Georgia in the American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  Georgia's secession convention in January 1861 required every delegate to sign a pledge supporting secession, no matter how they had actually voted. Contemporary accounts note that the organizers had simply "cooked the numbers." In February 1861, Georgia joined six other states to form the Confederate States of America. Governor Joseph E. Brown had already told Georgians in December 1860 that Abraham Lincoln's presidency would bring "the total abolition of slavery." But the Georgia that entered the war was not the united front its convention suggested. How many Georgians truly supported the Confederate cause? What happened when the Union blockade severed the state's cotton trade? And what did one general's campaign do to a state that had been largely untouched by war for the first two years of the conflict?

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• 2. Why Georgia Seceded

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  Georgian delegate Henry L. Benning traveled to the Virginia Secession Convention in February 1861 with a clear message. He declared that Georgia had seceded out of a "deep conviction" that only separation from the North could prevent the abolition of slavery. Religious leaders across the state made similar arguments. One preacher condemned abolitionists and Republicans as holding views "diametrically opposed to the letter and spirit of the Bible." Celebrations had already erupted in Savannah when South Carolina voted to secede in late 1860. Mississippi's secession commissioner William L. Harris addressed Georgia legislators directly. He warned that Republicans aimed to promote "equality between the white and negro races" and that secession was the only defense against their policies. The convention's own ordinance named slavery in the territories as a central grievance. It also cited Republican leaders' public declarations of racial equality as a key cause for separation. The same arguments would surface three years later, when the Confederate government proposed something that unsettled many Georgians: arming their own enslaved population.

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• 3. Governor Brown's Defiance

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  Governor Joseph E. Brown spent the war fighting on two fronts: one against the Union and one against his own Confederate government. He resisted the Confederate military draft, working to keep soldiers inside Georgia's borders. He challenged Confederate orders to impress animals, goods, and enslaved people from the state. Several other Confederate governors followed his lead. Brown believed fiercely in states' rights, and he applied that belief against Richmond as readily as against Washington.

  By summer 1861, the Union blockade had virtually shut down Georgia's cotton exports and the import of manufactured goods. Food that had normally arrived by rail from the Northern states was now halted. The legislature imposed cotton quotas and made it a crime to grow too much, hoping to redirect farmland toward food production. Planters resisted, expecting European powers to break the blockade and send cotton prices higher. In more than a dozen instances across the state, poor white women raided stores and captured supply wagons. They were after necessities: bacon, corn, flour, and cotton yarn. Confederate armies began seizing food directly from Georgians and South Carolinians. Brown lamented that such actions had been "ruinous to the people of the northeastern part of the State." Late in the war, as farms went untended and families went hungry, soldiers deserted in growing numbers to attend to their homes.

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• 4. The War Within Georgia

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  Approximately 5,000 Georgians chose to fight on the Union side. They served in units including the 1st Georgia Infantry Battalion and East Tennessean regiments. Georgia supplied fewer Union volunteers than any other Confederate state except South Carolina.

  Rabun County, in the state's northeast, stood largely against secession. One contemporary account called the county "almost a unit" against leaving the Union. A resident recalled in 1865 that the people of the county were "more averse to secession" than anyone he knew. The same resident estimated that in the entire county, "not exceeding twenty men" had favored secession.

  Historian Jonathan Dean Sarris examined Fannin and Lumpkin counties in his study "A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South." He found a "complex web of local, regional, and national loyalties" connecting these mountain societies, making simple Union-versus-Confederate labels inadequate. The Madden Branch Massacre in Fannin County was one of several atrocities that resulted from this internal division. On the 29th of November 1864, John P. Gatewood, called "the long-haired, red-bearded beast from Georgia," killed six Georgians who were trying to join the U.S. Army. The six who died were Thomas Bell, Harvey Brewster, James T. Hughes, James B. Nelson, Elijah Robinson, and Samuel Lovell. Peter Parris and Wyatt J. Parton escaped.

