The County Which Changed its Name

War Comes to Bartow County

As we commence the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the coming of the war to Bartow County, this and succeeding articles will focus on telling the stories of the men and women who made Bartow County home.

The County Which Changed its Name

When the war started there was no Bartow county – actually there was a county, but it was known by a different name – Cass. The story of how the name was changed focuses on two men, one who sided with the Yankees and one made his allegiance with the South.

Lewis Cass (October 9, 1782 – June 17, 1866) was an American military officer and politician. Cass was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, where he attended Phillips Exeter Academy. His parents were Major Jonathan Cass and Molly Gilman. In 1800 he moved with his family to Marietta, Ohio. On May 26, 1806, he married Elizabeth Spencer.[1]  When the War of 1812 started, he took command of the 3rd Ohio Volunteer Regiment. In March 1813, Cass was promoted to Brigadier General, and later he participated in the Battle of the Thames.

Cass was nationally famous as a leading spokesman for the controversial Doctrine of Popular Sovereignty, which would have allowed voters in the territories to determine whether to make slavery legal instead of having Congress decide.  This controversy came to a head however well after Cass County was named and the town of Cassville formed in 1832.  Cass evidently had no direct contact with Cass County and Cassville.  At the time of its naming Gen. Cass was serving as Secretary of War under Andrew Jackson and was primarily instrumental in the formulation of the Indian Removal Policy. While popular with the white settlers in this portion of the state at the time, today we generally disapprove of the driving of the Cherokee from their ancestral home.  A study of this imposition of Federal Power on States Rights and the sovereignty of the people is a volume to itself and beyond the scope of this article, but it was no doubt this action which caused the early settlers to name the county and the town after Cass.

During his long political career, Cass served as a governor of the Michigan Territory, an American ambassador, a U.S. Senator representing Michigan, and co-founder as well as first Masonic Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Michigan. He was the losing nominee of the Democratic Party for president in 1844 losing on the 9th ballot to candidate James K. Polk, who went on to win the presidential election.

In 1848, he resigned from the Senate to run for President. Col. William Orlando Butler of Kentucky was his running mate.[2] His stance against Federal control over the slavery issue in favor of popular sovereignty caused a split in the Democratic Party, leading many antislavery Democrats to join the Free Soil Party.

In the 1850s Northern Democrats led by Senator Cass of Michigan and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois promoted popular sovereignty as a middle position on the slavery issue. It said that actual residents of territories should be able to decide by voting whether or not slavery would be allowed in the territory. The federal government did not have to make the decision, and by appealing to democracy Cass and Douglas hoped they could finesse the question of support for or opposition to slavery.

Douglas applied popular sovereignty to Kansas in the Kansas Nebraska Act which passed Congress in 1854. The Act had two unexpected results. By dropping the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which said slavery would never be allowed in Kansas), it was a major boost for the expansion of slavery. Overnight outrage united anti-slavery forces across the North into an "anti-Nebraska" movement that soon was institutionalized as the Republican Party, with its firm commitment to stop the expansion of slavery. Second, pro- and anti-slavery elements moved into Kansas with the intention of voting slavery up or down, leading to a raging civil war, known as "Bleeding Kansas."

From 1857 to 1860, Cass served as Secretary of State under President James Buchanan.[3]  Cass resigned on December 13, 1860, because of Buchanan's failure to protect federal interests in the South and failure to mobilize the federal military, actions that might have averted the threatened secession of Southern states.[4]

Abraham Lincoln targeted popular sovereignty in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, leaving Douglas in a position that alienated Southern pro-slavery Democrats who thought he was too weak in his support of slavery. The Southern Democrats broke off and ran their own candidate against Lincoln and Douglas in 1860.[5]

Following 1st Manassas on July 21st, 1861, the people of Cassville renamed the town to Manassas.   It was here in the first major battle of the war in Virginia that the Confederates “Whipped their asses at First Manassas” and Sherman along with thousands of other Union troops fled from the field in a total rout.  On Dec. 1st, 1861 the county was renamed to Bartow in honor of native son and Brigadier General Francis Bartow who had been killed at the battle.

In the political fall-out following Manassas, Sherman was shipped out west and it was a part of his resentment that led to the total destruction of the Town of Manassas, Georgia as Sherman began to extract his revenge on Georgia in 1864.

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About the Author:

John Rigdon is the author of  a number of Civil War books and maintains the site ResearchOnLine.net (www.researchonine.net)

This article is excerpted from

First Families of Cartersville and Bartow County, GA (http://www.researchonline.net/first/ga/bartow/index.htm)

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NOTES:

[1] Heidler, David S., and Heidler, Jeanne T. (eds) (2004). Encyclopedia of the War of 1812, pp. 83-84. Naval Institute Press. ISBN 1-59114-362-4.

[2] Kleber, John E. (ed.) (1992). The Kentucky Encyclopedia, p. 146. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-1772-0, ISBN 978-0-8131-1772-0.

[3] Heidler.

[4] Cass's resignation statement, quoted in McLaughlin, Andrew Cunningham (1899) Lewis Cass Houghton, Mifflin, Boston, pp. 345-346, OCLC 4377268, (standard library edition, first edition was published in 1891)

[5] Childers, Christopher (March 2011), "Interpreting Popular Sovereignty: A Historiographical Essay", Civil War History 57 (1): 48–70 http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/civil_war_history/v057/57.1.childers.htm...