Tunis Campbell and the price he would not take
This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed. Tunis Campbell needs to be remembered.
The Person
In the Savannah jail, in a cell nine feet long and four and a half feet wide, men came to a sixty-three-year-old preacher with an offer. They had made it before. Thirty-five thousand dollars, and he was to keep quiet and preach as the white ministers directed, or leave Georgia.
He told the jailer to stop sending for him when men came to get him out by bargains. He had made up his mind to die in prison.
He was born at Middlebrook, New Jersey, on the first of April, 1812, the youngest of ten children of a blacksmith. At five he was playing in the road with his sisters when a white man rode up, asked for his mother, and arranged to send him to a school at Babylon on Long Island. He was the only colored child in it. They meant him for a missionary to Liberia. At eighteen he went home and would not go.
In 1832 he formed an anti-colonization society and pledged himself never to leave this country until every slave was free on American soil. For thirty years he preached, raised schools in Brooklyn and Jersey City, and worked as a hotel steward. He was mobbed many times and once nearly killed. Two letters to Lincoln brought him a commission to General Saxton at Hilton Head.
The Context
Sherman’s order of January 1865 set the coast aside for the freed people. No white person whatever, excepting detailed officers and soldiers, would be permitted to reside there, and the management of affairs would be left to the freed people themselves. Campbell asked for the Georgia Sea Islands and was given five, with orders to establish governments there.
He took the order at its word. On St. Catherines he built a constitution, a senate of eight, a house of twenty, a supreme court, and a militia of two hundred and seventy-five. He brought three teachers from the North and paid them himself. Of those two years he later wrote one flat sentence: he remained governor on those islands.
Then Johnson pardoned the planters, and the planters wanted the coast back. General Davis Tillson took over the Bureau in Georgia, broke up the schools, and pressed labor contracts on people who had been promised land. Campbell went to Augusta and told him he could not go onto the islands in safety. Tillson said that was all right, but that he could not give him any protection.
The Decision
He hired a sailboat at Thunderbolt and went out to the islands anyway, to tell the people that if they came to the mainland he would try to get them a plantation.
Belle Ville, in McIntosh County, ran to 1,250 acres and belonged to a man named Hopkins, who would not take less than $14.50 an acre. Campbell agreed and advanced a thousand dollars of his own. They crossed in one flat-boat, through rain and storm, to a place where everything had been burned in the war. Because the people would not stay without him, he put his own family in a shelter of old boards and palmetto.
Land, then votes. Registrar, delegate to the constitutional convention, state senator — until the legislature voted its Black members out on the ground that Georgia had never meant them to hold office at all.
He came back for the session of January 10, 1870. Under the new reconstruction bill someone in each chamber had to read a protest against members ineligible to take the oath. The protests were written out. Nobody would sign them. Campbell signed his own name for the Senate, put the papers in his pocket, and went to his seat. The men around him told him what was upstairs: eight men in the gallery above the Republican side, there to shoot whoever read.
He looked up at the clock. It wanted ten minutes to the hour. He said that he would read them. Then every senator near him stood and moved away, and he sat by himself with the papers in his coat and ten minutes to run, doing arithmetic that was not complicated. There was one man to be sworn ahead of him. When his turn came he took the oath, laid the protests out in order, and read them over the shouting, all but one.
The Aftermath
He and another Black registrar were poisoned; the other man died. The men he caught planning his murder had him arrested instead. In 1872 his seat went in a fraudulent election. While he was in Washington his house burned, and his wife and son’s store burned, and the court convened the same day.
The charge that finally held was false imprisonment under color of legal process — a Georgia statute written against a magistrate who jails a man illegally, carrying removal from office and not less than a year. Some accounts call it malfeasance, some false imprisonment; it is one crime. And it was not invented for him.
He had once jailed a man for failing to pay court costs, which is imprisonment for debt, the exact practice he was working to abolish from his seat in the Senate. Another time he called three hundred armed men out through his militia to surround the courthouse where he was being arraigned, and the magistrate turned him loose. Edmund Drago’s verdict is that he used his powers arbitrarily and wholly for the benefit of Black Georgians.
