Only two Georgians have served as Secretary of State. John Forsyth was one of them. Born in Virginia in 1780, Forsyth went to school in Wilkes County, Georgia, before graduating from the future Princeton University in 1799. He returned to Augusta to practice law and married the daughter of Josiah Meigs, the president of the […]
A man who killed a political opponent in a duel nearly became the first president from Georgia, long before Jimmy Carter. William Crawford began his political career in 1803 as a state legislator from Oglethorpe County. Even though he killed a political enemy in a duel in 1802, Crawford’s political star kept rising, with service […]
He was Georgia’s Civil War governor who opposed almost every Confederate policy. Joseph Emerson Brown was born in South Carolina in 1821 and was raised in north Georgia. He rode a successful legal career all the way to the governorship in 1859. Brown championed the common man and for the rest of his life he […]
She was an outspoken opponent of slavery who married one of the largest slaveholders in the South. Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble was born in London in 1809 in a family of actors, and she became an established actress herself. In Philadelphia in 1832 she met and eventually married Pierce Butler, a Georgia plantation owner with […]
A Georgia native founded the most influential black newspaper of the 20th century. Robert Sengstacke Abbott was born on St. Simon’s island in 1868 and raised in Savannah. He attended law school in Chicago. When Abbott couldn’t find a job as a lawyer, he turned to journalism and founded the Chicago Defender. Within a decade […]
The Civil Rights movement boasted many heroes; some, sadly, unsung. Thomas Brewer was born in Alabama in 1894, and earned a medical degree at Meharry Medical College in Nashville. In 1920, Brewer moved to Columbus, Georgia, opened a practice and became a leader in the thriving black professional community. He helped establish the Columbus chapter […]
“Atlanta is ours, and fairly won:” the immortal words of General William Tecumseh Sherman when he captured Atlanta on this date in 1864. Sherman had taken the Deep South’s major manufacturing center and railroad hub, a huge loss for the Confederacy. Unwilling to attack Atlanta’s strong defenses, U.S. forces swept west and south around the […]
It was one of the most audacious military movements in history—and one of the most controversial. U.S. General William Tecumseh Sherman captured Atlanta in September 1864 and two months later was ready to move. He sent General George Thomas to deal with the Confederate Army moving toward Nashville, while he took the rest of his […]
The threat of secession hung heavy over the land eight days after Abraham Lincoln’s election. Alexander Stephens, who had known Lincoln from his days in Congress, addressed the Georgia General Assembly on this day in 1860. He told the legislature secession was premature. Alexander Hamilton Stephens, born in 1812 near Crawfordville, had been a dominant […]
It was built to look like the United States Capitol and is now a national historic landmark. Georgia’s capital moved from Milledgeville to Atlanta in 1868 but without any buildings to house it, so state government had two temporary quarters—the old Atlanta City Hall and the Kimball Opera House. In 1883, the state legislature authorized […]
