GAGeorgia History

Mound towns and the chiefdoms de Soto walked through

Before any European saw the interior, the piedmont held towns built around earthen mounds. Etowah, near Cartersville, was occupied from roughly 1000 to 1550, its largest mound still rising about sixty feet, its burials full of copper plates and marble figures traded from far away. Ocmulgee at the fall line near Macon has a reconstructed earth lodge whose floor timbers date to around 1015. Hernando de Soto's column crossed in the spring of 1540, extorting food and porters, and left epidemic disease that brought the mound societies down within two generations. Out of that collapse came the Muscogee, called Creek by the English, and the Cherokee in the northern mountains. Spanish Franciscans ran missions on the Guale coast from the 1580s until English backed raids ended them by the 1680s.

Oglethorpe's experiment and the ban that did not hold

George II granted a charter on June 9, 1732 to a board of trustees, none of whom was permitted to own land in the colony they governed. James Oglethorpe landed with about 114 settlers and laid out Savannah on Yamacraw Bluff in February 1733, on a repeating plan of wards around open squares that is still the shape of the old city. Tomochichi of the Yamacraw granted the ground. To keep it a place of small independent farmers the trustees banned slavery in 1735, along with rum, and refused to let lawyers argue cases for pay. Settlers lobbied against the ban for fifteen years, pointing at Carolina rice fortunes, and it was repealed in 1750 with effect from the first day of 1751.

Bloody Marsh, a fast ratification, and the Yazoo fraud

Oglethorpe turned back a Spanish invasion at Bloody Marsh on St. Simons on July 7, 1742. The trustees handed the charter back in 1752, and the plantation society the colony was built to prevent arrived within a decade. Savannah fell to the British in December 1778 and was held until 1782; a French and American attempt to retake it on October 9, 1779 failed badly and killed Casimir Pulaski. Georgia ratified the Constitution on January 2, 1788, fourth in line, because it wanted federal troops on a frontier it could not hold. Seven years later the legislature sold roughly thirty five million acres, most of present Alabama and Mississippi, for about five hundred thousand dollars, with nearly every member bribed. The next assembly repealed the sale and burned the records, and in Fletcher v. Peck in 1810 the Supreme Court struck down that repeal, the first time it voided a state law.

Cotton, New Echota, and the Trail of Tears

Eli Whitney built his cotton gin in 1793 at Mulberry Grove near Savannah, and short staple cotton, uncleanable at scale before, became the crop of the upland South. Georgia's enslaved population went from about 29,000 in 1790 to more than 460,000 by 1860, and the demand for cotton land pointed straight at the Cherokee north. The Cherokee had responded by building the sort of state Washington claimed to want: a capital at New Echota in 1825, a written constitution in 1827, the syllabary Sequoyah completed in 1821 and a bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, from February 1828. Gold found near Dahlonega in 1829 brought thousands of trespassers, Georgia extended state law over Cherokee territory, and when the Supreme Court ruled for the Cherokee in Worcester v. Georgia in 1832 the state ignored the judgment. Removal followed in 1838 and roughly 4,000 died on the way west.

Secession, Sherman, and the last state readmitted

Georgia seceded on January 19, 1861 after a close and bitter convention, and Alexander Stephens of Crawfordville, who had argued against it, became Confederate vice president. Chickamauga in September 1863 was the bloodiest fighting of the western theatre. William Sherman took Atlanta on September 2, 1864, a result that probably secured Lincoln's reelection, then cut loose from his supply lines and marched to Savannah, reaching the coast on December 21 after wrecking railroads and farms in a corridor about sixty miles wide. At Andersonville roughly 13,000 Union prisoners died in fourteen months. Georgia was readmitted on July 15, 1870, last of the former Confederate states, after the legislature expelled its thirty three Black members and Congress restored military rule until they were seated.

One person one vote, and the making of modern Atlanta

For nearly half a century Georgia elections ran on the county unit system, written into law in 1917, which weighted votes so heavily toward the smallest rural counties that a ballot in Echols County outweighed one in Fulton many times over. The Supreme Court struck it down in Gray v. Sanders in 1963, the case in which the phrase one person, one vote entered constitutional law. Martin Luther King Jr. was born on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta on January 15, 1929 and later co-pastored Ebenezer Baptist Church nearby. Mayor William Hartsfield sold the city as too busy to hate, and Ivan Allen Jr. was the only Southern elected official to testify for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Maynard Jackson took office in 1974 as the first Black mayor of a major Southern city. The commercial spine was older: John Pemberton mixed the first Coca-Cola syrup here in 1886 and Delta moved its headquarters to Atlanta in 1941.

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