History of Georgia (U.S. state)
The history of Georgia in the United States of America spans pre-Columbian time to the present-day U.S. state of Georgia. The area was inhabited by Aboriginal tribes for thousands of years. A modest Spanish presence was established in the late 16th century, mostly centered on Catholic missions. The Spanish had largely withdrawn from the territory by the early 18th century, although they had settlements in nearby Florida. They had little influence historically in what would become Georgia.
Georgia was founded by James Oglethorpe in 1732. Oglethorpe envisioned the new colony as a refuge for the debtors who crowded London prisons; however, no such prisoners were among the initial settlers. Military concerns were a far more motivating force for the British government, which wanted Georgia 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.
European Americans began to settle in Georgia, although it was territory of both the Creek and the Cherokee nations. They pressured state and the federal government to remove the Indians. After Indian Removal in the 1830s, under President Jackson, the pace of settlement by European Americans increased rapidly. The new cotton gin, invented at the end of the 18th century, enabled the profitable processing of short-staple cotton, which could now be grown in the inland and upcountry regions. This change stimulated the cotton boom in Georgia and much of the Deep South, resulting in cotton being a main economic driver, cultivated on slave labor. Based on enslaved labor, planters cleared and developed large cotton plantations. Many became immensely wealthy, but most of the yeomen whites did not own slaves and worked family subsistence farms.
On January 19, 1861, Georgia seceded from the Union and on February 8, 1861, joined other Southern states, all slave societies, to form the Confederate States of America. Georgia contributed nearly one hundred twenty thousand soldiers to the Confederacy, with about five thousand Georgians joining the Union Army. The first major battle in the state was the Battle of Chickamauga, a Confederate victory, and the last major Confederate victory in the west. In 1864, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's armies invaded Georgia as part of the Atlanta campaign. The burning of Atlanta was followed by Sherman's March to the Sea, which laid waste to a wide swath of the state from Atlanta to Savannah in late 1864. These events became iconic in the state's memory and dealt a devastating economic blow to the entire Confederacy.
After the war, Georgians endured a period of economic hardship. Reconstruction was a period of military occupation. With enfranchisement of freedmen, who allied with the Republican Party, a biracial legislature was elected. It established public education and welfare institutions for the first time in the state, and initiated economic programs. Reconstruction ended in 1875 after white Democrats regained political control of the state, through violence and intimidation at elections. They passed new laws and constitutional amendments that disenfranchised blacks and many poor whites near the turn of the century. In the Jim Crow era from the late 19th century to 1964, blacks were suppressed as second-class citizens, nearly excluded from politics. Thousands of blacks migrated North to escape these conditions and associated violence. The state was predominately rural, with an agricultural economy based on cotton into the 20th century. All residents of the state suffered in the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The many training bases and munitions plants established in World War II stimulated the economy, and provided some new opportunities for blacks. During the broad-based activism of the Civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, Atlanta, Georgia was the base of African-American leader, minister Martin Luther King Jr. The state integrated public facilities. After 1950 the economy grew and became more diverse, with cotton receding in importance. Atlanta became a major regional city and transportation hub, expanding into neighboring communities through its fast-growing suburbs. Politically, Georgia was part of the Solid South until 1964, when it first voted for a Republican candidate for president. Democratic candidates continued to receive majority-white support in state and local elections until the 1990s, when the realignment of conservative whites shifted to the Republican Party. Atlanta was the host of the 1996 Summer Olympics, which marked the 100th anniversary of the modern Olympic Games. Georgia would grow rapidly both population wise and economically in the late 20th to early 21st century. In 2014, Georgia's population topped 10 million people, and was the fourth fastest growing U.S. state from 2013 to 2014.
