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State of Georgia History
Georgia (state), one of the South Atlantic states of the United States. Founded in 1733, Georgia was the last of the 13 original English colonies to be established in what is now the United States. Georgia emerged as a state during the American Revolution (1775-1783), and Georgians were among the first signers of the Declaration of Independence. On January 2, 1788, Georgia became the fourth state, and the first Southern one, to ratify the Constitution of the Constitution of the United States. Georgia developed slowly and did not begin to prosper until late in the 18th century. However, during the first half of the 19th century Georgia flourished as an agricultural state, with vast cotton and rice plantations. By 1860 Georgia was one of the wealthiest Southern states, and stately plantation homes graced the rolling hills of the coastal and central sections of the state.
The American Civil War (1861-1865) and its aftermath were major turning points in the economic and social life of Georgia. The state was devastated during the war, and after the abolition of slavery the plantation system was replaced by tenant farming, which still focused on traditional agricultural products such as cotton, tobacco, peanuts, and grain crops. The state remained poor, and during the Great Depression of the 1930s it was particularly devastated as the boll weevil decimated the cotton economy. Migration to other states seemed to be one of the few ways of overcoming poverty. The state remained primarily agricultural in nature until the early 1950s, when the development of industry began to accelerate. By the early 1960s, industrial production far outranked agriculture as the chief source of income. In the late 1990s Georgia had an economy based on manufacturing and service industries. Atlanta, the largest city and capital of the state, serves as an important economic center of the South and the nation.
The early colony was named in honor of King George II of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Over the years the state has acquired many nicknames. Nicknames include the Buzzard State, in commemoration of an early state law to protect buzzards; and the Goober State, for the state’s enormous annual peanut crop. Two nicknames, however, are gaining frequency in use. Georgia is known as the Peach State, for the famous peaches grown there, and the peach emblem is on the state’s automobile license plates. Georgia is also known as the Empire State of the South. This nickname alludes to New York, which is known as the Empire State, and reflects Georgia’s size and the rapid development of its economy.
Georgia was founded in 1733 to give new lives to deserving non-Roman Catholics in the New World. Despite involvements of Georgia's founder, James Oglethorpe, with debtors prisons, no debtors and no criminals were allowed to be sent to Georgia. The myth that Georgia was a debtors' colony or a type of Botany Bay seems impossible to lay to rest with the truth.
Trustees of the colony sent about 5,000 persons from Great Britain to Georgia, and information about those colonists is published in E. Merton Coulter and Albert B. Saye, A List of the Early Settlers of Georgia (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1949). Each colonist received fifty acres of land, while those who paid their own passage might have received up to 500 acres.
The Salzburgers, central European Protestants, became the first non-British group to settle in Georgia beginning in 1734. They established themselves at Ebenezer in what is now Effingham County. After Georgia became a royal province in 1753, settlers began to move in from Virginia and the Carolinas in large numbers. Other immigrants included Piedmontese from Italy, Scots-Highlanders, Swiss, and Portuguese Jews.
When the Revolutionary War began, Georgia consisted of twelve parishes (these did not function as governments, however) and a large area of ceded lands which the Cherokee and Creek Indians had turned over to the colony in 1773. Georgia's first constitution, dated 1777, provided for the creation of Wilkes, Richmond, Burke, Effingham, Chatham, Liberty, Glynn, and Camden counties. In 1784 Washington and Franklin counties were organized. By 1820 Georgia established fifty counties, mostly from the area that comprised the original ten counties.
The Civil War left Georgia devastated with enormous strains upon the state's few factories and fragile railroad system. Factories and foundries of Atlanta, Griswaldville, Rome, and Roswell were completely destroyed. Millions of dollars in capital was lost by the emancipation of slaves. The soil was worn out and farm animals were gone.
The end of the war did not bring immediate recovery. Federal direct taxes added to the burden. Thousands of people, black and white, were displaced or missed in the 1870 federal census. Economic and social pressures led to racial conflict.
The decades following the war brought Georgia its last wave of nineteenth-century migration. North Carolinians came south to take advantage of the pine forests for turpentine and naval stores. Lumber, marble, granite, coal, and kaoline became major businesses, but cotton remained "king" through much of the twentieth century.
Atlanta recovered almost immediately after the Civil War as a transportation center. Today, it is still the hub of the South, with interstate roads, interstate railways, and air travel. The growth of Atlanta has been explosive, producing two distinct parts of Georgia-Atlanta and its suburbs as a modern, industrial, urban complex with many people born outside the state; and the rest of the state, which remains rural with declining population and wealth.
Immigration - Savannah, Georgia, served as one of the nation’s southern immigration ports. Passenger lists of immigrants arriving at Savannah are available (however, they are sketchy during early years) on federal microfilm M575, Passengers Arriving at Miscellaneous Ports on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, at the National Archives and the FHL.
British merchant claims, published over many years in Virginia Genealogist and The North Carolina Genealogical Society Journal, respectively, document the migration of thousands of families to Georgia before 1810. Georgia governors issued passports of good character for families passing through the Indian lands for the West prior to 1820. These passports are abstracted in Dorothy Williams Potter, Passports of Southeastern Pioneers, 1770–1823 (Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1982). See also Marion R. Hemperley, “Savannah Federal Naturalization Oaths, 1790–1860,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 51 (1967): 454-87; and Linda Woodward Geiger and Meyer L. Frankel, Index to Georgia’s Federal Naturalization Records to 1950, Excluding Military Petitions (Atlanta: Georgia Genealogical Society, 1996).
Native American - The majority of Georgia’s Native American population consisted of Cherokees and Creeks, both of whom were removed from the area to the west onto land that would become the Indian and Oklahoma territories before Oklahoma statehood. Some remaining Creeks removed themselves to land in Alabama. While the history of Georgia’s native population differs from that of North Carolina, the records in which they are documented are similar. See the Native American section under North Carolina for a complete discussion of available records and their whereabouts. Early federal records of Cherokees are more extensive for Georgia than any other eastern state. These records are in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The Georgia Archives has indexed unpublished typescripts of state records concerning the Creeks and Cherokees, including information on their white relations.
See Robert S. Davis Jr., A Guide to Native American (Indian) Research Sources at the Georgia Department of Archives and History (Jasper, Ga.: the author, 1985).
African American - The Georgia Archives has lists of free persons of color, marriages, slave lists, imported slave lists, apprenticeship bonds, trial dockets, lists of slave owners, cemetery records, church records, bills of sale, deeds transferring slaves, plantation records, and other miscellaneous records. Not every Georgia county created or preserved each type of record listed above. In fact, the number of local records attesting to a specific slave is minuscule when compared to those available for free persons. Many such sources are described in Davis and Brooke, Georgia Research, 84-86.
In 1940 the Federal Writers’ Project produced Drums and Shadows: Surviving Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), which covers the social history of a specific group of African Americans in Georgia’s history. For statewide information on narratives of former slaves, see Howard E. Potts, A Comprehensive Name Index for the American Slave (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997).
The National Archives has federal census schedules, military records, Freedmen’s Bureau, and related records. The National Archives will soon have available on microfilm records of the post Civil War Georgia offices of the Freedman’s Bureau. The FHL has some federal records pertaining to former slaves and sells a CD-ROM of the extensive personal information on depositors in the Freedman’s bank, which had offices in Atlanta, Augusta, and Savannah. Each of the guidebooks noted in Background Sources discusses federal records as they pertain to African American research.
Georgia History by County
