Georgia in the American Civil War

"Georgia in the Civil War" redirects here. For the internal conflict from 1991 to 1993 in the Republic of Georgia, see Georgian Civil War.

State of Georgia
Unofficial Flag of Georgia Seal of Georgia Nickname(s):
Capital	Milledgeville
Largest city	Savannah
Admission to Confederacy	February 18, 1861 (5th)
Population	1,057,286 Total * 595,088 free * 462,198 slave
Forces supplied	100,000 Total * soldiers * sailors * marines
Casualties	18,253 dead
Major garrisons/armories	Fort Pulaski Cockspur Island, Georgia
Governor	Joseph E. Brown
Lieutenant Governor
Senators	Benjamin Harvey Hill John Wood Lewis, Sr. Herschel Vespasian Johnson
Representatives	List
Restored to the Union	1870

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On January 19, 1861, Georgia seceded from the Union as the "Republic of Georgia" and joined the newly formed Confederacy the next month during the prelude to the American Civil War. During the war, Georgia sent nearly 100,000 soldiers to battle, mostly to the armies in Virginia. The state switched from cotton to food production, but severe transportation difficulties eventually restricted supplies. Early in the war, the state's 1,400 miles of railroad tracks provided a frequently used means of moving supplies and men but, by the middle of 1864, much of these lay in ruins or in Union hands.

The $3 voted $100,000 to be sent to South Carolina for the relief of Charlestonians who suffered a disastrous fire in December 1861.

Thinking the state safe from invasion, the Confederates built several small munitions factories in Georgia, as well as housing tens of thousands of Union prisoners. Their largest prisoner of war camp was at Andersonville.

Home front

Governor Joseph E. Brown was a leading secessionist and led efforts to remove the state from the Union and into the Confederacy. A firm believer in state's rights, he defied the Confederate government's wartime policies. He resisted the Confederate military draft and tried to keep as many soldiers at home as possible to fight invading forces. Brown challenged Confederate impressment of animals, goods, and slaves. Several other governors followed his lead.

Food shortages

By summer 1861, the Union naval blockade virtually shut down the export of cotton and the import of manufactured items. Food that normally came by rail from the North were halted. The governor and legislature pleaded with planters to grow less cotton and more food. The planters refused because at first they thought the Union would not or could not fight. The planters then saw cotton prices in Europe soared and they expected Europe to soon intervene and break the blockade. The legislature imposed cotton quotas and made it a crime to grow an excess, but the food shortages continued to worsen, especially in the towns. In more than a dozen instances across the state, poor white women raided stores and captured supply wagons to get such necessities as bacon, corn, flour, and cotton yarn.

As conditions at home worsened late in the war more and soldiers deserted the army to attend to their suffering farms and families.

Battles in Georgia

Georgia was relatively free from warfare until late 1863. A total of nearly 550 battles and skirmishes occurred within the state, with the majority occurring in the last two years of the conflict. The first major battle in Georgia was a Confederate victory at the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863, which was the last major Confederate victory in the west. In 1864 Union general William T. Sherman's armies invaded Georgia as part of the Atlanta Campaign. Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston fought a series of battles, the largest being the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, trying to delay Union armies for as long as possible as he retreated toward Atlanta. Johnston's replacement, Gen. John Bell Hood, attempted several unsuccessful counterattacks at the Battle of Peachtree Creek and the Battle of Atlanta, but Sherman captured Atlanta on September 2, 1864.

Sherman's March to the Sea

Main article: Sherman's March to the Sea

Sherman's March to the Sea, Nov.-Dec. 1864.

In November 1864, Sherman stripped his army of non-essentials, burned Atlanta, and left it to the Confederates. He began his famous Sherman's March to the Sea, living off the land then burning plantations, wrecking railroads, and killing the livestock. Thousands of escaped slaves followed him as he entered Savannah on December 22. After the loss of Atlanta, the governor withdrew the state's militia from the Confederate forces to harvest crops for the state and the army. The militia did not try to stop Sherman.

Sherman's March was devastating to Georgia and the Confederacy in terms of economics and psychology. Sherman himself estimated that the campaign had inflicted $100 million (about $1.4 billion in 2012 dollars) in destruction, about one fifth of which "inured to our advantage" while the "remainder is simple waste and destruction." His army wrecked 300 miles (480 km) of railroad and numerous bridges and miles of telegraph lines. It seized 5,000 horses, 4,000 mules, and 13,000 head of cattle. It confiscated 9.5 million pounds of corn and 10.5 million pounds of fodder, and destroyed uncounted cotton gins and mills.

Sherman's campaign of total war extended to Georgia civilians. In July 1864, during the Atlanta campaign, Sherman ordered approximately 400 Rosewell mill workers, mostly women, arrested as traitors and shipped as prisoners to the North with their children. There is little evidence that more than a few of the women ever returned home.

The memory of Sherman's March became iconic and central to the "Myth of the Lost Cause." The crisis was the setting for Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind and the subsequent 1939 film. Most important were many "salvation stories" that tell not what Sherman's army destroyed, but what was saved by the quick thinking and crafty women on the home front, or by a Union soldier's appreciation of the beauty of homes and the charm of Southern women.

