The Civil War in Georgia: A New Georgia Encyclopedia Companion

SECTION 1: Prelude to War

SECTION 1 } Prelude to War Georgia’s Ordinance of Secession, signed in Milledgeville on January 21, 1861. Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library / University of Georgia Libraries. THE CIVILWARWAS VERY MUCH A POLITICALWAR, one brought on by the simultaneous failure of national political leadership and the triumph of Southern politicians pushing regional agendas. Following an overview of antebellum slavery and a socioeconomic snapshot of the state in 1860, this opening section focuses on the political issues, processes , and decisions that led Georgia out of the Union in January 1861 and negotiated its place within the Confederate nation created only a few weeks later. By the 1850s national debates over the institution of slavery, which had formed the bedrock of Georgia’s agricultural economy for a century , intensified as the United States continued to acquire new western territories. During this sectional crisis, many white Georgians, along with other Southerners, argued vehemently to maintain protections for slavery in the face of rising abolitionist sentiment in the North. The crisis finally culminated in secession. On January 19, 1861, Georgia became the fifth state to secede from the Union in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency, and the state joined with six others in Montgomery, Alabama, to form the new Confederate nation on February 1. The opening shots of the war in April at Fort Sumter, outside Charleston, South Carolina, and President Lincoln’s subsequent call for troops to put down the rebellion brought four more states into the Confederacy by May. In the end, the decision to leave the Union was made eleven different times by eleven different states over a period of five months. Despite the major national developments that fueled the secession movement across the South, there were significant variables in how the secession process played out in individual states. Differences in leadership, shifting sentiments , geographic variables among a state’s populace, and other factors all contributed to how and when Georgia and other states chose to take themselves out of the Union. Thus, while Georgia shared much along the road to disunion and war with its fellow Deep South states, certain circumstances, personalities, and socioeconomic realities also determined the route it took and the role it played within the larger Confederacy . 16 Prelude to War } Slavery When the Georgia Trustees first envisioned their colonial experiment in the early 1730s, they sought to avoid the slave-based plantation economy that had developed in other colonies in the American South. The allure of profits from slavery, however, proved to be too powerful for white Georgia settlers to resist. By the era of the American Revolution (1775–83), African slaves constituted nearly half of Georgia’s population. Although the Revolution fostered the growth of an antislavery movement in the Northern states, white Georgia landowners fiercely maintained their commitment to slavery even as the war disrupted the plantation economy. At the constitutional convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1787, Georgia delegates joined with South Carolina’s to insert clauses protecting slavery into the new federal charter. In subsequent decades slavery would play an ever-increasing role in Georgia’s shifting plantation economy. Cotton and the Growth of Slavery For almost the entire eighteenth century Georgia’s plantation economy was concentrated on the production of rice, a crop that could be commercially cultivated only in the Lowcountry. During the Revolution planters began to cultivate cotton for domestic use. After the war the explosive growth of the textile industry promised to turn cotton into a potentially lucrative staple crop—if only efficient methods of cleaning the tenacious seeds from the cotton fibers could be developed. By the 1790s entrepreneurs were perfecting new mechanized cotton gins, the most famous of which was invented by Eli Whitney on a Savannah River plantation owned by Catharine Greene in 1793. This technological advance presented Georgia planters with a staple crop that could be grown over much of the state. As early as the 1780s white politicians in Georgia were working to acquire and to distribute fertile western lands controlled by the Creek Indians, a process that continued in the nineteenth century with the expulsion of the Cherokees. By the 1830s cotton plantations had spread across most of the state. As was the case for rice production, cotton planters relied upon the labor power of enslaved African and African American people. Accordingly , the slave population of Georgia increased dramatically during the Slavery 17 early...