User:Parkerplanet/African American Georgia Gold Miners

Background
The Appalachian Gold Rush marked a period of American history in the Antebellum period (1812-1861) that began the Gold Rush culture which would precede 49er Californian culture and set the stage for Southern industrialization. Georgia Gold fever remade local economies and societies, however, in the process, gold miners would rip apart steam beds, hillsides, and forests to build miles of wooden towns and mines. Historians have argued the Georgia Gold Rush served as a technical and social model for more well-known gold rushes in California, Colorado, the Dakotas, and the Klondike.

Portions of the Appalachian Gold Rush have been ignored by historians as the event was not as groundbreaking or as influential across the nation as its predecessors, however, an important and central aspect of the Appalachian Gold Rush was lost in the record as African Americans played a central role in the Appalachian mines. There is immense uncertainty about where the first account of gold was found along Appalachia and more uncertainty about who made the discovery. There are accounts of one enslaved person noticing a similarity in the soil of the Nacoochee Valley and the soil in the gold region to the north. After testing the sample, it was found to have gold.

Origins
Despite uncertainty regarding the true origin of the gold fever in Appalachia, it was underway in 1829. Miners flooded the state of Georgia and as many as 130,000 people were applying for mining sites. The rapid influx of people in Georgia caused land scarcity as far as mining sites were concerned. Georgian officials turned to Cherokee land to allocate to miners which would be known as “The Great Intrusion” to Cherokee people. This would be a large factor in the Indian Removal Act’s passing as Senator of South Carolina, John C Calhoun, had a pressing interest in the Appalachian Gold rush and was actively a part of it.

In September of 1832 surveys across Appalachia were complete and the state began allocating land to all Georgians who applied, except for anyone with traces of African descent. This did not stop mixed-race people from applying for the lottery. There was the case of Allen Summerall, who applied as a single white male and was given a plot of land to mine on. Later, officials discovered Summerall’s mother was black and seized the land.

Land lotteries were not the only racial barrier for African Americans as black people were also excluded from recreational events in towns set up along mining strips. These towns were described as places full of vices and violence by citizens of cities like Dahlonega. Contemporaries of these miners even described black miners as the only moral people residing in miner towns as they did not participate in the gambling, fighting, and solicitation that white miners partook in.

Enslaved miners
Farming and gold digging seemed to have gone hand in hand in Appalachia as those who were residents of the mining lands would search for gold on their land as supplemental income. It was common practice for Georgians to send slaves into mining land on the crop offseason, and it was estimated that slaves produced 30,000$ in gold during a single season. In the 1830s Senator John C Calhoun would send twenty slaves each mining season just South of Dahlonega. It was estimated that slaves under Calhoun would produce around 500$ per hand to which he had no reason to believe that production would halter.

The enslaved miner population was entirely dictated by the value of cotton at the time. There were periods when cotton prices were on the decline and slaveholders completely abandoned King Cotton, but typically the frequency to which enslaved people were in the mines ebbed and flowed with the price of the cash crop. It is also important to note that more often than not, slaveholders’ efforts were entirely mining or entirely agriculture at any given point, there was very little diversification of slave labor in Appalachia.

The mines also gave prominence to a new form of slavery in leasing out enslaved people to slaveholders who wanted cheap mining labor. Typically these leases were priced out at 10$ an hour which went to the slaveholder. This source of labor gave way to a new form of resistance in slaves as they would consistently try to find ways to hide and pocket gold for themselves. Enslaved people would hide ounces of gold in their clothes and put gold dust in their hair (Otis, 1983). A common slaveholder practice in response to this was randomly shaving enslaved people to which they would find a significant amount of pure gold. Slaves would also secretly bury gold somewhere and sneak out at night to find it.

The gold that slaves would sneak was used to purchase their freedom in rare cases. It was rare for a slave to pocket enough gold to buy their freedom and even rarer for a person to buy gold off of a black miner as they could be charged with a federal crime for purchasing gold from a slave. There were cases of slave owners that allowed enslaved people to either keep a portion or all of the gold they found. A placer mine in Habersham County allowed enslaved miners to keep all gold they found after dark with the caveat of selling the gold back to the mine.

“Free Jim”
One of the most influential black men in Appalachia during the Gold Rush was North Georgian entrepreneur, James Boisclair, known as "Free Jim". He came to Dahlonega at the height of the gold rush and started up a cake shop. Inevitably he would become interested in gold mining, however as a black man he could not buy or sell land. He convinced Dr. Joseph Singleton to be his “guardian” and Boisclair bought a mining plot through him. Boisclair was successful in the mines for nearly a decade, allowing him to start the largest general merchandise store in the town. He also started a natural ice business that was extremely successful and popular within the town and is now the present-day Dahlonega Baptist church. Boisclair also started a saloon that was so popular in the town he was expelled from the Baptist church for the amount of alcohol he was selling to Christians. Boisclair was an anomaly in the Antebellum South, however, as a vast majority of black miners were brought to the South as slaves and remained slaves. Boisclair’s success was an anomaly in the context of the Appalachian Gold Rush. No other black man would find success to the same scale or individuality that Boisclair was able to produce.