  Away from the mountains, the Okefenokee Swamp sheltered another kind of resistance. Black Jack Island and Soldiers Camp Island within the swamp reportedly harbored over 1,000 deserters. By 1864, the Wiregrass Region had slipped so far from Confederate control that the government could no longer claim authority there. In the backcountry of Pulaski, Montgomery, and Telfair counties, along Gum Swamp Creek in what is now Dodge County, similar groups gathered. Draft evaders and deserters held out against Confederate authority there until the war ended.

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• 5. The Slave Soldier Question

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  The Atlanta Southern Confederacy newspaper, publishing out of Macon, greeted a late-war proposal with fury. The Confederate government was weighing the idea of arming enslaved men to fight as soldiers. The newspaper called this "a stigma on the imperishable pages of history, of which all future generations of Southrons would be ashamed." Its position was unambiguous: "Let us put the negro to work, but not to fight."

  Georgian Democrat Howell Cobb called the proposition "the most pernicious idea that has been suggested since the war began." He argued that the moment the Confederacy turned to enslaved soldiers, "your white soldiers will be lost to you." Cobb added a point that cut to the core of Confederate ideology: "If slaves make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong." Despite these protests, the Confederate Congress passed a law on the 13th of March 1865, allowing troops to be raised from the enslaved population. By mid-April, a few recruiting stations had appeared in Macon. Whether any enslaved men were actually recruited through them remains unknown.

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• 6. Sherman's Campaign

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  William T. Sherman began his invasion of Georgia in May 1864, pushing south from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston's army fell back in a series of flanking maneuvers, fighting to delay rather than stop Sherman's advance. The largest pitched battle of Johnston's retreat was at Kennesaw Mountain. In July, Confederate President Jefferson Davis replaced Johnston with the more aggressive John Bell Hood. Hood launched counterattacks at Peachtree Creek and at the Battle of Atlanta, but they failed. Atlanta fell on the 2nd of September 1864.

  In November 1864, Sherman stripped his army of everything non-essential, burned Atlanta, and began his March to the Sea. His forces burned plantations, wrecked railroads, killed livestock, and freed enslaved people as they moved toward the coast. Thousands of those freed people followed his army as it entered Savannah on December 22. News of the march reached Georgian soldiers in Robert E. Lee's army in Virginia. Whole regiments deserted, feeling they were needed at home.

  Sherman himself estimated the campaign had caused $100 million in damage, roughly $1.4 billion in 2012 dollars. About one fifth of that, in his own assessment, benefited the Union cause; the rest he described as "simple waste and destruction." His army wrecked 300 miles of railroad along with numerous bridges and miles of telegraph lines. It seized 5,000 horses, 4,000 mules, and 13,000 head of cattle. His forces also confiscated 9.5 million pounds of corn and 10.5 million pounds of fodder. During the Atlanta campaign in July 1864, Sherman ordered around 400 mill workers from Roswell arrested as traitors. Most were women. They were shipped as prisoners to the North with their children, and little evidence exists that more than a few ever returned home.

  Margaret Mitchell set her 1936 novel Gone with the Wind in the chaos of Sherman's march, and a film followed in 1939. The story that took hold in Georgia's memory focused less on destruction than on what the women of the home front managed to save. Across the state, Sherman's forces destroyed twelve county courthouses. The courthouse at Ringgold was the lone exception: Sherman spared it upon learning it also served as a Masonic lodge.

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• 7. The Long Reckoning

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  On the 16th of April 1865, soldiers fought each other at Columbus, on the Georgia-Alabama border. By some criteria, the engagement is reckoned as the last battle of the Civil War. Georgia's state legislature settled the question in 1935, officially declaring it "the last battle of the War Between the States."

  Georgia was placed in the Third Military District after the war ended, its economy in ruins and many of its people dead or wounded. Reconstruction began immediately after the hostilities ceased. The enslaved people of the state were emancipated in 1865. Georgia did not re-enter the Union until the 15th of July 1870, becoming the last of the former Confederate states to be re-admitted. The state remained poor well into the twentieth century. At Sweetwater Creek State Park in Douglas County, one of the last buildings burned by Sherman's army still stands: New Manchester Mill.

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