The New Georgia Encyclopedia is supported by funding from A More Perfect Union, a special initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This letter, dated June 24, 1859, shows a correspondence between Elizabeth Craig and her soon-to-be husband, James Robb. The couple married in 1860 and relocated to Chicago before the outbreak of the Civil War.
The Historic New Orleans Collection (Williams Research Center), James Robb Collection , #MSS 265.
Camp Douglas, depicted in this etching from Harper's Weekly, served as a prisoner of war camp during the Civil War. Elizabeth Church Robb frequently visited the camp to assist Confederate prisoners—a fact that was later used to sensationalize her legacy as a Lost Cause heroine.
From Harper's Weekly, Wikimedia Commons
Elizabeth Church Robb died in 1868 and was buried in a family plot at the Oconee Hill Cemetery in Athens. Though Robb died from ovarian cancer, her obituary was embellished and reprinted to bolster Lost Cause mythology.
From the Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab, Death and Human History in Athens.
The fourth USS Savannah (CL-42) engaged in Atlantic and Meditteranean operations during World War II (1941-45), most notably Operation Torch, the allied invasion of North Africa.
Photograph by Naval History and Heritage Command
The second USS Savannah completed naval operations in the Mexican and Civil Wars. Â
From Old Naval Days: Sketches From the Life of Rear Admiral William Radford, U. S. N. by Sophie Radford De Meissner, Wikimedia
The third USS Savannah (AS-8) served as a submarine tender during World War I (1917-18).
Photograph by Naval History and Heritage Command
This 1777 engraving depicts the fatal duel between Button Gwinnett and Lachlan McIntosh.Â
Courtesy of New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division
Button Gwinnett served in Georgia's colonial legislature, in the Second Continental Congress, and as president of Georgia's Revolutionary Council of Safety. He was one of three Georgia signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Lachlan McIntosh distinguished himself in a career that evolved over three critical eras in the state's early history, from the colonial period to the Revolutionary War to statehood.
Augustin Verot, known as the "Rebel Bishop" for his support of the Confederacy during the Civil War, became bishop of the Diocese of Savannah in 1861 and led the Catholic community through the turbulent years of war and Reconstruction.
Courtesy of Catholic Diocese of Savannah Archives
On January 4, 1861 Augustin Verot delivered a sermon defending the practice of slavery and condemning abolitionism. It was later reprinted as a Confederate tract and circulated throughout the region, earning Verot wide acclaim in southern states. Â
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Augustin Verot called for Catholic bishops to support the construction of schools and churches for freedmen.Â
This portrait was published with the Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave. The book, the first slave narrative printed in the U.S., was first published in New York City in 1825.
Photograph from Dwight C. Kilbourne, The Bench and Bar of Litchfield County, Connecticut, 1709-1909: Biographical Sketches of Members, History and Catalogue of the Litchfield Law School Historical Notes
This map of Savannah River-area rice plantations was created in 1825, the same year William Grimes first published his narrative in New York City. Grimes served six enslavers in Savannah between 1811 and 1815 before escaping to freedom in New England.
Chatham County Map Portfolio, compiled by workers of the Writers program of the Works Projects Administration in the State of Georgia. Sponsored by the Georgia Society of the Colonial Dames of America.
William G. Bonner's Pocket Map of the State of Georgia was published in Milledgeville in 1851. Bonner was a civil engineer who published a series of pocket maps in the mid-nineteenth century.
King George II granted James Oglethorpe and the Trustees a charter in 1732 to establish the colony of Georgia. This charter provided, among other things, that the new colony would consist of all the land between the headwaters of the Savannah and the Altamaha rivers, with its eastern boundary formed by the Atlantic Ocean and its western boundary by the "south seas," a reference to the Pacific Ocean.
Map by John Nelson. Reprinted by permission of William J. Morton
In 1763 the British divided what had been Spanish Florida into the two new colonies of West Florida and East Florida, with the Apalachicola River serving as the dividing line between them. East Florida was all the land east of the Apalachicola River, with St. Augustine as its capital.
Map by John Nelson. Reprinted by permission of William J. Morton
In 1763 the British divided what had been Spanish Florida into the two new colonies of West Florida and East Florida, with the Apalachicola River serving as the dividing line between them. West Florida, with Pensacola as its capital, extended west to the Mississippi River.
