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Southern
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Locally Owned And Operated Since 1975
Across from Georgia Square Mall
Between Travel Lodge & Sonny’s BBQ
Mon-Fri 10-7; Sat 10-6; Sun 1-5
3775 Atlanta Hwy. Athens 543-4323
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William Henry Harrison Heard was bom
into slavery June 23,1850, in Longstreet
District, Elbert County, Ga., about 10 miles
below Elberton. His mother, Pathenia
Galloway, was a slave of the Galloway estate;
his father, George W. Heard, was a skilled
blacksmith and carpenter who lived three
miles away on the Thomas J. Heard planta
tion and was able to visit his family only
twice a week. George Heard’s master was also
his father, and through this mingling of the
races, William Heard was the
great-grandson of Georgia
Revolutionary' War governor
Stephen Heard and a close
relative of many of die most
powerful white families in
upper Georgia and South
Carolina.
When William was very
young, he was sold along
with his mother, brother and
sister, to John A. Trenchard,
an Iowa native who was
principal of the Elberton
High School. In 1859, a
typhoid epidemic broke out in Elberton in
which William’s mother and oldest sister
died. He was put to work in the cotton
fields. Heard’s master provided religious
training for his slaves; though forbidden to
leam reading and writing, William memo
rized many of the Psalms and a large part of
the Methodist Shorter Catechism.
William Heard was 16 when freedom
came in 1865. He moved in with his father
who had opened a wheelwright’s shop in
Elberton and began paying a “poor white”
boy 10 cents a lesson to teach him to read
and write. For the next two years he hired
himself out as a laborer to white farmers,
always stipulating that he receive lessons
along with his wages. He enrolled in
Elberton’s first school for freed people and
was soon teaching the lower grades himself.
Elbert was a black majority county, but
the freedmen had a difficult time establish
ing themselves politically against the fraud
and violence of the white Democrats. The
county was home to Amos Tappan
Akerman, one of the state’s leading white
Republicans who served as U.S. Attorney
General in 1870-71 and who was kin by
marriage to Heird’s ft:„i master. Akerman
encouraged Heoid to join the local
Republican organization. In 1872, soon
after his 21st birthday, Heard was elected
co-chairman of the county Republican
party and candidate for state representative.
In those days in Georgia, each party had its
own ballots that were sent from Atlanta to
the county party committees just before
election day and distributed to the election
managers at each polling place. The white
Democrats managed to intercept the Elbert
County Republican ballots the day before
the election; Heard stayed up all night
writing out replacement ballots by hand,
QEORQE
HEARD'S
MASTER
WAS ALSO
HIS
FATHER...
but his task was impossible. Gangs of whites
fought to keep black voters from casting
their few available ballots and Democrat
Henry P. Mattox easily defeated Heard.
Heard had married by this time. In
1873, he and his wife Amanda moved
across the Savannah River to Abbeville
Countv, S.C., where he taught at Mt. Carmel
and studied Latin and algebra under a local
white teacher. South Carolina’s black voters
had installed a Republican governor and
legislature in 1868 and the
state university at Columbia
was opened to African-
American students. In 1874
Heard took an examination
and won one of the five
scholarships available to
Abbeville county men
between the ages of 16 and
21 (even though he was 23
at the time). He entered the
University of South
Carolina that year as a
classics major.
In 1876, Heard ran for
South Carolina state representative from
Abbeville County. His precinct returned a
solid Republican majority and though a
white mob failed to keep black voters away
from the polk, they did succeed in stealing
the ballot box. The returns had been certified
and when Heard returned the next day to
give the affidavits to the election managers,
the mob seized him and carried him over the
river to Elbert County, where they tried to
get local men to lynch him. The Georgians
refused, but took him as a prisoner to the
Samuel Stark plantation (Stark’s son-in-law
was future South Carolina governor and U.S.
Senator Benjamin Ryan Tillman). Stark’s
son Edmund, who had fought with Heard in
Elbertor on election day 1872, wanted to
kill him on the spot, but Stark would not
permit it.
That night, a band of white men rook
Heard to the Broad River in the dead of
night and left him in the woods on the
Wilkes County side. He walked more than
15 miles to Washington, Ga., and spent his
last $5 on a train ticket to Augusta. From
Augusta he went over the Savannah to
Hamburg, S.C., and told his story to the
captain of federal troops stationed there.
Continuing on to Columbia, he affirmed
the results of his precinct’s election to the
election board and was seated as representa
tive from Abbeville County.
His term in the legislature was short.
When federal troops withdrew from South
Carolina in March 1877, the state’s white
minority seized power, expelling African-
Americans from the legislature and the
state University. William Heard left his
ruined hopes in Columbia and headed for
Athens, Ga., to start a school.
CONCLUDED NEXT WEEK.
©1996 John Ryan Seawright
WILLIAM HENRY HEARD:
Slave, Statesman,
Editor, Diplomat,
Bishop♦ Part 1.
alittle bit
to the east.
a little bit
to*the west
Celine had
no problem
being all
over the
map.
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