Georgia

Joel Chandler Harris was a New South journalist, a folklorist, and one of Georgia’s most famous authors. He was born in Eatonton in 1845. Like Ben Franklin, Harris learned to write by hand-setting newspaper type, working at Turnwold Plantation for Joseph Addison Turner. After working in Macon and Savannah, Harris went to work for Henry […]

Prohibition and voting rights for women: they were the twin passions of Mary Latimer McLendon. Mary Latimer was the younger sister of outspoken suffragist Rebecca Latimer Felton. She was born in DeKalb County in 1840 and graduated from the Southern Masonic Female College in Covington. After the Civil War, McLendon became active in the Women’s […]

Margaret Mitchell portrayed him as a corrupt carpetbagger, whose great failing was to be a Republican who supported African-American equality. Rufus Bullock was born in 1834 in New York. He moved to Augusta and did business with the Confederates after the Civil War began, though he opposed secession. He was a lieutenant colonel in the […]

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 […]

Missouri has Mark Twain. Georgia has Bill Arp, the pen name for Charles Henry Smith. Born in Lawrenceville in 1826, Smith moved to Rome in 1851 to practice law. After the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Smith wrote a letter under the pen name “Bill Arp” to President Lincoln in the humorous dialect favored by […]

On this day in 1825, 200 Creek warriors set fire to a plantation house, and shot and stabbed the owner to death. The owner was William McIntosh, a Creek Indian chief killed by his own people. McIntosh was born around 1778 to a white Scotsman and a Creek woman. Though raised among the creeks, he […]

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 […]

The War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain officially ended on Christmas Eve, 1814, with the Treaty of Ghent. Georgians were deeply involved in the war on several fronts. General John Floyd led troops against Britain’s Indian allies in Alabama in decisive battles that would eventually open up the region to American […]

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 […]

It started as a swindle and ended up as a landmark Supreme Court case. In 1795, Georgia passed the Yazoo Land Act, selling 35 million acres of western land—most of present-day Alabama and Mississippi—to four land companies for $500,000, about 1.5 cents an acre, far below its value. Opponents cried foul: many legislators owned shares […]