Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (9 page)

Robert Stafford lived with his mother and sister, and when both contracted yellow fever and died, Stafford’s neighbor sent over a mulatto nurse slave named Zabette to help cook meals. Zabette was light-skinned, tall, and slim, with long black hair and round, chestnut eyes. She was nineteen years old when she arrived at the doorstep of the forty-six-year-old plantation owner.

Zabette helped Stafford with more than meals. She satisfied another appetite, bearing him six children. Zabette lived in separate quarters adjacent to Stafford’s house, since Georgia law forbade female slaves from living under the same roof as an adult white male. Nevertheless, she spent many a night with her master.

Fearful for his reputation, Stafford was unwilling to admit the children were his. Yet he wanted to provide for them. So he secretly ferried them north to Connecticut, where they could live free and attend school. Initially they stayed with a family friend, but eventually he built an immense house in Connecticut for his children, and Stafford’s family friends became their guardians. Stafford visited the children a couple of times a year, and Zabette accompanied him as his live-in nurse. No one in the affluent New England neighborhood ever knew that Stafford and Zabette were the children’s parents.

When the Civil War broke out, Zabette moved to Connecticut with the children. Stafford stubbornly refused to leave his plantation, even when Union forces overran the island in 1862. He was the only white man living on the island during the Civil War. All of Stafford’s 350 former slaves had been armed by Union forces, and one evening they surrounded his house. They killed his cattle—and threatened the same for him. Stafford was rescued by Union soldiers, and after the war, a vengeful Stafford returned to Cumberland and burned down his former slaves’ cabins. Today only charred chimneys remain. The twenty-three chimneys are the oldest historic structures on the island today, silent sentinels of slavery’s stain.

Zabette stayed in Connecticut as long as she could, but she never fit in. Her children were better educated and more socially mobile than her, and they were embarrassed by her darker color, crude speech, and unpolished manners. Cumberland was where she belonged. Zabette returned to the island, hoping to rejoin Stafford on his plantation. When she arrived, she discovered Stafford with another mulatto woman, with whom he had fathered two daughters in Zabette’s absence.

When Stafford died in 1877, he was worth over $1 million. All of it went to his children in Connecticut. He left nothing for Zabette. She moved to a squatters’ field on Cumberland’s north end to live the rest of her life in a dirt-floored hut. No one knows where she is buried.

Over five hundred slaves lived on Cumberland Island before the Civil War. Many of them were Gullah, a close-knit band of African people who maintained their old traditions in the new world. The name Gullah is likely a distortion of Angola, the African country where almost half of all slaves in Georgia and South Carolina came from. After the war, many freed Gullah slaves returned to Cumberland and built shanties with rusted tin roofs on the north end of the island.

Most of them ended up working for the Cumberland Island Hotel, a resort built in the 1880s that catered to wealthy vacationers. Guests at the Cumberland Island Hotel enjoyed an orchestra and fine dining. A horse-drawn trolley carted guests out to the beach, where they were shown how to dig for sea turtle eggs in the dunes.

To maintain a steady pool of laborers, the hotel owners cleared five acres near Half Moon Bluff, which overlooked the salt marshes near Christmas Creek, and divided the land into fifty small lots, penetrated by a network of primitive sand roads. They called it the Settlement. Lots were sold to black workers at the hotel. One of them was Charlie Trimmings, son of a former slave, who built a small cabin in the Settlement for his wife and son. Trimmings worked for the hotel and cut timber to support his family.

After the hotel closed, Coca-Cola heir Howard Candler—Sam Candler’s grandfather—purchased the abandoned hotel and turned it into a private thousand-acre family retreat. Howard was the son of Asa Candler, an Atlanta drugstore owner. When a rival pharmacist, Dr. John Pembleton, started selling a fizzy concoction of soda water and tonic as a headache remedy, Asa Candler bought the recipe for $2,300. He marketed Coca-Cola as a soft drink to a national audience and amassed millions.

