Georgia History and Government

Thanks largely to Margaret Mitchell's classic novel Gone with the Wind, the state of Georgia has come to embody the idyllic gentility of the antebellum South. However, Georgia has long been a leader in the industrial and economic development of the southern states, so much so that it earned the nickname "Empire State of the South." Although probably best known for its Georgia peaches, peanuts, and Coca Cola, the state boasts a variety of industries, including aerospace, aircraft construction, publishing, real estate, and telecommunications. The city of Atlanta is a major railroad hub for Norfolk Southern and CSX, and is home to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, widely regarded the busiest airport in the world.

The territory that would become Georgia was, for a time, hotly contested by Spain and Britain, as it lay between Spanish Florida and British South Carolina. In 1732, James Oglethorpe was granted a charter by King George II to found Georgia, a "garrison province" to protect the South Carolina holdings from the threat of Spanish invasion. An outspoken advocate of reform in the British jail system, Oglethorpe had originally hoped to populate his colony with London's "worthy poor," debtors and other homeless who would be eager to escape the harshness of prison and start a new life in the New World. Oglethorpe's altruistic plan never materialized, but the legend that Georgia was founded as a penal colony still persists to this day.

In 1733, the HSM Ann landed at the site that would eventually become Savannah, the first planned city in the U.S. Although African slavery was prevalent among the other colonies, Oglethorpe was opposed to it and actually prohibited it in the Georgia Charter. The colonists struggled, attempted to eke out a meager living while producing the silk, wine, and other semi-tropical goods they hoped would support them. Unfortunately, many of the colonists came from the cities and had no experience farming. The colonists also bore a great deal of resentment towards the Trustees, who administered Georgia from overseas and had no clear picture of the hardships being faced. The colonists lobbied for slavery, pointing to the success of South Carolina's slave-based plantation economy and in 1749, the Trustees reluctantly overturned the slavery ban. It proved to be too little too late as far as the British Parliament was concerned. In light of Georgia's lackluster performance, Parliament refused the Trustees' request for further funds and disbanded them in 1751. The Province of Georgia came under the King's control and the first Royal Governor, John Reynolds, arrived in Savannah in 1754.

As tensions mounted between Britain and the other colonies, Georgia remained loyal to the crown. Despite efforts from the Sons of Liberty to block the Stamp Act in 1765, Georgia was the only colony to import and use the revenue stamps. James Wright, the third Royal Governor of Georgia, was an able administrator and quite popular with the colonists. Although there was some grumbling about the British retaliation to the Boston Tea Party, the Georgians remained rather complacent, refusing to even send delegates to the First Continental Congress. However, when news about the Battle of Concord reached Georgia in 1775, it touched off a powder keg. The patriots raided the royal magazine in Savannah and made off with the ammunition. The annual celebration of the King's birthday became a riotous demonstration against British rule. The assemblies in Savannah set up their own provincial congress to supplant the administration of the Royal Governor. As the patriots raised troops and prepared for war, Wright tried desperately to negotiate a peaceful resolution. In early 1776, several armed patriots entered Wright's home and took him prisoner. He managed to escape to the HMS Scarborough, a British Navy man-of-war, where he made several more efforts to negotiate with the patriots before finally attempting to recapture Savannah with naval forces. His first attempt to recapture the city failed, but in 1778, Wright convinced the British government to lend him enough troops for another try. This time, he succeeded and managed to return a large portion of Georgia (making Georgia the only colony to be regained by the British after they were expelled). Wright managed to hold onto Savannah until the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1782, when the British finally withdrew. In 1788, Georgia became the fourth state of the U.S. after ratifying the Constitution.

In 1829, gold was discovered in the north Georgia mountains, on land owned by the Cherokee Nation. Despite a Supreme Court ruling that states were not permitted to redraw the boundaries of Native lands, President Martin van Buren sent federal troops to deport the Cherokee west of the Mississippi. Over 4,000 Native Americans died during this forced relocation, which came to be known as the Trail of Tears.

In the years that followed the Revolutionary War, cotton became a staple of Georgia's economy, and the state became dependent on slave labor. When the institution of slavery was threatened by Abraham Lincoln's Republican administration in 1861, Georgia seceded from the Union and joined the newly-formed Confederacy. For a couple of years, the state of Georgia remained relatively untouched by the Civil War. Believing the state to be safe from invasion, the Confederates built a number of small munitions factories and established several prisoner of war camps for Unions soldiers. In 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman invaded Georgia, driving the Confederate forces back to Atlanta. Sherman captured Atlanta, burned it to the ground, and then embarked on his infamous March to the Sea, where he and his armies cut a swath of destruction all the way to Savannah.

During the Reconstruction period, General Sherman issued orders that the abandoned plantation lands of Georgia were to be confiscated and redistributed to the former slaves. President Andrew Johnson revoked that order. Johnson's decision to restore the Confederate states to the Union was met with opposition from the Radical Republicans in Congress, who wanted the military occupation of the South to continue. The Republicans also passed an ironclad oath, which prohibited any former Confederates from voting or holding office. In 1868, Georgia's first elected governor after the war, Charles Jenkins, refused to fund a racially integrated state constitutional convention. His administration was dissolved and Jenkins was replaced by a military governor. That same year, the Ku Klux Klan became prominent in Georgia. Opposed to the Reconstruction effort, they murdered, assaulted, and threatened the Freedmen (former slaves), Carpetbaggers (Northern Republicans), and Scalawags (Southern whites sympathetic to the Republicans).