Pre-colonial era
Before European contact, Native American cultures are divided under archaeological criteria into four lengthy periods of culture: Paleo, Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian. Their cultures and polities are identified by characteristics of artifacts and other archaeological evidence, including earthwork mounds that survive to the present and are visible aboveground.The human occupation of Georgia can be dated to at least 13,250 years ago. This was one of the most dramatic periods of climate change in recent earth history, toward the end of the Ice Age, in the Late Pleistocene epoch. Sea levels were more than lower than present levels. The Atlantic Ocean shoreline was 100 or more miles seaward of its current boundary. A 2003 research project undertaken by University of Georgia researchers Ervan G. Garrison, Sherri L. Littman, and Megan Mitchell, looked at and reported on fossils and artefacts associated with Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary, which is located more than beyond today's shoreline, and 60 to below the Atlantic Ocean. As recently as 8,000 years ago, Gray's Reef was dry ground, attached to the mainland. The researchers uncovered artefacts from a period of occupation by Clovis culture and Paleoindian hunters dating back more than 10,000 years. A 2005 study published by Texas A&M University suggested that Burke County may also have been a major center of Clovis culture. It possesses a particularly high number of Clovis and Dalton points, likely due to the large areas of exposed chert for making stone tools. In general, most Paleoindian projectile points in the state were found in a large strip of land running from southwest to northeast, crossing both the Piedmont and the Atlantic Plain.
The South Appalachian Mississippian culture, one of many mound building Native American cultures, lasted from 800 to 1500 AD. This culture developed urban societies distinguished by their construction of truncated earthworks pyramids, or platform mounds; as well as their hierarchical chiefdoms such as Coosa and Ocute; intensive village-based maize horticulture, which enabled the development of more dense populations; and creation of ornate copper, shell and mica paraphernalia adorned with a series of motifs known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. The largest sites surviving in present-day Georgia are Kolomoki in Early County, Etowah in Bartow County, Nacoochee Mound in White County, and Ocmulgee National Monument in Macon.
European exploration
At the time of European colonization of the Americas, the historic Iroquoian-speaking Cherokee and Muskogean-speaking Yamasee and Hitchiti peoples lived throughout Georgia.The coastal regions were occupied by groups of small, Muskogean-speaking tribes with a loosely shared heritage, consisting mostly of the Guale-associated groups to the east and the Timucua group to the south. This group of 35 tribes had lands that extended into central Florida; they were bordered by the Hitchiti and their territory to the west.
The Muskogean peoples were related by language to the three large Muskogean nations that occupied territories between the Mississippi River and the Cherokee: the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Coushatta. There were also a few other small Muskogean tribes along the Florida-Alabama Gulf Coast region. Archaeology shows that these historic peoples were in this region, at the very least, from the 12th century to colonial times. The name for Appalachia came from the Timucuan language, and a specific group from northern Florida called the Apalachee.
Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León may have sailed along the coast during his exploration of Florida. In 1526, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón attempted to establish a colony on an island, possibly near St. Catherines Island. At San Miguel de Gualdape, the first Catholic Mass took place in the boundaries of what are today the United States.
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. A vast undertaking, de Soto's North American expedition ranged across parts of the modern states of Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. His expedition traversed much of the state of Georgia from south to north, and it recorded encountering many native groups along the way. These have largely been identified as part of the Mississippian culture and its chiefdoms.
An expedition of French Protestants founded the colonial settlement of Charlesfort in 1562 on Parris Island off the coast of South Carolina. Jean Ribault and his party of French Huguenots settled an area in the Port Royal Sound area of present-day South Carolina.Within a year the colony failed. Most of the colonists followed René Goulaine de Laudonnière south and founded a new outpost called Fort Caroline in present-day Florida.
Over the next few decades, a number of Spanish explorers from Florida visited the inland region of present-day Georgia. The Mississippian culture way of life, described by de Soto in 1540, had completely disappeared by the mid-1600s. The people may have suffered from new infectious diseases carried by the Europeans. Remaining peoples are believed to have coalesced as the documented historic tribes.
English fur traders from the Province of Carolina first encountered the Creek people in 1690.The English established a fort at Ocmulgee. There they traded iron tools, guns, cloth, and rum for deerskins and Indian slaves, captured by warring tribes in regular raids.