Dred Scott v Sanford was one of the most controversial cases in history, with a Georgian sitting on the Supreme Court that decided it. Dred Scott was a Missouri slave who sued for freedom after his master took him to the free territories of Illinois and Wisconsin. The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger […]
Few presidential acts have had more impact upon the arc of history than the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln on this day in 1863. It transformed a war for union into a crusade for human freedom. Emancipation had not initially been a U.S. war aim. As the Union death toll mounted however, support […]
What better gift than freedom? That’s what William and Ellen Craft gave each other, and celebrated this day in 1848. Their memoir, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, was exactly what they did. The Crafts were slaves in Macon who devised a daring and dangerous plan of escape. Ellen was the daughter of her white […]
The words slavery and slave were never mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, until Georgia ratified the 13th Amendment and officially abolished slavery in the United States. Ironically, an earlier 13th Amendment would have done just the opposite, outlawing amendments ending slavery in an attempt to persuade the Southern states not to leave the Union. The […]
“I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.” Thus did U.S. General William Tecumseh Sherman notify President Lincoln that he had captured Savannah at the end of his March to the Sea. Sherman left Atlanta […]
King Cotton wound up owing Eli Whitney a lot. Born in 1765 in Massachusetts, the unemployed Yale graduate came South for a teaching job. When that didn’t pan out, he came to Georgia in 1792. His friend Catharine Greene, General Nathanael Greene’s widow, invited him to her plantation outside Savannah. English Mills had created a […]
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 […]