Map by John Nelson. Reprinted by permission of William J. Morton
The appointment of James Wright in 1760 as governor of Georgia coincided with a period of expansion. By 1764 the boundaries of the colony had expanded to include those territories between the Mississippi and Chattahoochee rivers that had not been granted to the Florida colonies.
Map by John Nelson. Reprinted by permission of William J. Morton
In 1767 the governor of West Florida received permission from the king of England to advance the colony's northern border along the Mississippi and Chattahoochee rivers, where royal trading posts were located. Georgia's land holdings significantly decreased as a result.
Map by John Nelson. Reprinted by permission of William J. Morton
The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War (1775-83), fixed the 31st latitude north as the southern boundary of the new United States. The line extended from the Mississippi River eastward to the Chattahoochee River, moved down that river to its junction with the Flint River, and then followed a direct line east to the headwaters of the St. Marys River.Â
Map by John Nelson. Reprinted by permission of William J. Morton
The Orr-Whitner line was accepted by Florida in 1861 and Georgia in 1866 as their official boundary, although the outbreak of the Civil War (1861-65) delayed the line's approval by the U.S. Congress until 1872.
Map by John Nelson. Reprinted by permission of William J. Morton
In 1811 Georgia hired Andrew Ellicott to survey and mark the location of the 35th latitude north, which formed the boundary between Georgia and North Carolina. In an 1812 letter to North Carolina governor William Hawkins, Ellicott states: "In the parallel of 35 degree N. latitude, on the west side of the Chatoga river, a stone is set up marked on the South side (G. lat 35 N.) and on the north side, (N.C.) for North Carolina." This map locates what is currently and erroneously called Ellicott's Rock on the east side of the Chattooga River.
Map by John Nelson. Reprinted by permission of William J. Morton
This map shows the surveyed line as marked by James Camak, which set Georgia's northern boundary line south of the 35th latitude north, including the offset known as Montgomery's Corner.
Map by John Nelson. Reprinted by permission of William J. Morton
Following the 1802 Article of Agreement and Cession, Georgia's new western boundary began with the juncture of the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers in southwest Georgia and proceeded north to the great bend of the river (at present-day West Point, Georgia). From there it stretched for 160 miles to the Indian village of Nickajack on the Tennessee River and continued from there up to the 35th latitude north.
Map by John Nelson. Reprinted by permission of William J. Morton
The east wall trench of Fort Daniel, constructed in Gwinnett County in 1814, was discovered by researchers with the Gwinnett Archaeological Research Society in 2009. Other intact buried features at the site include the entire stockade wall trench and evidence of two corner blockhouses.
Courtesy of The Fort Daniel Foundation, Inc.
U.S. secretary of war Henry Knox sent this sketch of a proposed frontier fort to Georgia governor George Mathews in 1794. The drawing closely resembles the archaeological remains at the site of Fort Daniel, a stockade constructed in 1814 at Hog Mountain, in Gwinnett County.
Courtesy of James D'Angelo
British artist Thomas Addison Richards painted River Plantation (1855-60) from sketches made in Georgia during his travels through the South in the 1840s. Oil on canvas (20 1/4" x 30").
Courtesy of Morris Museum of Art
DeKalb County resident John Brandon Morris (far left) is pictured at his home, Cedar Grove, around the time of the Civil War.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
dek223-85.
Eligea and Hanna Ricketts of Porter Springs, in Lumpkin County, are pictured circa 1860. In that year nearly a third of Georgia's populace lived in the state's upcountry and mountain counties.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
lum164.
An enslaved family picking cotton outside Savannah in the 1850s.
Courtesy of New York Historical Society, Photograph by Pierre Havens..
The Hofwyl Plantation (later the Hofwyl-Broadfield Plantation) in Glynn County, a state historic site, is pictured circa 1910. The plantation, established in 1801, produced rice until shortly after the Civil War ended in 1865.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
gly189.
The homes of tenant farmers stand alongside a cotton field in Georgia. Landless whites, many of whom were farm tenants, made up nearly half the white populace in the state by 1860.
From Plantation Slavery in Georgia, by R. B. Flanders
Enslaved workers are pictured carrying cotton to the gin at twilight in an 1854 drawing. Beginning in late July and continuing through December, enslaved workers would each pick between 250 and 300 pounds of cotton per day. The cotton gin, invented by Eli Whitney on a Georgia plantation in 1793, led to dramatically increased cotton yields and a greater dependence on slavery.