Asa Candler tinkered with the Coca-Cola recipe, which was originally three parts coca leaf to one part kola nut. The coca leaves contained nine milligrams of cocaine per ounce, but Candler eventually replaced them with processed coca leaves that provided only trace amounts of cocaine. The cola portion of the formula—the kola nut extract—imparted a slightly bitter taste and a hefty wallop of caffeine. The U.S. government sued Asa Candler in 1911—not for lacing his beverage with cocaine, but for using caffeine, which it considered a dangerous, habit-forming drug. Candler and Coca-Cola prevailed, and amped-up America soon became the most caffeinated country on the planet.

Howard Candler, the oldest of Asa’s eleven children, was given the Coca-Cola Company as a Christmas present in 1917. He ran the company for only two years before he and his siblings sold it to a group of investors in 1919. After cashing out, he bought his one-thousand-acre oasis on Cumberland Island.

Some of the Settlement’s unemployed residents found work with the Candlers, but most left the island seeking jobs on the mainland. In 1937, the few remaining Settlement dwellers constructed the First African Baptist Church from salvaged lumber and driftwood.

The unofficial mayor of the Settlement was Beulah Alberty, a plump, gray-haired African American who smoked a pipe, played poker, and distilled moonshine. She scraped up money wherever she could to fund her granddaughter’s education, working first as a schoolteacher on the mainland and, later, selling coon skins and butchering island hogs. On weekends, black workers congregated at Beulah’s to drop a nickel in the slot of her jukebox, toss back some gut-burning moonshine, buy a tangy barbecued pork dinner for seventy-five cents, and gamble away the rest of their earnings in five-card stud.

Part of Beulah’s house was blown up after her father got in a dispute with a white landowner named Ed Fader over a liquor still on the island. Fader lit a stick of dynamite and tossed it beneath the Alberty’s house, blasting apart one side of it. Beulah and her father were injured. The next day, shots were exchanged between the two families. Eventually a trial was held in superior court, but the all-white jury failed to indict Fader.

The house was eventually rebuilt, and today Beulah’s house is a National Park Service visitor center. It sits directly beside the First African Baptist Church, which would soon become the island’s most celebrated and controversial structure, even eclipsing the popularity of palatial mansions built by one of the world’s wealthiest families, the Carnegies.

At the height of America’s industrial revolution, corporate moguls built big factories in the cities and private castles along the coast. Georgia’s barrier islands, with their balmy weather, hushed seclusion, and cheap land, lured the millionaires.

Several of the richest robber barons pooled their money to purchase Jekyll Island, just one mile north of Cumberland. The Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Goodyear, Morgan, and Pulitzer families formed the country’s most exclusive organization: the Jekyll Island Club. For six decades, no uninvited person ever stepped foot on Jekyll. The island was a private playground, with mansions, clubhouses, tennis courts, and swimming pools.

Other Georgia barrier islands were snatched up by auto magnate Howard Coffin and tobacco titan R. J. Reynolds. Cumberland—Georgia’s largest and southernmost barrier island—was claimed by a branch of the Carnegie family.

The Carnegies had amassed a fortune in the steel industry. Andrew and his younger brother Thomas embodied the American Dream: immigrant boys who went from rags to riches, self-made men who became captains of industry.

Born to working-class parents in Scotland, Andy and Tom immigrated to the United States in 1848 and eventually landed in Pittsburgh. There they built the world’s largest steel empire, Carnegie Steel, which mass-produced cheap steel that spurred the growth of the nation. They consolidated the entire steel process from start to finish: they owned the raw iron ore, railroads, and even the coal mines to fuel the steel furnaces.

Andy was the fiery CEO and commander of the operation. Tom mostly managed the books. Though they were partners, Andy ran the show. Andy never felt Tom was aggressive enough and said that he was “born tired.” Tom began drinking heavily to escape the demands of his ambitious older brother.

Once Carnegie Steel had wiped out unions from every one of its factories, its iron grip on industry tightened. Carnegie Steel became the most profitable company in the world. The Carnegies amassed personal fortunes with a real value today of $300 billion, more than the combined wealth of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg, the Koch brothers, and the entire Walton family. Andrew Carnegie became the second wealthiest man in history. Only oil mogul John D. Rockefeller was richer.

