Savannah to execute tax collector

Okay, they won't really kill one--it'll just be a performance.  Next week when Savannah commemorates the anniversary of its first public reading of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they will reenact the hanging of a tax collector!  From the Savannah Morning News yesterday:

“Georgia’s First Fourth” will portray the arrival of the Declaration of Independence in Savannah on Aug. 10, 1776, said Jacob Grotheer, an interpretative ranger at Wormsloe [State Historice Site].

Archibald Bulloch, the president of the council on safety, read the declaration aloud in public that day, said Grotheer.

That proclamation will be restaged this weekend, along with a debate on the issue of loyalty, a portrayal of the raising of a militia force and the hanging of a tax collector.

The residents of Wormsloe, and the rest of Georgia, were split on the issues of the time, said Grotheer. Noble Wimberly Jones was so heavily involved in the patriot cause that he earned the nickname the “Morning Star of Liberty.” His father, Noble Jones, who settled Wormsloe in the mid-1730s, remained loyal to the crown.

The Habersham and Telfair families, along with many others in Savannah, were likewise rended by the revolution. The colony, after all, had been named for King George II, and its ties to the mother country proved difficult to break, said Grotheer.

The carefully researched and staged debate at Wormsloe will chart the colony’s path to the Declaration of Independence, and it will be followed by the public punishment of an ever-popular villain, a tax collector.

“They’ve been hated since biblical times,” Grotheer said.