“Along a corridor I tread, 

High over-arched by ancient trees, 

Where, like a tapestry overhead, 

The gray moss floats upon the breeze. 

 —Henry Roots Jackson (Bonaventure by Starlight, 1842) 

Bonaventure Cemetery: The George Johnson Baldwin Angel 

We last met Henry Roots Jackson when he was busy prosecuting Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar for breaking the prohibition of the importation of slaves in the notorious Wanderer case (see PFS #75). 

In 1842, the youth-filled 22-year-old Jackson (1820-1898) wrote a short poem mentioning the ‘solitary Tatnall tomb’ residing on the Bonaventure Plantation. In his sweet poem Bonaventure By Starlight, a sentimental Jackson rhythmically suggested the entire landscape surrounding the lone gravestone in the Tatnall family graveyard would make a superb location for an enlarged cemetery. And it did. 

Today, the former President of the Georgia Historical Society, the first President of the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences, the lawyer, the prosecutor, the judge, the soldier, the diplomat, and the beloved Southern poet, is buried next to his wife in his poetically imagined Bonaventure family plot, not far from the Lawton Family (PFS #78). Henry Roots Jackson lived a most meaningful life here in Savannah. 

Many gravestones located in the cemeteries throughout Savannah include the images of angels. I had great fun painting the angel-gravestone for Louisa Porter, found in the Laurel Grove Cemetery (PFS #33).  

Naturally, there are many fabulous angels to be found throughout the Bonaventure Cemetery. One magnificent angel sculpture is this white marble monument found at the family gravesite of Savannah businessman George Johnson Baldwin (1856-1927). 

Christian Theology includes endless commentary concerning angels, beginning with Thomas Aquinas and carried on by the Franciscan Monk Saint Bonaventure, who’d carefully outlined the twelve important works guardian angels do for the living — to include consoling, teaching, and offering Devine revelation. 

George Baldwin graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1877. Trained as a chemist, he quickly made a fortune in the fertilizer business. In the 1890s, Baldwin became associated with the Boston firm of Stone & Webster, which financed, built, and managed street railways and public electric utilities. By 1905, the firm was the largest company of its niche in the United States, with many of its properties located in the South, including Savannah, Columbus, Tampa, Jacksonville, and Houston. 

Baldwin became the President of the Savannah Electric Company (SEC) when the utility business had become a political battlefield involving open warfare tactics raising racial tensions. In 1900, the population of Savannah was around 52%-to-48%, Black to white. Baldwin represented a company located in the ‘Yankee’ north, which was considered foreign-owned by many southern businessmen. 

The competitive clash of northern and southern business interests brought the SEC into conflict with the locally owned Savannah Lighting Company (SLC). A common tactic of local owners was the use of Jim Crow racial segregation laws, such as a streetcar ordinance, to exacerbate the port city’s racial tensions. Advocating Black disenfranchisement and tighter regulations against Yankee businesses was common. 

For several decades, Savannah’s Black community often successfully deployed community boycotts of the city’s railways to fight off Jim Crow racial laws. Meanwhile, ‘foreign’ businessmen, like Baldwin, were forced to implement local segregation rules against their financial interests. However, they often could answer the call of their better angles, influence local politics, and counterattack their regulators.