The Carnegies felt their accumulation of wealth was natural and even morally correct. They defended the widening gulf between rich and poor as a good and necessary indicator of social evolution. “Great inequality, the concentration of business in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these is not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race,” wrote Andy.

Andy and Tom were crusaders for Social Darwinism, a belief that the wealthy should rule and reap from the weaker members of society. Drawing from a skewed interpretation of Darwin’s breakthroughs in biological evolution, Social Darwinists concocted the notion of “survival of the fittest,” a phrase never used by Darwin but coined instead by British philosopher Herbert Spencer, the Carnegie brothers’ favorite author and political thinker. Spencer even crossed the pond to personally visit the Carnegie brothers in Pittsburgh. Spencer preferred talking with Tom to Andy, finding Tom a more receptive audience for his ideas. It was one of the few moments in Tom’s life where he bested his older brother.

Social Darwinists applied the “survival of the fittest” ideology to economics, class, and race. They believed the rich and powerful were more fit and better adapted to the social and economic climate. Therefore it was natural and proper for the strong to thrive at the expense of the weak. They opposed social welfare programs, safety regulations, or laws restricting child labor. Such actions would only coddle the weak and the unfit.

The Carnegies believed it was naturally and morally right for wealth to be concentrated at the top of a competitive capitalist society. As Andy put it, “Millionaires are the bees that make the most honey and contribute most to the hive even after they have gorged themselves full.”

At the dawn of the Gilded Age, Social Darwinism seemed especially attractive. The Carnegie steel factories fueled America’s meteoric rise from Civil War ashes to the world’s wealthiest nation. Robber barons were reaping unprecedented profits. To Tom and Andy, the world was an industrial utopia of idealized steelworkers engaged in noble toil. Powerful blast furnaces perpetually ran fast and full, overseen by two knights in black steel armor.

But there was a dark side to the Carnegies’ fairy tale. Social Darwinism validated the exploitation of workers, including children, who were paid pennies a day for long hours of backbreaking labor. Sweatshops were common, urban slums festered, and most of America was impoverished. Void of any social protections, the age of robber barons led to labor insurrections and social violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Social Darwinism was later used to support eugenics, which sought to weed out the undesirable genes of supposedly inferior races through forced sterilization. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were sterilized—especially blacks, the working poor, and people with disabilities, and eugenic euthanasia programs were implemented in mental hospitals.

Tom and Andy Carnegie had helped erect those pillars of Social Darwinism. However, Andy eventually began to question some of its central tenets. He ultimately ended up giving away 90 percent of his wealth to build twenty-eight hundred libraries around the world. Did the lives of his underpaid steelworkers and his ruthless pursuit of personal wealth weigh on the conscience of the man who had grown up in poverty? “Maybe with the giving away of his money,” says Andrew Carnegie’s biographer Joseph Wall, “he would justify what he had done to get that money.”

Tom Carnegie had no such misgivings or philanthropic leanings. Instead of a legacy of libraries, Tom eyed a private island off the Georgia coast as a vacation home for his family. The Carnegies had been snubbed by the Jekyll Island Club to the north, and Tom wanted an island of his own anyway. In 1882, Tom Carnegie purchased twelve thousand acres of Cumberland, including Dungeness and all of Stafford’s property, for $75,000, as a gift to his wife, Lucy.

Lucy, the daughter of a wealthy Pittsburgh coal tycoon, had been enchanted by Cumberland Island ever since she was a nine-year-old girl attending boarding school in nearby Fernandina Beach, Florida, a few miles from the island’s southern tip. At one time, Lucy included Andrew Carnegie among her suitors, but she settled on his younger brother. She and Tom had nine children together—six sons and three daughters.

Lucy’s first act as empress of the island was to raze the ruins of Caty’s old Dungeness manor and build an even larger sandcastle overlooking the south end salt marshes. Then in 1886, one year after the new Dungeness mansion was built, Thomas Carnegie died of pneumonia at age forty-three. Alcoholism and stress from his strained relationship with Andy contributed to his illness and early death. Lucy Carnegie—like Caty and Louisa before her—became the widowed matriarch of Cumberland Island.