Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state in the Southeastern, South Atlantic, and Deep South regions of the United States. It borders Tennessee to the northwest, North Carolina and South Carolina to the northeast, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Florida to the south, and Alabama to the west. Of the 50 U.S. states, Georgia is the 24th-largest by area and eighth-most populous. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, its 2024 estimated population was 11,180,878. Atlanta, a global city, is both the state's capital and its largest city. The Atlanta metropolitan area, with a population greater than 6.3 million people in 2023, is the eighth most populous metropolitan area in the United States and contains about 57% of Georgia's entire population. Other major metropolitan areas in the state include Augusta, Savannah, Columbus, and Macon.
The Province of Georgia was established in 1732, with its first settlement occurring in 1733 when Savannah was founded. By 1752, Georgia had transitioned into a British royal colony, making it the last and southernmost of the original Thirteen Colonies. On January 2, 1788, Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution. Between 1802 and 1804, a portion of western Georgia was carved out to create the Mississippi Territory, which eventually became the U.S. states of Alabama and Mississippi. Georgia declared its secession from the Union on January 19, 1861, joining the ranks of the original seven Confederate States. After the Civil War, it was the last state to be readmitted to the Union on July 15, 1870. In the late 19th century, during the post-Reconstruction period, Georgia's economy underwent significant changes, driven by a coalition of influential politicians, business leaders, and journalists, notably Henry W. Grady, who promoted the "New South" ideology focused on reconciliation and industrialization. In the mid-20th century, several notable figures from Georgia, including Martin Luther King Jr., emerged as key leaders in the civil rights movement. Since 1945, Georgia has experienced significant population and economic expansion, aligning with the larger Sun Belt trend.
Georgia is defined by a diversity of landscapes, flora, and fauna, such as the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Piedmont plateau. Except for some elevated areas in the Blue Ridge, Georgia predominantly experiences a humid subtropical climate.
History
Pre-settlement
Before settlement by European colonists, Georgia was governed by mound building polities such as Ocute and Coosa.Colonial era and Revolutionary War
On February 12, 1733, a year after Georgia was established as a British colony, the Province of Georgia was established in Savannah by British General James Oglethorpe. It was administered by the Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia in America under a charter issued by King George II. The Trustees implemented an elaborate plan for the colony's settlement, known as the Oglethorpe Plan, which envisioned an agrarian society of yeoman farmers and prohibited slavery. The colony was invaded by the Spanish in 1742, during the War of Jenkins' Ear. In 1752, after the government failed to renew subsidies that had helped support the colony, the Trustees turned over control to the crown. Georgia became a crown colony, with a governor appointed by the king of Great Britain.The Province of Georgia was one of the Thirteen Colonies that revolted against British rule in the American Revolution. Its delegates to the Second Continental Congress, which convened in present-day Independence Hall in Philadelphia, joined other delegates in unanimously approving the Declaration of Independence, which declared the Thirteen Colonies free and independent from British colonial rule.
Independence
Georgia's first constitution was ratified in February 1777. Georgia was the 10th state to ratify the Articles of Confederation on July 24, 1778, and was the 4th state to ratify the United States Constitution on January 2, 1788.After the Creek War, General Andrew Jackson forced the Muscogee tribes to surrender land to Georgia, including in the Treaty of Fort Jackson, surrendering 21 million acres in what is now southern Georgia and central Alabama, and the Treaty of Indian Springs. In 1829, gold was discovered in the North Georgia mountains leading to the Georgia Gold Rush and establishment of a federal mint in Dahlonega, which continued in operation until 1861. The resulting influx of American settlers put pressure on the federal U.S. government to take land from the Cherokee Nation. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act, sending many eastern Indian nations to reservations in present-day Oklahoma, including all of Georgia's tribes. Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Worcester v. Georgia that U.S. states were not permitted to redraw Indian boundaries, President Jackson and the state of Georgia ignored the ruling. In 1838, his successor, Martin Van Buren, dispatched federal troops to gather the tribes and deport them west of the Mississippi. This forced relocation, known as the Trail of Tears, led to the death of more than four thousand Cherokees.