From Harper's New Monthly, March 1854
A. R. Waud's sketch Rice Culture on the Ogeechee, Near Savannah, Georgia depicts enslaved African Americans working in the rice fields.
From Harper's Weekly
Healan's Mill in Hall County was a gristmill built prior to the Civil War. Most industry in antebellum Georgia was related to agriculture, which formed the base of the state's economy at that time.
Image from Neal Wellons
Timber from St. Simons Lumber Mills on St. Simons Island was shipped to market from this dock in Brunswick. After coming to a halt during the Civil War, the timber industry on the island was revived during the 1870s.
Courtesy of Coastal Georgia Historical Society.
W. T. Wofford, pictured on a postcard distributed in 1881 during the International Cotton Exposition in Atlanta, was a military leader and state legislator. A native of Habersham County, Wofford served in both the Mexican War and Civil War.
Georgia native Howell Cobb served as congressman (1843-51; 1855-57), Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (1849-51), governor of Georgia (1851-53), and secretary of the treasury (1857-60).
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Georgia Photo File.
Alexander Stephens, a native of Taliaferro County, was a prominent member of the Whig Party during the sectional crisis that arose in the wake of the Mexican War (1846-48). He later joined the ranks of the Democratic party and served as vice president of the Confederacy during the Civil War (1861-65).
In 1849 George W. Crawford, a former governor of Georgia, joined U.S. president Zachary Taylor's cabinet as secretary of war. From left, Reverdy Johnson, William M. Meredith, William B. Preston, Zachary Taylor, Crawford, Jacob Collamer, Thomas Ewing, and John M. Clayton.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
George W. Towns served as the governor of Georgia from 1847 to 1851. Earlier in his career, Towns served as both a state legislator and a U.S. congressman. Although he entered politics as a Unionist, Towns was known as an ardent states' rights secessionist during his governorship.
Painter Tompkins H. Matteson's Union, engraved by Henry S. Sadd, is a symbolic portrait celebrating the legislators responsible for brokering the Compromise of 1850. Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster appear in the center, from left to right. Georgian Howell Cobb is portrayed in the far left background.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Robert Toombs helped to lead Georgia out of the Union on the eve of the Civil War, though his support for the Georgia Platform in 1850 had demonstrated his commitment to preserving the Union.
The Georgia Platform established Georgia's conditional acceptance of the Compromise of 1850. Much of the document followed a draft written by Charles Jones Jenkins, who later served as Georgia's governor from 1865 to 1868.
An 1856 political cartoon attacks the proslavery platform of the Democratic Party. In the lower right corner, an enslaved man and woman kneel before an overseer. One asks, "Is this democracy?" The overseer responds, "We will subdue you." In the left background a Kansas settlement burns, representing the violent response to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. This act, endorsed by Democrats, allowed for popular sovereignty to decide the slavery question in the western territories.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
In 1857 Joseph E. Brown edged aside better-known politicians to become the Democrats' gubernatorial candidate. He won decisively, and from then on he was unbeatable in statewide elections.
This 1859 sketch of the abolitionist John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, appeared in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and depicts an attack on the raiders at the railroad bridge. News of the raid intensified the call for secession by many southern slaveowners.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Herschel Johnson, a nineteenth-century Georgia politician, is pictured in an 1860 Currier and Ives portrait. That same year, Johnson was the vice-presidential running mate for Democratic candidate Stephen Douglas, who lost the election to Abraham Lincoln.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
This 1990s postage stamp features Savannah native John C. Fremont, the first Republican US presidential candidate.
Courtesy of Smithsonian National Postal Museum
The Wanderer is pictured during the Civil War (1861-65). Prior to its service in the Union navy, the Wanderer was the last ship to transport African captives to Georgia as part of the slave trade. Commissioned as a yacht in 1857, the ship was converted into a slave ship the following year, and was seized by the Union navy in 1861.
Courtesy of U.S. Naval Historical Center
Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas kept an extensive journal chronicling her life as the daughter and wife of Augusta planters from 1848 to 1889. An edited version of the journal was published in 1990 under the title The Secret Eye.
Courtesy of Georgia Info, Digital Library of Georgia.
