A valuable document from the Reconstruction era, "The Journal of
Archibald C. McKinley" offers the modern reader a rare glimpse of
daily life on Sapelo Island, Georgia, as seen through the eyes of
an upper-class farmer.
A descendant of Scottish settlers, Archibald McKinley was born
in Lexington, Georgia, in 1842 and served as a Confederate officer
during the Civil War. Just after the war, he began farming near
Milledgeville, Georgia, and within a year had met and married Sarah
Spalding, a granddaughter of Thomas Spalding, who had built his
plantation empire on Sapelo Island. In 1869, the McKinleys moved to
Sapelo to raise cotton, sugar cane, and other crops. The bulk of
this journal is a sustained account of their sojourn on the island
through 1876, before their return to Milledgeville.
The brief, matter-of-fact entries that make up McKinley's
journal focus mainly on the small occurrences that filled his days:
farm work, hunting and fishing expeditions, sailing excursions,
church services, changes in the weather, the disposition of his
crops, the development of the Darien timber shipping trade.
Scattered throughout, however, are intriguing references to
dramatic events--shootings, trials, tensions between whites and the
recently freed blacks--and to the processes of Reconstruction, as
when McKinley notes that "a company of Yankee soldiers" had arrived
at the penitentiary to ensure equal treatment of black and white
convicts. The longest entry in the journal is a eulogy for a
freedman named Scott, who, as McKinley's slave, had remained "true
as steel" during McKinley's service in the Civil War.
Editor Robert L. Humphries has included with the journal several
of the McKinley family letters, written after Archibald and Sarah
left Sapelo Island. In the introduction, historian Russell Duncan
places the story in context, focusing on the larger events of
Reconstruction as they pertained to Sapelo Island and to the
relations between blacks and whites there.
General
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