Georgia

Statistics

The area of Georgia is 59,475 sq. m., and it is the largest of the original thirteen United States; bounded on the north by Tennessee and North Carolina, on the east by the Savannah River and the Atlantic Ocean, on the south by Florida, and on the west by Florida and Alabama. Population in 1790, 82,548; in 1830, 516,823; in 1870, 1,184,109; and in 1900, 2,216,331, including 1,034,813 negroes, 204 Chinese, 1 Japanese, and 19 Indians. The population of Savannah, the largest city, was, in 1900, 54,244. The present Constitution was adopted in 1877. The State is divided into 10 congressional districts, 44 senatorial districts, and 137 counties. No State in the American Union has such a variety of agricultural products. Cotton is the chief. Before the Civil War one-sixth of the total cotton crop of the United States was raised in Georgia. In 1883, 824,250 bales were produced; in 1907, 1,920,000. Georgia now ranks as the second cotton-producing State. Among other agricultural products, Georgia produced in 1907 5,010,000 bushels of oats, 57,538,000 bushels of corn, and 2,673,000 bushels of wheat. Georgia is likewise remarkable for the extent and variety of its woodland, its pine being world-famous. It possesses coal, iron, and gold mines, as well as silver, copper, and lead. In 1905 the value of its products of manufacture was $151,040,455, the capital employed being $135,211,551. Its favourable location, extensive railroads, and numerous navigable streams give Georgia excellent commercial advantages. Situated between the North and the South-West, the West and the Atlantic, trade between these sections passes through the State. Atlanta and Savannah are its principal commercial centres. The value of foreign commerce is estimated at $30,000,000. There is no Southern State equal to Georgia in the number of its railroad enterprises. Atlanta, Columbus, Mâcon, Savannah, and Augusta are the principal railroad centres. The mileage of railroads in 1907 was 6786.33.

Education

The Constitution provides for a “thorough system of common schools”, maintained by taxation “or otherwise”, and free for “white and coloured races”. The State school commissioner is appointed by the governor for a term of two years. Every county has a board of education and a superintendent, and is provided with free schools. Atlanta, Savannah, Augusta, Mâcon, and Columbus are separately organized under local laws. The State university, at Athens, founded in 1785, is non-sectarian and in 1908 had 199 instructors and 3375 students. Connected with it are agricultural colleges, a law school, and a medical school in various parts of the State.

The other prominent institutions of learning are Atlanta University at Atlanta, founded in 1869, non-sectarian, with 20 instructors and 340 students ; Clark University at Atlanta, founded in 1870, Methodist Episcopal, with 25 instructors and 532 students; Emory College at Oxford, founded in 1836, Methodist Episcopal, with 14 instructors and 265 students; Morris Brown College at Atlanta, founded in 1881, Methodist, with 28 instructors and 940 students; Shorter College at Rome, founded in 1877, Baptist, with 30 instructors and 250 students; and Wesleyan Female College at Mâcon, the first institution of learning for women in America, founded in 1836, Methodist Episcopal, with 33 instructors and 474 students. In the common schools of Georgia there were enrolled in 1907 499,103 pupils and 10,360 teachers.

Civil history

The swamps and pine lands of Georgia, the last colonized of the original thirteen American settlements, were all but untrod by the feet of white men before the eighteenth century. Tradition has it that De Soto, in his ill-starred march to his grave in the Mississippi, camped for a while in 1540 near the present city of Augusta; a more unreliable tradition asserts that Sir Walter Raleigh, on his initial voyage, “landed at the mouth of Savannah River, and visited the bluff on which the city was afterwards built”. For a century and a half the Uchees, Creeks, and Cherokees were left undisputed masters of their hunting-grounds — Lords of the Marches — between the English frontier to the north and the Spanish to the south. In the nature of things this could not long endure. By the voyage of John Cabot, in 1497, England laid claim to the Atlantic seaboard; by the settlement of St. Augustine, in 1565, Spain established its authority over the southern coast. The vastness of the new world deferred the inevitable clash of these overlapping claims until the settlement of South Carolina in 1670, when Spain, alarmed at this territorial expansion of the Protestant English colonies, began, by intrigues with Indians and negro slaves, to harass the safety of the latter colony. At the beginning of the eighteenth century Parliament began to feel that a military colony on the southern frontier was imperative, and this conclusion was felicitously complemented by the belief that the mulberry and the vine could be successfully cultivated on the southern hills and savannas; while a third great philanthropic consideration contributed to the final adoption of the scheme. James Oglethorpe, who had followed up a brilliant military career as aide-de-camp to the Prince Eugene by a still more brilliant parliamentary career, had conceived the plan of settling a colony in the New World with worthy, though unfortunate and economically unproductive, inmates of the wretched English prisons. With this threefold purpose in view, a petition was presented and accepted by the Privy Council and the Board of Trade, and the charter of the Colony of Georgia, named after the king and embracing the territory lying between the Savannah and the Altamaha Rivers, received the great seal of England on 9 June, 1732. This charter created a board of trustees for twenty-one years, who were to possess entire rights in the governing and the financing of the project, but who were not to profit, either directly or indirectly, by the venture. The board thus created, composed of many leading noblemen, clergymen, and members of Parliament of the day, met forthwith and drew up one of the most remarkable governmental documents in English colonial history. A military governor was appointed. Transportation, food, and land were given settlers for the feudal returns of labour and military service; but tenure of land was to descend only along the line of direct male issue. Other salient limitations in these by-laws were the prohibition of liquor, as well as that of negro slaves, and freedom of worship was to be granted to all prospective colonists “except papists”. With this document and 126 passengers, carefully selected for the most part from the more worthy inmates of English prisons, Oglethorpe himself, who had been appointed “general” of the new colony, embarked on the “Anne,” on 12 November, 1732, arrived at Charleston the following January, and in the spring of that year founded Savannah, which took its name from that of the river above which the little cabins of the settlers were first reared.

