He was the other signer from Georgia of the U.S. Constitution. William Few was born in 1748 in Maryland and moved to Richmond County near Augusta in the 1770s. Few was an active Patriot during the American Revolution. He served in the military, in the state legislature, and as a delegate to the 1777 Georgia […]
Theodore Roosevelt’s great-great-grandfather was Georgia’s first chief executive. Archibald Bulloch was born in Charleston in 1730 and moved to Georgia in 1758. When the revolutionary crisis began, Bulloch became an outspoken leader of the Liberty Party that championed American rights. He served as president of Georgia’s Provincial Congress that met in 1775 to address the […]
James Jackson was a pugnacious politician with a fiery temper. Born in England in 1756, he came to Savannah as a teen and fought in the American Revolution. Jackson served in the first Congress under the new U.S. Constitution, and supported Thomas Jefferson’s fledgling Democratic-Republicans against Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists. Jackson was in the U.S. Senate […]
Samuel Elbert had every reason to support the British during the American Revolution. A successful and conservative Savannah businessman, he might favor security over revolution, but Elbert, like many Americans, chose a different path. His business made him a colonial leader in the colony, and his revolutionary fervor made him a captain in the militia. […]
In 1776, Georgia patriots, like other Americans during the Revolution, battled not only the British, but demoralization when things went badly…. Or, in the words of Thomas Paine, “the summer soldier and the sunshine Patriot.” Paine, a master at propaganda, had rallied Americans earlier that year with his pamphlet Common Sense, a clarion call for […]
A theology degree from Yale led to chaplaincy in the Army for New England-born Abraham Baldwin. After the war, he followed his friend Nathanael Greene to Georgia, to settle in Augusta, practice law, and start his stellar political career. As a state legislator, Baldwin staunchly believed that education was the key to Georgia’s future. When […]
He was the last Georgia governor who answered to the King. James Wright, born in London in 1716, came to South Carolina as a teenager when his father became the colony’s chief justice. In 1760, he was named by King George III as the third royal governor of Georgia. He thoroughly invested in the colony, […]
Lyman Hall was an ordained minister, a doctor and one of three Georgians to sign the Declaration of Independence, quite a resume for a man born in Connecticut in 1747. Hall was from old New England stock and graduated from Yale. He abandoned the congregational ministry for medicine and moved South, eventually settling in Georgia […]