Last battles

In December 1864 Sherman captured Savannah before leaving Georgia in January 1865 to begin his Carolinas Campaign. However, there were still several small fights in Georgia after his departure. On April 16, 1865, the Battle of Columbus, was fought on the Georgia-Alabama border. In 1935 the state legislature officially declared this engagement as the "last battle of the War Between the States."

List of battles fought in Georgia

Battle of Adairsville
Battle of Allatoona
Battle of Atlanta
Battle of Brown's Mill
Battle of Buck Head Creek
Battle of Chickamauga
Battle of Dallas
Battle of Dalton I
Battle of Dalton II
Battle of Davis' Cross Roads
Battle of Ezra Church
Battle of Fort McAllister (1863)
Battle of Fort McAllister (1864)
Battle of Fort Pulaski
Battle of Griswoldville
Battle of Jonesborough
Battle of Kennesaw Mountain
Battle of Kolb's Farm
Battle of Lovejoy's Station
Battle of Marietta
Battle of New Hope Church
Battle of Peachtree Creek
Battle of Pickett's Mill
Battle of Resaca
Battle of Ringgold Gap
Battle of Rocky Face Ridge
Battle of Utoy Creek
Battle of Waynesboro

Re-entry to the Union

Main article: Georgia during Reconstruction

The war left most of Georgia devastated, with many war dead and wounded, and the state's economy in shambles. The slaves were emancipated in 1865, and Reconstruction started immediately after the hostilities ceased. The state remained poor well into the Twentieth century. Georgia did not re-enter the Union until June 15, 1870, the last of the Confederate States to be re-admitted.

Civil War sites in Georgia

Many of Georgia's Civil War battlefields, particularly those around Atlanta, have been lost to modern urban development. However, a number of sites have been well preserved, including Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park and Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. Other Civil War-related sites include Stone Mountain, Fort Pulaski, and the Atlanta Cyclorama, as well as Confederate Memorial Park.

A number of antebellum mansions and plantations in Georgia are preserved and open to the public, particularly around Atlanta and Savannah. Portions of the Civil War-era Western & Atlantic Railroad have historical markers commemorating events during the war, including several sites associated with the Andrews Raid. Another area near Atlanta with Civil War history is in the Sweet Water Creek State Park in Douglas County, Georgia. At this location is one of the last standing buildings burned by General Sherman's army, New Manchester Mill.

See also

• Confederate States of America

Further reading

• Brown, Barry L. and Gordon R. Elwell. Crossroads of Conflict: A Guide to Civil War Sites in Georgia (2010)
• Bryan, T. Conn. Confederate Georgia (1953), the standard scholarly survey
• DeCredico, Mary A. Patriotism for Profit: Georgia's Urban Entrepreneurs and the Confederate War Effort (1990).
• Fowler, John D. and David B. Parker, eds. Breaking the Heartland: The Civil War in Georgia (2011)
• Gourley, Bruce T. Diverging Loyalties: Baptists in Middle Georgia During the Civil War (2011)
• Harrington, Hugh T. Civil War Milledgeville: Tales from the Confederate Capital of Georgia (2005)
• Hill, Louise Biles. Joseph E. Brown and the Confederacy. (1972)
• Inscoe, John C. (2011). The Civil War in Georgia: A New Georgia Encyclopedia Companion. University of Georgia Press. http://books.google.com/books?id=SNXMfE9vXc0C&pg=PT41. 
• Johnson, Michael P. Toward A Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia (1977)
• Jones, Charles Edgeworth (1909). Georgia in the War: 1861-1865. Augusta, Georgia: Foote and Davies.
• Miles, Jim. To the Sea: A History and Tour Guide of the War in the West, Sherman's March Across Georgia and Through the Carolinas, 1864-1865 (2002)
• Mohr, Clarence L. On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (1986)
• Parks, Joseph H. Joseph E. Brown of Georgia (Louisiana State University Press (1977) 612 pages
• Wallenstein, Peter. "Rich Man's War, Rich Man's Fight: Civil War and the Transformation of Public Finance in Georgia," Journal of Southern History (1984) 50#1 pp 15–42 in JSTOR
• Wetherington, Mark V. Plain Folk's Fight: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia (2009) excerpt and text search
• Whites, Lee Ann. The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890 (2000) excerpt and text search
• Williams, David. Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley (1998), examines a fifteen-county region of southeast Alabama and southwest Georgia.

Primary sources

• Bailey, Anne J. and Walter J. Fraser. Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Georgia in the Civil War (1996)
• Myers, Robert Manson, ed. The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (1972)
• “Rebel Yell: The Civil War Diary of John Thomas Whatley, CSA”, edited by John Wilson Cowart, is the diary of a confederate soldier whose work included preparing for the defense of Savannah, Georgia. The diary documents his life from March 2, 1862, till November 27, 1864.

External links

• A contemporary broadside of Georgias Ordinance of Secession
• Declaration of Causes of Seceding States - Ordinances of Secession of Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas
• University of Georgia website for Georgia in the Civil War
• National Park Service map of Civil War sites in Georgia
• Civil War Sites in Georgia
• This Week in Georgia Civil War History Site from GeorgiaInfo
• Cobb County Civil War historical markers on a map.
• http://portcolumbus.org/