During the twenty-one years of its proprietary government Georgia struggled along, rather in spite of the remote designs and unpractical restrictions of its trustees than because of their indefatigable labour, sterling integrity, and single-minded philanthropy. As a frontier settlement against the Catholic colonies of Spain, Georgia speedily justified its existence. War between the rival countries was declared in 1739. Oglethorpe invaded Florida in 1740, and with an insufficient force unsuccessfully besieged St. Augustine. Two years later Spain retaliated, attempting by land and sea the complete annihilation of the English colony. By a splendid bit of strategy on Oglethorpe’s part the invasion was repulsed, and the last blow had been struck by Spain against the English colonies in the New World. Less successful was the attempt of the board of trustees to plant the mulberry and the vine in the new colony. The warfare with Spain, the lack of adequate skilled labour, and the general thriftlessness of the colonists made the cultivation of such products practically impossible. The vine, which was to have supplied all the plantations, and to cultivate which they had imported a Portuguese Vigneron, resulted in only a few gallons and was then abandoned. The hemp and flax, which were to have sustained the linen manufactures of Great Britain and to have thrown the balance of trade with Russia into England’s favour, never came to a single ship-load ; and the cultivation of the mulberry seems to have expired with its crowning achievement when, on the occasion of His Majesty’s birthday in 1735, Queen Caroline appeared at the levee in a complete court dress of Georgia silk. Least successful of all was the philanthropic attempt to colonize Georgia with non-productive inmates from English prisons. It was this class that early began to cry for rum and slavery; and had it not been for the settlement of Ebenezer, in 1734, with industrious Salzburgers, expelled from Germany by reason of their religious beliefs; that of Fort Argyle, in 1735, with a colony of Swiss and Moravian immigrants; and that of New Inverness, in 1736, with a hardy band of thrifty Scotch mountaineers, the philanthropic plans of Oglethorpe would have been speedily wrecked. As it was, the energies of the general were mainly directed towards placing Savannah upon an economically self-sufficient basis.

One of the restrictions that acted most forcibly against labour and thrift, the tenure of land along the line of male descent, was repealed in 1739. Another, the prohibition of slavery, a restriction which served to make restless and impermanent an unskilled and thriftless population settled so close to the slave-holding settlements of South Carolina, was removed in 1747. Even the attempt to rouse up spiritual energy in Savannah proved too great a task for the Wesleys, although in 1738 the eloquent Whitefleld seems to have won at least a hearing for his strenuous moral code. But neither an energetic general governor, a concessive board of trustees, nor the zealous bearers of a fresh and fiery spiritual code could establish the philanthropic or commercial success of the proprietary colony of Georgia. Mutiny was widespread. Oglethorpe’s life was threatened and actually attempted. The trustees were disheartened. Letters of dissent and charges against Oglethorpe, written under the pseudonym of “The Plain Dealer”, reached Parliament. In 1743 Oglethorpe returned to England to face a general court martial on nineteen charges. He was entirely exonerated from charges, which were pronounced “false, malicious and without foundation”. But he had done with the colony and never returned to Savannah while the board of trustees, in 1751, at the expiration of their charter, formally and wearily surrendered their right of government to the Lords of the Council, and Georgia became a royal province.

In the generation before the Revolution Georgia steadily increased in population under royal governors. The cultivation of rice by slaves made the colony economically self-supporting. A better class of colonists were induced to immigrate to its woodlands and rice fields from England and the Carolinas. On 11 January, 1758, the Assembly passed an Act “for constituting the several Divisions and Districts of this Province into Parishes, and for establishing Religious Worship therein, according to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Church of England“. This was designed not to interfere with other classes of worshippers, but to provide by law for supplying the settlements with the ministrations of religion, by which Act a salary of £25 per annum was allowed every clergyman of the Established Church. The law excluding Roman Catholic colonists was not, however, repealed ; a restriction which put to the test the loyalty of a