “And Die in Dixie,” 165–67, 171–72; Berry, Price for Their Pound of Flesh, 87; Warren, “‘To Claim One’s Own,’” 120, 122.

48. Roediger, “And Die in Dixie,” 180; Oakes, Ruling Race, 116–17 (quotation).

49. Kruger-Kahloula, “On the Wrong Side of the Fence,” 135.

50. Reidy, “Masters and Slaves,” 342 (quotation); Sholes’ Directory of the City of Macon.

51. Jack Thomas, Rose Hill, 545–80; “Oak Ridge Cemetery 1866 to the Present,” interpretive marker, Oak Ridge Cemetery, Macon, Ga., viewed by author, July 2019 (first quotation); Oak Ridge Cemetery (Macon, Bibb County, Ga.), William B. Clark headstone, photographed by author, July 2019. Interment in Oak Ridge continues to the present. Though there are no family lots available, burials continue in established plots.

52. Ida Young, Gholson, and Hargrove, History of Macon, 325.

53. “Old Records of Rose Hill Interesting Documents,” Telegraph, December 17, 1905. This article noted that the sexton was attempting to raise funds from the families buried in the cemetery to pay for the cemetery’s upkeep. In defense of the city, I should note that Rose Hill was not designed for easy accessibility and upkeep, especially considering all the retention walls that were expensive not only to build but also to maintain.

54. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country, 73 (first quotation); French, “Cemetery as a Cultural Institution,” 70 (second quotation).

55. “Sketch of the Life of the Late Joseph Bond,” part 1; “Sketch of the Life of the Late Joseph Bond,” part 2; “A Contemporary, in Noticing the Killing of Col. Joseph Bond.”

56. Burton, “Myths Laid to Rest” (quotations). Burton is talking about slaveholders being a part of antebellum funerals for enslaved persons, but it applies here as well, when slaveholders were using deathways (this time related to the death of a slaveholder) to bolster the image of slavery.

57. Brundage, “Introduction: No Deed but Memory,” 6–7.

58. O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South, 132.

59. Reidy, “Masters and Slaves,” 288–89, 294, 391, 398–99, 435–36.

60. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 108.

61. Merritt, Masterless Men, 334 (first quotation); O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South, 133 (second quotation).

62. Historians have explored the pitfalls and problems of ranking occupations and the increasingly complex difficulties of classification. The finer gradations in the occupational structure are not critical to my findings. Griffen, “Occupational Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America,” 310–12, 316; Katz, “Occupational Classification in History,” 63, 70.

63. Edwards, “Social-Economic Groups of the United States”; Nam and Powers, Socioeconomic Approach to Status Measurement, 36–37; Edwards, “Social-Economic Grouping of the Gainful Workers of the United States.”

64. Margo, Wages and Labor Markets in the United States, 45, table 2.2. Unfortunately, his samples from Georgia were miniscule.

65. Green, “Born of the Aristocracy?”; Katz, “Occupational Classification,” 68. In his article “Profile of a Late Antebellum Community,” James C. Bonner divided the residents of Hancock County, Ga., into seven occupational groups, including planters. Tyler Anbinder also used an occupational scheme in his study of antebellum Savannah, which shored up my findings in Macon. Bonner, “Profile of a Late Antebellum Community”; Anbinder, “Irish Origins and the Shaping of Immigrant Life in Savannah,” 34–35.

66. Population Schedules, 1850, Macon; Population Schedules, 1860, Macon; Macon Directory for 1860; Tax Digest for 1840, Macon City Records, Middle Georgia Archives; City of Macon, Tax Digest, 1857. The 1830 and 1840 censuses did not include vocational information. These sources were not extremely reliable, with self-reported personal and real estate on the censuses relying completely on the honor system and tax lists by local assessors often faulty. There was “gross underreporting” of property within the city on the tax digests, which also did not include wealth held outside the city. Yet, relatively broad socioeconomic groupings, as well as reliance on multiple sources to categorize individuals, minimized the impact of unreliable sources. Griffen, “Occupational Mobility,” 316, 318. Griffen divided occupations into five levels: unskilled, semiskilled, skilled, and low and high white-collar workers.

67. Population Schedules, 1840, Macon; Federal Slave Schedules, 1860, Macon; Federal Slave Schedules, 1850, Macon; City of Macon, Tax Digest, 1857.

68. Reidy, “Masters and Slaves,” 126; Griffen, “Occupational Mobility,” 316.

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