Both halves of that are true, and the second does not cancel the first.
The case that took him was small. A man named Rafe stood accused of housebreaking and of threatening to kill two men. Campbell issued a warrant and ordered him held when he would not post bond. Rafe swore that he had, and ran. At a called session the judge refused Campbell’s counsel an hour, then refused fifteen minutes. The clerk tore open the jury packages in open court and counted out forty-eight names. The jury stayed out all night. At ten the foreman said they could not agree, and the judge told them they would be locked up until Thursday without food or fire. By Campbell’s watch they came back in fifteen minutes.
The judge refused bond and refused to sign a bill of exceptions, which is why the conviction that imprisoned him has no appellate record at all. He spent eight months and ten days in a Savannah cell the grand jury had condemned as unhealthy. He wrote to Grant, and the Attorney General wrote back that he was deeply interested. It changed nothing. 
He was there eleven months and twenty-one days. Men were worked from first light and beaten with a strop when they fell off the stroke, and he judged that four in that camp were whipped to death.
He added that it was considered one of the best camps in the state.
What got his chains off was his wife. Harriet Campbell pledged her gold watch against a legal fee, sold homemade medicine, picked blackberries outside Atlanta to carry into the city, and crossed forty miles of rotting road at night to run down a clerk who kept slipping out the back of a store to avoid surrendering the record. She wrote to the President, the letters copied out by their fourteen-year-old daughter. Then she told her husband’s case to the principal keeper, and the chains came off. Campbell got home on the sixth of January, 1877, at sixty-four.
The Meaning
He was offered a way out three times — five thousand a year in 1866 to preach as the landowners directed, thirty-five thousand dollars in 1868 to be quiet or go, and the same offer again through the bars in Savannah, when taking it would have cost him nothing but the work he came south to do. A man’s price is the cleanest evidence we get about him, and Campbell’s is on the record because he kept declining to name one.
Here’s we actually know. Nearly everything documented about him is adversarial — indictments, contested elections, trial records, the pamphlet he wrote to defend himself. The island government reaches us mostly through one sympathetic biography built on thin manuscripts, and a reviewer in the Journal of Southern History said the result hovers between fiction and history. The record is richest where his enemies worked hardest and thinnest where he was building. Even the detail every account repeats — that the man he jailed was white — is in the literature and not in Campbell’s own telling. A conquered people leave few papers. The people who conquer them leave courthouses full.
The constitution did not survive, or the militia, or the twenty-man house. They lasted two years on sand that belonged, in the end, to whoever the President said it belonged to. McIntosh County survived. It kept returning a Black legislator to the General Assembly in nearly every election for forty years, long after the man who organized it had been walked down a Savannah street on twelve feet of chain and gone north for good.
He wrote out what had been done to him, twenty-seven pages, and put it in print. Then he lived fourteen more years and died in Boston.
Georgia made him a convict.
It never got his price.
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Sources: Tunis G. Campbell, Sufferings of the Rev. T. G. Campbell and His Family, in Georgia (Washington: Enterprise Publishing Company, 1877), digitized by Cornell University Library in the Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection and available through the Internet Archive; Russell Duncan, Freedom’s Shore: Tunis Campbell and the Georgia Freedmen (University of Georgia Press, 1986); Edmund L. Drago, Black Politicians and Reconstruction in Georgia: A Splendid Failure (Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Charles L. Flynn, Jr., review of Freedom’s Shore, Journal of Southern History (February 1988); the New Georgia Encyclopedia and the Georgia Historical Society; Campbell v. The State, 48 Ga. 353 (1873); and the pardon petition of May 1876 in the Savannah Colored Tribune.
Next in this series: John Roy Lynch — he was owned as property, held the gavel of the Mississippi House at twenty-four, and outlived the era to write the history that refuted the lie.
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Charles Cranston Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. In his writing he employs AI tools in a limited, supporting role for research, occasional image creation, and editing, while the prose and judgment remain entirely his own. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live and co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.