Georgia and America: early contacts.

• Author: Bridges, Peter
• Position: Report

The United States and the ancient kingdom, now republic, of Georgia have honorable histories as civilized nations -- Georgia's far longer than America's. The first, unofficial contact between the two came a quarter of a century after the United States had declared independence from Britain, and at a time when Georgia was losing its independence to Tsarist Russia. It would be decades more before American consular officials were stationed in Georgia -- after a visit by a famous American general.

This essay does not attempt to catalog early visitors to Georgia from elsewhere in the Western world. However, they included people from Britain, France, Italy, and other countries. Enough Germans were living in Tbilisi in the nineteenth century that they formed a German suburb there. The British alpinist Douglas Freshfield led an expedition to the Caucasus in 1870 and seems to have been the first person to climb Kazbek, elevation 16,512 feet. There were enough European alpinists in the Caucasus by the time of the First World War that the president of Britain's Royal Geographical Society said that they had "added a new playground to Europe." (1) War and revolution of course closed that playground for a long time, for Americans as well as others.

The first recorded American visitor to Georgia was a man who bore the most common surname in America: Smith. He was, however, a most uncommon man, at least as regards travel. Joseph Allen Smith, who has been called an "American Grand Tourist," was born in 1769 to a wealthy family in South Carolina,and, like a number of other wealthy young Americans, he went abroad.

Joseph Smith, however, did not go on the usual Grand Tour that a wealthy young Englishman might take, which was a trip of several months to France, Italy, and sometimes Germany. Smith spent fourteen years in foreign travel, and his travels took him to the Russian Empire including, briefly, Georgia, at the beginning of 1804. He went beyond Georgia into Azerbaijan, with a Russian military escort, and watched the Russian army occupy the Muslim khanate of Gandja. Smith might have returned to the Caucasus if he had become the American envoy to Russia, as he hoped would happen; but he was never named to a diplomatic post and never returned to the Russian empire. (2)

The next American to visit Georgia, just three years after Smith, was another wealthy young man from South Carolina, Joel Poinsett. (3) Poinsett is best known as the American envoy to Mexico in the 1820s who, as an amateur botanist, discovered the shrub with beautiful red flowers which is named for him -- the poinsettia. Later in life he served as a member of the U.S. Congress and as Secretary of War.

Poinsett traveled to St. Petersburg at the end of 1806, when he was 27 years old. Like Smith before him, he had a friendly audience with Tsar Alexander I. As a result, when he left the capital in March 1807 for the Volga and the Caucasus, accompanied by a 20-year-old Englishman, Lord Royston, the authorities provided them with an escort of Cossacks and sent word to Russian commanders that they should offer the two travelers all possible assistance. They traveled from Astrakhan to Baku, Tbilisi, and Erevan, where they watched the unsuccessful Russian siege of that city.

One can question how much young Poinsett, traveling with a Russian military escort, learned about Georgia and its people. However, we know from his diary that he "supped with Her Majesty the Queen of Imeretia on the roof of her house."

This was presumably outside Kutaisi, and the lady was presumably the wife of King Solomon II, who retained his throne until the Russians deposed him in 1810. (4) One can only guess whether the queen gave Poinsett a briefing on Georgia and its difficulties.

Two other early American visitors to Georgia were Protestant Christian missionaries, the Reverend Eli Smith and the Reverend H.G.O. Dwight. They visited Tbilisi in 1830 in the course of a journey planned mainly to look into the condition of Christian communities in Armenia and Iran. (5) They decided that there was no possibility of undertaking missionary work among the Georgians, given what they called "the thorough amalgamation of their church with that of Russia". (6)

A decade after the two missionaries, a gentleman from the State of Vermont named George Ditson visited Georgia, escorted by a Georgian colonel in the Russian service whom he calls "Carganoff." Ditson was both a good writer and an admirer of the Georgian people. He describes how two centuries earlier, "Georgia made her last grand stand against the whole Persian strength ...acquitting herself with a sublimity of valor which still fires the souls of her sons ..." (7) When Ditson went from Tbilisi to see Mtskheta, the country's ancient capital, he found that the beauty of the surroundings and the history of the place combined to "...give them a power over the beholder which he cannot surmount and which he can never forget." (8)

As American society developed in the nineteenth century, an increasing number of Americans traveled abroad not just as tourists but as journalists and scholars. One of the more interesting American visitors to Georgia in that period was the first George Kennan. He was an elder cousin of the American diplomatist George Frost Kennan, who died in 2005 at the age of 101, after serving as American ambassador to the Soviet Union and publishing a number of notable historical works on Russian-American relations and other subjects.

The elder Kennan had first visited the Russian empire as a young surveyor for a possible telegraph line through Siberia. He came to eastern Georgia in 1870 when he was 25 years old. (9) His purpose, he said later, was "partly to gratify a love of rough travel, and partly to study a comparatively unknown and highly interesting race of people -- the Caucasian mountaineers." (Besides his love of rough travel, Kennan had arranged before leaving America to give a series of lectures on his return that he was going to call "The Land of the Golden Fleece," focusing on Georgia's coast.10 In the event, he saw the coast but never delivered the lectures.)

Young Kennan reached Dagestan in September, coming from St. Petersburg. He decided to cross the mountains into Georgia not on the Georgian Military Highway but instead, in order to have a "novel and adventurous experience,", to take a more southerly and far less traveled route. He spent a week in the village then called Temir-Khan-Shura (today's Buinaksk) without finding anyone he could employ as a guide. Then, fortunately, he met a Georgian nobleman in the Russian service, Prince Giorgi Davidovich Djordjadze, (11) who was returning to his home in the valley of the Alazani and who, Kennan found, was traveling with an escort of 25 armed men as well as guides and interpreters. Kennan was pleased, indeed relieved, to be invited to join him.

In early October the party passed through the last village in Dagestan, which...