During the 1820s Mirabeau Lamar, a Georgia native, established the Columbus Enquirer newspaper and served in the state senate. In 1835 he left Georgia for Texas, where he became president of the republic in 1838.
Reprinted by permission of Institute of Texan Cultures, # 068-0069, source unknown
The Etowah Mounds in Bartow County include one of the largest Indian mounds in North America. The mounds, constructed during the Mississippian Period, served as platforms for public buildings in a town that occupied the site from around 1100 until the 1600s.
Rock Eagle, a stone effigy built by Native Americans during the Woodland Period, circa A.D. 200, is located in Putnam County. The structure, made of quartz cobbles, measures 102 feet across the wings.
Courtesy of Explore Georgia, Photograph by Ralph Daniel.
A drawing from Lambert A. Wilmer's Life, Travels and Adventures of Ferdinand de Soto, Discoverer of the Mississippi (1859) depicts Hernando de Soto and his men crossing the Chattahoochee River. The accidental introduction of European diseases by explorers destroyed many of the civilizations along the river's banks.
Courtesy of Florida State Archives, Photographic Collection.
This oil painting by William Verelst shows the founders of Georgia, the Georgia Trustees, and a delegation of Georgia Indians in July 1734. One year later the Trustees persuaded the British government to support a ban on slavery in Georgia.
Courtesy of Georgia Info, Digital Library of Georgia.
This sketch, likely a small portion of a larger work, depicts the Battle of Kettle Creek, which took place in Wilkes County on February 14, 1779, during the Revolutionary War. The original caption reads: "Engagement between the Whigs and Tories."
Courtesy of Kettle Creek Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution
The inventor of the cotton gin, Eli Whitney lived in Georgia for just a year, on Catharine Greene's Mulberry Grove plantation near Savannah. After learning of the difficulty planters had with separating seeds from fibers in upland, or "short-staple," cotton, he set out to create a machine that could perform such a task more efficiently. His invention, the cotton gin, revolutionized the southern economy.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
In his 1942 painting Cherokee Trail of Tears, Robert Lindneux depicts the forced journey of the Cherokees in 1838 to present-day Oklahoma.
Courtesy of Woolaroc Museum, Bartlesville, Oklahoma
On January 21, 1861, the ordinance of secession was publicly signed in a ceremony by Georgia politicians. Two days earlier, delegates to a convention in Milledgeville voted 208 to 89 for the state to secede from the Union.
Wilkes County native Robert Toombs, pictured circa 1865, served briefly as the Confederate government's secretary of state and as a brigadier general during the Civil War.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Union prisoners of war are pictured at the Andersonville Prison in Macon County on August 17, 1864. Malnutrition and poor sanitary conditions at the camp led to the deaths of nearly 13,000 of Andersonville's 45,000 prisoners, the highest mortality rate of any Civil War prison.
Courtesy of Civil War Treasures, New-York Historical Society
An 1868 sketch by A. R. Waud illustrates the difficulties faced by the Freedmen's Bureau, caught between white planters on one side (left) and formerly enslaved African Americans on the other (right). The bureau was established in 1865 after Union general William T. Sherman issued his Field Order No. 15, which called for the resettlement of freedpeople on confiscated lands.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
With his New South platform, Henry W. Grady advocated unity and trust between the North and South and helped to spur northern investment in Atlanta industries.
Courtesy of Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Henry Woodfin Grady Papers.
Sharecroppers, pictured in 1910, harvest cotton in Randolph County. Theoretically beneficial to both laborers and landowners, the sharecropping system typically left workers in deep debt to their landlords and creditors from one harvest season to the next.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #ran218-82.
In 1892 Georgia politics was shaken by the arrival of the Populist Party. Led by Thomas E. Watson of McDuffie County, this new party mainly appealed to white farmers, many of whom had been impoverished by debt and low cotton prices in the 1880s and 1890s. The Populists also attempted to win the support of Black farmers away from the Republican Party.
Courtesy of Georgia Historical Society.
U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, visit Atlanta in 1935, during the Great Depression. From left: Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, U.S. senator Walter F. George, and U.S. senator Richard B. Russell Jr.
Georgia aviation pioneer Ben Epps is pictured with his first airplane outside his garage in Athens, 1907.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
clr176-83.
