Mayors of Savannah: Joseph Habersham

Joseph Habersham was born in Savannah in 1751 and was the third Mayor of Savannah (1792).  He was one of Savannah’s Revolutionary War Heroes.  He was educated at Princeton and he returned to Savannah to assist in organizing the "Liberty Boys". These were groups that sought to organize boycotts and other resistance to the Crown. The Liberty Boys of Boston were responsible for the Boston Tea Party.

In May 1775, when news of the New England battles of Lexington and Concord reached Savannah, Joseph Habersham joined Edward Telfair, Noble W. Jones, John Milledge, and other Liberty Boys in breaking into the royal magazine and making off with 600 pounds of powder.

 As the Revolution approached, he was at the organization of the Council of Safety at Tondee's Tavern, June 27, 1775. He would become a major of a battalion of Georgia militiamen and later a colonel in the 1st Georgia Regiment of the Continental Army.

Habersham would be involved in two significant events. The first in early summer of 1775, the South Carolina Council of Safety received intelligence that a shipment of gunpowder was on the way to Savannah, and that the powder would be used to supply the Native Americans to wage war against the Patriots. Two barges were sent from Beaufort to Bloody Point to intercept the shipment.
Captain Joseph Habersham outfitted a schooner with ten carriage guns and joined the effort to stop two British ships with weapons for the Indians to side with the British in the case of battle. Habersham and his crew saw the two ships at anchor on July 8th, and stopped four miles from them. Col. Maitland of the British ship Phillippa saw the Liberty closing the distance. "The schooner was full of armed men and had ten carriage-guns mounted." The Georgia schooner fired two muskets at the Phillippa and ordered Captain Maitland to identify himself. Maitland demanded to know who the schooner was. Bowen Habersham’s co-captain from South Carolina "hauled down their pendant and hoisted at the masthead a white flag with a red border, on the field of which flag was stamped or imprinted in large red letters the words 'American Liberty,' and the people on board the schooner said the schooner’s name was the Liberty."

The patriots were able to take off 16,000 pounds of powder and "seven hundred-weight of leaden bullets." They also "took away all the bar-lead, sheet-lead, Indian trading arms, and shot that were on board." The Carolinians and the Georgians divided the cargo between them. The South Carolinian’s powder was taken to Tucker’s Island where 4,000 pounds were put on board a schooner and delivered to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The Liberty, which has a footstone in its honor at Morrill Park on River Street, would be the first commissioned ‘battleship’ of the United States.

The second significant event was as a Son of Liberty Habersham was elected to lead a group of men to arrest the Provincial Governor of Georgia as the war with England began. Governor James Wright must have been shocked when on January 17, 1776,  Habersham, the son of his deceased good friend James Habersham, burst into a dinner party at the Royal Governor’s Mansion and placed his hand on his shoulder and declared, “Sir James, you are my prisoner.” At the ripe age of twenty-four Habersham was defying the British Empire.

Habersham’s career would have been more distinguished if he did not have to resign from the army after he served as Lachlan McIntosh's second in the controversial duel that killed Button Gwinnett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. But he would, after the war, have an important political career. He served as Speaker of the Georgia House in 1785 and was a member of the Georgia convention in 1788 that ratified the U.S. Constitution.  In 1785, Joseph Habersham signed the first charter granted to a state university in America, that of the University of Georgia. He was appointed Postmaster General (a cabinet position at the time) by President George Washington in 1795 and served until the beginning of Thomas Jefferson's administration in 1801.

​Habersham died in 1815 and is buried in Colonial Cemetery.
 

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