250 and Counting

Category: Georgia during the Revolution

  • Raid On Tybee Island–March 25, 1776

    Cover art for March 25, 1776: Map showing Savannah and Tybee Island, 1733. Via The Boston Public Library digital map archive.

    The raid on Tybee Island wasn’t the only one of its kind; in fact a similar action had been taken at Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina a few weeks earlier.

    In that case there were many more runaway slaves involved, but like Tybee, very few were actually captured and the fate of most of the others is unknown, although there is one account that says fifty people had resisted capture and were subesquently killed.

    But in both cases we see a raid that took place specifically to deny people their freedom, and the proclamation the led to these raids directly influenced the argument in the Declaration of Independence that King George incited “domestic insurrections.” So…the desire of slaves to be free…drove the Patriots to desire independence.

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  • 250 and Counting: January 18, 1775

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    Cover art for January 18, 1775: A commemorative plaque for Tondee's Tavern, which burned down during a huge fire in 1796 that destroyed most of Savannah, GA

    When the Provincial Congress of Georgia met in the city of Savannah, the natural place for them to meet was a place called Tondee’s Tavern.

    Georgians were no fans of British activities such as the Intolerable Acts, but they otherwise prospered under British rule and remained largely indifferent to the mother country. However, while the Provincial Congress didn’t want to join the other colonies in their association (which became the First Continental Congress), they were willing to support that association’s ban on trade with Britain, although they didn’t enforce it right away.

    Tondee’s Tavern was ultimately destroyed in 1796, in a fire that took out more than half of Savannah. The next building on that spot was a bank which dealt heavily in the slave trade. As a result, in recent years the building was said to be haunted and appears on most of Savannah’s Ghost Tours.

    The building reopened as a modern-day Tondee’s Tavern in 2013, but unfortunately it appears to have closed down sometime in the past year.