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 […]
A Revolutionary War hero, born on this day, played a critical role in helping Georgia defeat the British. Nathanael Greene, George Washington’s top lieutenant, was an unlikely warrior. Born in Rhode Island, he was raised a pacifist Quaker. But when the war began, he helped form a militia unit. Greene fought in many of the […]
Georgia joined The United States on August 2, 1776, the same day that Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, and George Walton signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. The declaration was approved on July 4, but signed by only one man that day, John Hancock. Fifty other delegates to the 2nd Continental Congress signed on August […]
Georgians might have been speaking with a different accent had it not been for a key Patriot victory in Augusta during the American Revolution. In 1778, the British launched their southern campaign, hoping to break the stalemate in the northern states and rally loyalists to their cause. Savannah fell and later, Charleston. Augusta then became […]
He watched America being born and was its last king. On this day in 1738 at Windsor Castle, Frederick, the Prince of Wales, and his wife Princess Augusta had their first son, George William Frederick. In 1751, the Prince of Wales died. That put 12-year-old George in line for the throne, which he ascended as […]
His John Hancock is rarer than John Hancock’s. Born in England in 1735, Button Gwinnett came to Savannah 30 years later. He bought St. Catherine’s Island and became a planter. In 1776 he was elected commander of Georgia’s Continental Army Battalion during the American Revolution. When political opponents- including Lachlan McIntosh- challenged his election, he […]
The Stamp Act was supposed to raise money to pay off the country’s enormous debt following eight years of war, but instead it started a revolution. The French and Indian War, fought on the North American frontier, cost Britain a king’s ransom, and Parliament thought the American colonists should help pay for it. The Stamp […]
He was a Revolutionary leader involved in the most famous duel in Georgia history. Lachlan McIntosh was born in Scotland in 1727 and came to Georgia with a group of Highland Scots to defend the colony’s southern border. He grew up in the Scots settlement of Darien and became a prosperous rice planter. During the […]
Their arrival in Georgia on this date in 1734 heralded the beginning of one of the most culturally distinctive communities in Georgia. The Catholic Archbishop of Salzburg expelled German Protestants from the region in present-day Austria in 1731, and England’s King George II offered them refuge in the new colony of Georgia. Some 300 Salzburgers […]
Georgians weren’t feeling the love, even if it was Valentine’s Day. The Battle of Kettle Creek was fought during the American Revolution on this day in 1779. 600 loyalists from Georgia and the Carolinas were camped on the creek, which flows into the Little River in Wilkes County, Georgia’s backcountry in those days. The British […]