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1 The Georgia navy December 1860–february 1861 all eyes were on charleston. south carolina’s efforts to negotiate with the new republican administration had been rebuffed. There was no agreement on formerly shared property—like the newly built fort sumter in charleston’s outer harbor. The u.s. army had occupied it, moving there in the dead of night from fort Moultrie on sullivan’s island. The move infuriated the south. from ossabaw sound below savannah, susan Kollock wrote her son, George, at virginia Military institute: “Georgia is in a perfect flame of indignation.” senator robert Toombs in Washington warned Governor Joseph e. Brown that the north might send troops to fort Pulaski, the great fortress at the mouth of the savannah river. as a preemptive measure, the governor ordered colonel alexander lawton’s Georgia militia to occupy the fort.When lawton’s troops marched through a driving rain to the savannah waterfront, a crowd turned out to cheer them, people packed so densely the soldiers could barely get to the boat. savannah newspapers, reflecting the bellicose attitude of the citizenry , reported that had the governor not taken action, the fort would have been occupied by “a spontaneous uprising of the people.” “in ten more days,” Mrs. Kollock wrote her son, “i hope Georgia will be out of this disgraceful union, and free of the broken constitution.”1 Within two weeks a convention would convene to accomplish just that. at Milledgeville, the state capital, nearly three hundred of Georgia’s leading judges and attorneys, planters and farmers, newspaper editors, and politicians met to decide the fate of those they represented, and that of generations to follow. Most urged following the path their forefathers had taken in 1776—independence . The secessionists’ ranks had swelled since the presidential election in no- 2 / chapter 1 vember. The last insult had been borne, they said. Georgians could no longer maintain with dignity, honor, or safety their place in the union. savannah’s francis Bartow and Macon’s eugenius nisbet—strong unionists until the election—had converted to the faith and now led the forces for immediate secession and independence . a few still held out for the union. senator herschel v. Johnson and little alec stephens of the u.s. house, and even stephens’s archenemy, the tall, handsome congressman, Ben hill,2 spoke for moderation and reason, for keeping Georgia in the nation she had helped create, safe within the sheltering arms of the federal government. That, their opponents retorted, meant submitting to a colonial bondage imposed by the bankers and brokers of Philadelphia and new york and a political domination that would see Boston and the hated yankees rule the south. The unionists—stephens, hill, Johnson, and their followers—were few. in the main, the Milledgeville delegates agreed that Georgia should be out of the union: the question was not if, but when and how. The division was between the cooperationists who thought the southern states should go out as a group, and the immediate secessionists who called for Georgia to make her decision regardless of what other states might do.3 Macon’s Mr. nisbet introduced a secession resolution. alec stephens opposed it. The best way to protect southern rights, stephens said, was to stay in the union and use the protective power of federal law. in the house, stephens had been close friends with illinois’s abe lincoln, whose election to the presidency had precipitated this hurried rush, after eighty years’ prologue, out of the union. stephens knew lincoln to be a moderate and reasonable man on the abolition question, even if his party did seem a haven for every southern-hating radical in the nation . lincoln would insure that southern property rights were protected, stephens thought. he, Johnson, and hill argued that the federal government was the best protection for slavery. But their arguments missed the point: what Georgians wanted was freedom from the north—now. senator Johnson moved to present a list of demands that must be met to keep Georgia within the union, like new england’s hartford convention had done in 1815. But the motion generated no interest, and the immediate versus cooperative secession debate raged on. all over the south conventions like Georgia’s were meeting, had already met, or were being anticipated and arranged by southern nationalists. and in the u.s. army and navy, southern officers (and northern- and foreign-born officers with ties to the south) faced decisions of honor and loyalty...

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