In the midst of the strife and protest, Georgia elected a new General Assembly that year, and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. Rufus Bollock, the newly-elected Republican governor, was inaugurated, and it looked like Georgia was on the verge of rejoining the Union. Unfortunately, Governor Bullock, hoping to extend the Reconstruction efforts in Georgia and strengthen the Republican influence there, intentionally sabotaged the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment which would give former slaves the right to vote. At the same time, a number of white Republicans sided with the Democrats to bar the Freedmen from their seats in the General Assembly. In 1870, Georgia was once again placed under military rule. General Alfred H. Terry purged the Assembly of former Confederates, readmitted the expelled Freedmen, and oversaw the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. On July 15 of that year, Georgia became the last Confederate state to be readmitted into the Union. In the next round of elections, the Democrats won majorities in both houses of the General Assembly, and Governor Bullock was forced to flee Georgia to avoid impeachment. By 1872, the conservative Democrats were in control of the state.

After the Reconstruction, Georgia entered an era of unprecedented economic growth known as the Gilded Age. Many people, such as Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady, advocated the industrialization and urbanization of the Southern states in a movement known as the "New South." The virgin forests of Georgia, virtually untapped at this point, became a major new resource and created a number of new industries for the state, including paper, lumber, and turpentine (distilled from the tree resin). Coal, kaolin, and granite mining were also burgeoning industries. Cotton still played a dominant role in Georgia's economy, but had also given rise to a number of subsidiary textile industries.

Georgia's economy suffered a devastating blow in 1921 when boll weevils destroyed 45% of the state's cotton crop. The Great Depression worsened Georgia's economic situation, as the demand for cotton collapsed. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's aggressive New Deal programs proved beneficial to Georgia, bringing rural electrification, education, health care, and housing to the floundering state. Roosevelt's Agricultural Adjustment Act was particularly helpful to Georgia's cotton industry, as it paid farmers to plant less cotton, which drove the price up from five to fifteen cents per pound. Despite the obvious benefits, Roosevelt's New Deal programs were vehemently opposed by Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge, who attempted to subvert a number of them. Talmadge railed against the idea of paying equal wages to black and white workers, and he denounced much of the New Deal as "communist." Tamladge's overt racism and Roosevelt's popularity proved to be his undoing as his political career floundered. He did manage to get reelected in 1946, but he died before taking office.

Georgia became the front line of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s, beginning with Governor Marvin Griffin's pledge to keep the state's schools segregated, "come hell or high water." Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., born in Atlanta, led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, which in turn led to the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta in 1957. Governor Carl Sanders worked with President John F. Kennedy's administration to ensure Georgia's compliance with the Civil Rights Act. His successor, Lester Maddox, remained stubbornly opposed to integration; after Reverend King's assassination, Maddox refused to allow him to lie in state at Georgia's capitol. In 1969, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Georgia, finally integrating the public schools. Maddox's successor, Jimmy Carter, declared in his 1970 inaugural address that racial segregation had ended in Georgia.

The state of Georgia is divided into five distinct regions: the Appalachian Plateau, the Ridge and Valley, the Blue Ridge, the Piedmont, and the Coastal Plain. The Appalachian Plateau (which actually stretches from New York to Alabama) occupies only the extreme northwestern corner of Georgia. Lookout and Sand Mountains are the most prominent features in this province, most of which is covered by the Appalachian Oak Forests.

The Ridge and Valley region occupies most of northwestern Georgia, and lies between the Appalachian Plateau and the Blue Ridge. Ridge and Valley is named for the folded wrinkles in the landscape, caused by alternating beds of hard and soft sedimentary rocks. The result is a number of parallel valleys (including the Chickamauga Valley and the Great Valley) separated by a series of ridges (such as the Armuchee Ridges).

The Blue Ridge Mountains and the Cohutta Mountains dominate the Blue Ridge province, which consists mainly of an irregular sequence of mountains, ridges, and basins. Georgia's highest point of elevation, Brasstown Bald, lies within this region. Marble and talc are mined from Blue Ridge, and the discovery of gold in the area precipitated the Cherokee Trail of Tears in the 1830s.

The Piedmont region is home to most of Georgia's population. The black, fertile soil of Georgia's Black Belt was once responsible for the state's remarkable cotton crops. Rolling hills, with the occasional mountain, dominate the landscape, with rivers and ravines scattered among the forests of oak, hickory and pine. Most of Georgia's cities, including Athens and Atlanta, are in Piedmont, and the area has become highly industrialized. The town of Warm Springs was made world famous by President Roosevelt, who hoped that bathing in the warm mineral springs would provide relief from his paraplegia. He visited constantly for two decades, and eventually died there in 1945 at his retreat, known as the "Little White House."