History of Georgia (U.S. state)

Military concerns were a far more motivating force for the British government, which wanted Georgia (named for King George II) as a buffer zone to protect South Carolina and its other southern colonies against incursions from Florida by the Spanish, Britain’s greatest rival for North American territory.

As a result, a series of fortifications was built along the coast, and on several occasions, most notably the Battle of Bloody Marsh on St. Simons Island, British troops that were commanded and financed by Oglethorpe kept the Spanish at bay.

[9] From 1539 to 1542 Hernando de Soto, a Spanish conquistador, led the first European expedition deep into the territory of the modern-day southern United States searching for gold, and a passage to China.

The conflict between Spain and England over control of Georgia began in earnest in about 1670, when the English colony of South Carolina was founded just north of the missionary provinces of Guale and Mocama, part of Spanish Florida.

English settlement began in the early 1730s after James Oglethorpe, a Member of Parliament, proposed that the area be colonized with the "worthy poor" of England, to provide an alternative to the overcrowded debtors' prisons of the period.

The plan framed a system of "agrarian equality" designed to support and perpetuate an economy based on family farming and to prevent the social disintegration they associated with unregulated urbanization.

[20] Because of the development of large plantations and commodity crops that required numerous slaves for cultivation and processing, the society of the Georgia coast was more like that of such British colonies as Barbados and Jamaica, than of Virginia.

At the Siege of Savannah in 1779, American and French troops (the latter including a company of free men of color from Saint-Domingue, who were mixed race) fought unsuccessfully to retake the city.

In the abstraction [removal] of negro slaves, by the burning of dwellings, in the obliteration of plantations, by the destruction of agricultural implements, and by theft of domestic animals and personal effects, it is estimated that at least one half of the available property of the inhabitants had, during this period, been completely swept away.

Leading Georgia patriots such as Archibald Bulloch, Stephen Heard, Lyman Hall, John Houstoun, Samuel Elbert, Edward Telfair and George Mathews were all instrumental in both encouraging the Loyalists to stay and in making sure that they were not mistreated during the peace that followed the war.

In the city of Savannah, Archibald Bulloch, Stephen Heard, Lyman Hall and John Houstoun all made personal appeals to the loyalists to "stay on" after the war ended and make the best of their lives under the new republican form of government.

The slave population increased to work the plantations, but the native Cherokee tribe was removed and resettled west in Oklahoma, in the final two decades before the Civil War, as explained further in the paragraphs below.

The lower Piedmont or 'Black Belt' counties – comprising the middle third of the state and initially named for the region's distinctively dark and fertile soil – became the site of the largest and most productive cotton plantations.

In July 1864, during the Atlanta campaign, General Sherman ordered approximately 400 Roswell mill workers, mostly women, arrested as traitors and shipped as prisoners to the North with their children.

[55] Poor white women raised more than two dozen riots when they raided stores and captured supply wagons to get such necessities as bacon, corn, flour, and cotton yarn.

[citation needed] Refusing to give up social domination, some ex-Confederates organized insurgent paramilitary groups, especially chapters of the newly formed Ku Klux Klan.

One prominent beneficiary of this system was the Republican jurist and politician Joseph E. Brown, whose railroads, coal mines and iron works supplemented their workforce with convict labor.

Born in Massachusetts, Du Bois had earned his doctorate in Germany and was one of the most highly educated black men in America; in 1897 he joined the faculty of Atlanta University and taught there for several years.

Through the lien system, small-county merchants assumed a central role in cotton production, monopolizing the supply of equipment, fertilizers, seeds and foodstuffs needed to make sharecropping possible.

Hoke Smith's tenure as governor was noted for the passage of Jim Crow laws and the 1908 constitutional amendment that required a person to satisfy qualifications for literacy tests and property ownership for voting.

In 1934, Georgia's poll tax, which also had excluded poor whites from voter rolls to reduce the Populist threat, was upheld in the Supreme Court case of Breedlove v. Suttles (1937).

Starting around 1910, and increasing as jobs began to open up during World War I, tens of thousands of African Americans in the Great Migration moved to northern industrial cities out of the rural South for work, better education for their children, the right to vote and for escape from the violence of lynchings.

The Drys were led by ministers and middle-class women of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, who succeeded in securing a local option law that dried up most of the rural counties.

[82] It was initially sold as a patent medicine for five cents[83] a glass at soda fountains, which were popular in the United States at the time due to the belief that carbonated water was good for the health.

However, the most powerful member of the Georgia delegation, Congressman Eugene Cox, often opposed legislation which favored labor and urban interests, particularly the National Industrial Recovery Act.

The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was denounced by Governor Marvin Griffin, who pledged to keep Georgia's schools segregated, "come hell or high water".

After delivering a commencement speech at the all-Black Morris Brown College, Van Leer was summoned by the board of regents where he was quoted Either we’re going to the Sugar Bowl or you can find yourself another damn president of Georgia Tech.

Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. testified before Congress in support of the Civil Rights Act, and Governor Carl Sanders worked with the Kennedy administration to ensure the state's compliance.

As the era of old south Democratic control, symbolized by iconic personalities Herman Talmadge and Georgia Speaker of the House Tom Murphy drew to an end, new Republican leaders took their place.

After being appointed to the U.S. Senate by his successor, Roy Barnes, following the death of early state GOP standard-bearer Paul Coverdell in 2000, Miller emerged as a prominent ally of George W. Bush on the war in Iraq, Social Security privatization, tax cuts, and other conservative-backed issues.