Politics of Georgia (U.S. state)
The cultural makeup of the early colony led to a ban on slavery being overturned soon after its implementation, setting the stage for the many plantations in the state.
Since then, Democrats have won the state just four times, for native son Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, Southerner Bill Clinton in 1992, and for Joe Biden in 2020.
The Province of Georgia was founded in 1733 as a British colony by a royal charter through a trust led by James Oglethorpe, a member of Parliament who had originally envisioned it as a place to resettle volunteering debtors instead of sending them to prison.
The province recruited yeomen settlers to occupy land where the native Yamasee had lived before the Yamasee War, acted as a buffer to protect earlier settlements in South Carolina from the Spanish presence in Florida, and hinder West African slaves from escaping and reaching lands beyond the frontier and the control of their owners.
Although most early Georgia colonists were English, Scottish, and German artisans seeking arable land or freedom of religion, many of them complained to their leaders that the ban on slavery created a labor shortage that impeded local finances, compared to other Southern colonies.
After Spain failed to conquer the area during the War of Jenkins' Ear, the province legalized slavery in 1749, altering the balance of power in the settlements.
Their owners, mostly South Carolina planters, were wealthier than the early settlers and soon gained most of the official political appointments in the Crown colony that replaced the trusteeship in 1754.
Georgia had two rival governments during the American Revolutionary War: the appointed Loyalist regime of James Wright and the Patriot administration, initially led by planter Archibald Bulloch.
In addition, nationwide anger among the 13 states about the Yazoo land scandal resulted in Georgia leaders defining their claim in 1802 at the Chattahoochee River up to its head of navigation at the site of modern Columbus and a line running north by west from there.
Unlike the Federalist Party, which backed strong central government, Jeffersonians wanted a freer hand in both Indian removal and expanded plantation slavery.
After the Compromise of 1850 tried to resolve slavery among the states as an issue of balance of power, the Georgia Platform was accepted by many Southerners as the policy by which secession could be avoided.
In the 1850s, most state Whigs joined a reinvented Democratic Party that became inflexible on the issues of supporting the expansion of slavery and a highly devolved federalism.
[6][7] The legislature passed laws to institute legal segregation of public facilities and Jim Crow customs governed many informal rules placing blacks in second-class status.
In the postwar era after World War II, African Americans, particularly veterans, renewed their activism for civil rights, including being able to exercise the franchise.
[10][4] In 2022, incumbent Democratic senator Warnock defeated Republican nominee Herschel Walker in the election, winning a full six-year term in office.