U.S. soldiers, pictured in the spring of 1942, undergo training at Fort Benning in Columbus. During World War II Fort Benning was the largest infantry training post in the world.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Students protest segregation at the state capitol building in Atlanta on February 1, 1962. The passage of the federal Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 ended legal segregation across the nation.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Reporters gather at Atlanta's city hall on August 30, 1961, the day that the city's schools were officially integrated. The recommendations of the Sibley Commission to the state legislature in 1960 contributed to the desegregation of schools across Georgia.
Courtesy of Special Collections & Archives, Georgia State University Library, Lane Brothers Commercial Photographers Photographic Collection.
Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, the first Black students to enroll at the University of Georgia, are pictured here at the end of their first day on campus in January 1961.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Martin Luther King Jr. (second from right) and Ralph David Abernathy (third from right) pray during their arrest in Albany on July 27, 1962. William G. Anderson, the president of the Albany Movement, asked King and Abernathy to help with efforts to desegregate the city.
Augusta native Carl Sanders, elected governor of Georgia in 1962, brought the state into compliance with federal civil rights law during his single term in office.
In 1966 Lester Maddox defeated former governor Ellis Arnall in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in a major political upset. Subsequently, as a result of a close race between Maddox and Republican Bo Callaway, the General Assembly chose Maddox as governor.
U.S. president Jimmy Carter (right) meets with Hamilton Jordan in the Oval Office of the White House in 1977. Jordan served as Carter's chief of staff from 1977 to 1980.
Courtesy of Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum.
Georgia farmers lead the United States in peanut production, raising approximately 45 percent of the nation's total harvest. Grown in most south Georgia counties, peanuts are the official state crop.
Courtesy of Explore Georgia, Photograph by Ralph Daniel.
Latino workers plant loblolly pine seedlings in 1999 near Bremen, in Haralson County. Latino immigrants came to Georgia in large numbers during the 1980s and 1990s to work in the agriculture, construction, carpet, and poultry processing industries.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Tourists on St. Simons Island gather outside one of the island's many shops. The island suffered an economic depression at the end of the cotton era in the 1830s, but its fortunes reversed with the arrival of the timber industry in the 1870s. Today St. Simons enjoys a strong tourist industry.
Courtesy of Explore Georgia.
James Oglethorpe, a leader in the British movement to found a new colony in America, set sail for the new world on November 17, 1732, accompanied by Georgia's first settlers.
This roller gin, built by William Van Houten in Turner County, won first place at the Savannah State Fair in 1901. Farmers have continued to modify and improve Eli Whitney's original cotton gin since its invention in 1793.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
tur001.
An original model of an Eli Whitney cotton gin (circa 1800) is on display in Washington, D.C., at the National Museum of American History.
Image from National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Catharine Greene was the noted wife of Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene and later a supporter of Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin. This painting of Greene (oil on panel, 32 3/4" x 25 3/4"), dated circa 1809, is attributed to James Frothingham.
Courtesy of Telfair Museums.
The Dykes Creek Cotton Gin, pictured circa 1890, was located on Kingston Road in Rome. In the decades after the Civil War, cotton farmers brought their cotton to a community gin, rather than installing cotton gins on their own property.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #flo136.
James Marion Prance, the proprietor of a cotton gin in Cobb County, is pictured sitting in front of bales of cotton in the early 1900s.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
cob575.
Oliver H. Prince, a native of Connecticut, had a varied career in Georgia, which included stints as a lawyer, state and U.S. senator, journalist, and humorist. He was also instrumental in the founding of Macon and in bringing railroads to the state.
Cherokee Indian leaders pose in 1976 next to a plaque dedicating New Echota as a National Historic Landmark. Located northeast of Calhoun, New Echota was the capital of the Cherokee Nation.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
gor036.
Blood Mountain, at 4,461 feet, is the highest peak along the Appalachian Trail in Georgia and the sixth highest mountain in the state. The mountain is located near the line between Union and Lumpkin counties and may have been named for a battle between the Cherokees and the Creeks.
Photograph by Sammy Hancock
Archaeological excavation, carried out intermittently at the Etowah mound site for more than 100 years, has unearthed artifacts such as these figures, which have provided much information about life in the Mississippian Period.
Photograph from Wikimedia
The Fort Yargo cabin was built by whites in 1792 for protection against the Creeks and the Cherokees. Today it is used for history encampments at Fort Yargo State Park.
Photograph by Ashley Farrow, Wikimedia Commons