American Civil War
In early 1861, as the American Civil War commenced, Georgia chose to leave the Union to join the Confederacy. Support for secession from the Union enjoyed a slight majority among the state's delegates, and the state ultimately became one of several major military theaters during the Civil War.Major battles took place at Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, and Atlanta. In December 1864, a large swath of the state from Atlanta to Savannah, was destroyed during General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea, during which 18,253 Georgian soldiers were killed, representing roughly one of every five then in service of the Confederacy. One of the most notorious Civil War sites in the state was the Andersonville Prison, where nearly 13,000 Union prisoners of war died because of inhumane conditions and ill treatment. Following the war, the camp's commander Henry Wirz was sentenced to death for war crimes and hanged, making him the highest-ranking Confederate official to be executed.
Reconstruction and civil rights
Georgia did not re-enter the Union until July 15, 1870, as the last of the former Confederate states to be re-admitted. Federal troops would continue to be stationed in the state until the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877. With white Democrats having regained power in the state legislature, they passed a poll tax that year which disenfranchised many poor black people, preventing them from registering. In 1908, the state established a white primary; with the only competitive contests within the Democratic Party, it was another way to exclude black people from politics. They constituted 46.7% of the state's population in 1900, but the proportion of Georgia's population that was African American dropped thereafter to 28%, primarily due to tens of thousands leaving the state during the Great Migration., accessed March 15, 2008 In 1910, a secret meeting was held on Jekyll Island, off Georgia's Atlantic coast, to plan for the creation of an American central banking system. The decisions made at the meeting resulted in the passing of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.According to the Equal Justice Initiative's 2015 report on lynching in the United States, Georgia had 531 deaths, the second-highest total of these extralegal executions of any state in the South. The overwhelming number of victims were black and male. Many of the killings were committed by the white supremacist hate group the Ku Klux Klan, whose second iteration was formed at Georgia's Stone Mountain by William Joseph Simmons on November 25, 1915. The Klan's revival was spurned in part by the 1913 murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan and the lynching two years later of her convicted killer, Jewish pencil factory supervisor and B'nai B'rith Atlanta chapter president Leo Frank. The affair led to the creation of the Anti-Defamation League, which successfully lobbied for Frank to be posthumously pardoned in 1986. Political disfranchisement persisted through the mid-1960s, until after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
File:MLK Memorial in Atlanta, Georgia by George Paul Puvvada..jpg|thumb|Martin Luther King Jr.'s tomb at Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park in Atlanta
Martin Luther King Jr., an Atlanta-born Baptist minister who was part of the educated middle class that had developed in the city's African-American community, emerged as a national leader in the civil rights movement in the 1950s. King joined with others to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta in 1957 to provide political leadership for the civil rights movement across the South. In 1956, riots occurred at the Sugar Bowl in Atlanta following a clash between Georgia Tech's president Blake R. Van Leer and Governor Marvin Griffin.
On February 5, 1958, during a training mission flown by a B-47, a Mark 15 nuclear bomb, also known as the Tybee Bomb, was lost off the coast of Tybee Island near Savannah. The bomb was thought by the Department of Energy to lie buried in silt at the bottom of Wassaw Sound.
By the 1960s, the proportion of African Americans in Georgia had declined to 28% of the state's population, after waves of migration to the North and some immigration by whites. With their voting power diminished, it took some years for African Americans to win a state-wide office. Julian Bond, a civil rights leader, was elected to the Georgia's House of Representatives in 1965, and served multiple terms there and subsequently in Georgia's State Senate.
Atlanta mayor Ivan Allen Jr. testified before Congress in support of the Civil Rights Act, and Governor Carl Sanders worked with the Kennedy administration charged with ensuring the state's compliance. Ralph McGill, editor and syndicated columnist at the Atlanta Constitution, wrote supportively of civil rights movement. In 1970, Jimmy Carter, who was recently elected the state's governor, declared in his inaugural address that the era of racial segregation had ended. In 1972, Georgians elected Andrew Young to Congress as the first African American Congressman since the Reconstruction era.