Civil War

June 11, 1863

Burning of Darien

The burning of Darien, Georgia, depicted in the Civil War movie, Glory, was one of the most controversial acts of the War. Situated on the Atlantic coast, Darien thrived during the antebellum period as the shipping point for cotton, rice, and lumber. In June 1863, most of Darien’s 500 residents had already fled inland when […]

May 14, 1864

Battle of Resaca

It was the first major battle of the Atlanta Campaign during the Civil War. The Battle of Resaca began 75 miles northwest of Atlanta on this day in 1864. Joe Johnston’s Confederate Army of Tennessee had wintered in Dalton after its defeat at Chattanooga the previous November. Sherman moved south into Georgia in May with […]

May 8, 1915

Henry McNeal Turner

Mixing religion and politics worked out well for Henry McNeal Turner. Free-born in South Carolina in 1834, he was educated by white attorneys at a firm where he did janitorial work. Drawn to preaching, he led revivals in Macon, Athens, and Augusta. He pastored a church in Washington D.C., where he met Republican congressmen Charles […]

May 5, 1864

Atlanta Campaign Begins

General William Tecumseh Sherman introduced himself to the people of Georgia on this day in 1864. The Confederacy still had a chance to win the Civil War if Robert E. Lee could hold onto the capital at Richmond, and if Joe Johnston could keep Sherman from taking Atlanta, the South’s major railroad hub. President Lincoln […]

May 3, 1816

Montgomery Meigs

He was a Georgia native responsible for turning Robert E. Lee’s plantation into a national cemetery. Montgomery Meigs was born in Augusta in 1816 and graduated from the U.S. Military academy at West Point. Meigs was assigned to the Army Corps of Engineers and oversaw the construction of many of Washington’s most important buildings, including […]

May 1, 1886

Jefferson Davis

It was a comeback tour for the man who had been Confederate president. Jefferson Davis lived quietly at his Mississippi home in the decades after the Civil War. But in 1886, he laid the cornerstone for a Confederate memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Henry Grady, the enterprising editor of the Atlanta Constitution, invited Davis to Atlanta […]

February 8, 1917

Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Established

Two things stood between U.S. General William Sherman and Atlanta in the spring of 1864: Kennesaw Mountain and Confederate General Joseph Johnston’s Army of Tennessee. Johnston, fighting a defensive campaign, slowed and frustrated Sherman as he tried to move south. Twenty miles northwest of Atlanta, Johnston set his army in a strong line along Kennesaw […]

April 20, 1824

Alfred Colquitt

Alfred Colquitt had an imposing resume: Ivy League graduate, Mexican War veteran, Confederate general, congressman, governor and senator. Born in Walton County in 1824, Colquitt graduated from Princeton, then practiced law in Monroe until he fought in the Mexican War, rising to the rank of major. He was elected to the U.S. Congress during the […]

April 16, 1865

Columbus Captured in the Civil War

Columbus was one of the South’s most important manufacturing centers before the Civil War. Georgia’s third largest city lay out of the U.S. Army’s path until Easter Sunday, 1865, a week after General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. U.S. General James Wilson and his cavalry—13,500 strong—launched a night attack that captured the city and more than […]

April 2, 1814

Henry L. Benning

A U.S. Army fort in Columbus is named for a man who waged war against the U.S. Army. Henry Benning, born in Columbia County, was one of Georgia’s most outspoken disunionists. During the sectional crisis of the 1850s, Benning defended slavery. He ran for Congress on a Southern rights platform and lost. But he found […]