August 10

On this day in 1774, revolutionaries were plotting at Tondee’s Tavern in Savannah. Thirty men, calling themselves the “Sons of Liberty,” gathered to plan Georgia’s opposition to British colonial policy. This was Georgia’s first participation in what would become the American Revolution.

Nine months earlier a group in Boston protested British policies by throwing 342 chests of tea into the harbor. Parliament responded by closing Boston Harbor and revoking the Massachusetts charter. Virginia called for a colonial congress to meet, and consider a united response to what Americans called the “Intolerable Acts.” The Georgia Resolutions denounced those acts as contrary to the British Constitution, protested taxation without representation, and asserted that Americans had the same rights as all British citizens.

Georgia’s loyalties remained too divided to send delegates to the First Continental Congress, meeting the following month in Philadelphia. Georgia, separated from the British Empire, was simply unimaginable for some. But for others, we took the first tentative steps down the path of revolution on August 10, 1774, Today in Georgia History.