Georgia During the Civil War
Even before the election of Abraham Lincoln in November,1860, southern states, including Georgia, had been airing their grievances against the candidate, who ran on a platform opposing the expansion of slavery into western territories. Since the South's economy was heavily dependent upon agriculture, cotton in particular, and a plantation system which relied on the the labor of African-American slaves, the region began to push for secession.
In January 1861, the Georgia Succession Convention issued an Ordinance of Secession, in which the state of Georgia, along with six other states (South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida) formally seceded from the Union. The war began when Confederate artillery fired on a Union garrison in Fort Sumter, a sea fort in Charleston, South Carolina on April 12th, 1861.
Up until the the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863, Georgia had been spared most of the fighting. After that last Confederate victory, total devastation came in the form of Union general William T. Sherman's Atlanta Campaign of 1864, and later on, the capture of Confederate president Jefferson Davis in Irwin County.
The Atlanta Campaign and Sherman's March to the Sea
William T. Sherman invaded Georgia as part of his Atlanta campaign, capturing the city of Atlanta on September 2nd, 1864.
In the following months, much of Georgia's civilian infrastructure was destroyed during Sherman's March to the Sea, in which Sherman burned Atlanta and weaved a path of destruction on route from Atlanta to Savannah. Along the way, slaves were freed, buildings and railroads destroyed, crops seized, and livestock killed.
The lasting impact of Sherman's march could still be felt during the Reconstruction period and beyond, breeding both resentment of Northern aggression and elevation of wartime figures such as Confederate general Robert E. Lee and Confederate president Jefferson Davis.
Slavery and the Confederacy
Slavery was legalized in Georgia by royal decree in 1751, and was further ingrained into the region's economy by Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793. The gin was first demonstrated on Revolutionary War hero Nathaniel's Greene's plantation near Savannah and led to the dependence of southern states on slave labor to support their economic prospects, which, in turn, depended heavily on cash crops like cotton.
Georgia left the Union, in large part, to preserve the slave labor system, the foundation on which the southern economy thrived. Until the very last weeks of the Civil War, African-Americans (slave or free) were forbidden to join the Union army, although they did contribute much in the way of wartime labor, including support roles in infrastructure, mining, and medicine.
Upon the dissolution of the Confederacy in April of 1865, the institution of slavery ceased to be the driving engine of the Georgia economy.
Georgia After the Civil War: Reconstruction
After Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox courthouse in Virginia, the official end of the Civil War, a period of Reconstruction began in the South. The passing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st, 1863 freed slaves in ten states, (including Georgia), and since these men could no longer be used as labor, the economic system collapsed. It would take many years, well into the twentieth century, for the South to fully recover.
Although African-Americans were granted their freedom from slavery, they would continue to suffer many hardships, at the hands of white nationalist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and Red Shirts and, beginning in 1890, the infamous Jim Crow laws, enacted by state legislatures in the former Confederate States of America.
Artist's depiction of the destruction wreaked during General Sherman's march through Georgia
A map of Atlanta, Georgia, showing the positions of besieging Union troops. Source: Getty
Illustration showing the capture of the Confederate States president Jefferson Davis, 1865. Georgia, United States
Photo by Briggs Co./George Eastman House/Getty Images