From the time Madison was settled, education and religion were major cultural factors. As early as 1818 a male academy was established, and at mid-century both the Baptists and the Methodists founded colleges for women, both of which flourished until the Civil War. The Baptists' Georgia Female College (founded as Madison Collegiate Institute) occupied two buildings on South Main Street. The smaller one, known as the president's house, is now a private residence (Fig. 12), while the adjacent brick building burned in the 1880s (see Fig. 13). The impressive variety of courses at the college included philosophy, history, geology, botany, and foreign languages, as well as music, painting, and work with wax fruit and flowers.
In addition to the Baptists and the Methodists, the principal denominations in antebellum Madison were the Episcopalians and Presbyterians. In 1842 the Presbyterians built a starkly beautiful Greek revival edifice on South Main Street, the work of a skilled mason named Daniel Killian (Fig. 16). The churches in this tightly knit community in the antebellum years were centers of social as well as spiritual activity. Dolly Lunt Lewis (1817-1891), a young widow who taught school in Madison in the late 1840s, was an ardent churchgoer, attending monthly concerts at the Presbyterian church as well as Sabbath school and prayer meetings at both the Methodist and Baptist churches.
In the past generation historians have drastically revised the pretty southern myths, so that the phrase "moonlight and magnolias" has become an epithet. And yet, in Madison there were moonlit picnics at the Male Academy, cotillions and quadrilles at the American Hotel, weeklong house parties, and flirtations in the fragrant gardens and splendid houses. In July 1842 Jane Stokes (b. 1823) wrote to her brother, a college student in Athens, Georgia: "We have had the gayest season lately ever known in Madison. There are no less than eighteen visiting ladies in our place at one time...belles, who flourished here for a while, and then left carrying with them a dozen broken hearts."10 Sadly the price of this gaiety was slavery. There were certainly planters who realized that slavery was morally indefensible, but for most of them the conviction that their wealth was dependent on slave labor overcame their scruples.
In February 1861 Georgia joined six other southern states in Montgomery, Alabama, to organize the Confederate States of America. The young men of Madison promptly formed the Panola Guards and marched off to war from the grounds of the Georgia Female College wearing sashes made by the young ladies. During the war both women's colleges were converted into hospitals for the wounded. Many young women volunteered as nurses, cutting up their sheets and tablecloths for bandages and providing the wounded with blankets made from their carpets. They foraged in the woods for plants to be utilized for medicinal purposes: mustard seeds, hickory leaves, and pepper to treat pneumonia, and blackberry root to control dysentery.
There was a minority faction in Madison that opposed secession. Prominent among them was Joshua Hill, a lawyer and member of Congress, who resigned when Georgia seceded. He and John Sherman (1823-1900), a brother of William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891), had enjoyed a friendly relationship in Washington. When Hill's son Legaré (c. 1846-1864), who had joined the Confederate Army against his father's wishes, was killed in battle in north Georgia, Hill presumed to call on General Sherman in Decatur, near Atlanta, to ask his help in procuring Legaré's body for burial in Madison. Sherman received him graciously, honored his request, and invited Hill to join him for dinner in the mess. Sherman recorded the meeting in his autobiography:
We naturally ran into a general conversation about politics and the devastation and ruin caused by the war....Mr. Hill resided at Madison...and seemed to realize fully the danger; said that further resistance on the part of the South was madness, that he hoped Governor Brown of Georgia would so proclaim it and withdraw his people from the rebellion....I told him, if he saw Governor Brown, to describe to him fully what he had seen and to say that if he remained inert, I would be compelled to go ahead, devastating the State in its whole length and breadth; that there was no adequate force to stop us, etc.; but if he would issue his proclamation withdrawing the State troops from the armies of the Confederacy, I would spare the State...and would, moreover, pay for all the corn and food we needed....I believe that Mr. Hill, after reaching his home in Madison, went to Milledgeville, the capital of the State, and delivered the message to Governor Brown.11
But Brown refused Sherman's offer, and the notorious march through Georgia ensued.
Sitzmaschine, model #670, Designed by Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), Manufactured by J.& J. Kohn, Austria, ca. 1905.Bent beech wood, steel; height 39
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