History of Georgia (U.S. state)

The history of Georgia in the United States of America spans pre-Columbian time to the present-day U.S. state of Georgia. The area was inhabited by Native American tribes for thousands of years. A modest Spanish presence was established in the late 16th century, mostly centered on Catholic missions. The Spanish had largely withdrawn from the territory by the early 18th century, although they had settlements in nearby Florida. They had little influence historically in what would become Georgia. (Most Spanish place names in Georgia date from the 19th century, not from the age of colonization.)

English settlers arrived in the 1730s, led by James Oglethorpe. The name "Georgia", after George II of Great Britain, dates from the creation of this colony. Originally dedicated to the concept of common man, the colony forbade slavery. Failing to gain sufficient laborers from England, the colony overturned the ban in 1749 and began to import enslaved Africans. Slaves numbered 18,000 in the colony at the time of the American Revolution. The citizens of Georgia agreed with the other American Colonies concerning trade rights and issues of taxation. On April 8, 1776, royal officials had been expelled and Georgia's Provincial Congress issued a constitutional document that served as an interim constitution until adoption of the state Constitution of 1777. The British occupied much of Georgia from 1780 until shortly before the official end of the American Revolution in 1783. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution on January 2, 1788.

European Americans began to settle in Georgia, although it was territory of both the Creek and the Cherokee nations. They pressured state and the federal government to remove the Indians. After Indian Removal in the 1830s, under President Jackson, the pace of settlement by European Americans increased rapidly. The new cotton gin, invented at the end of the 18th century, enabled the profitable processing of short-staple cotton, which could now be grown in the inland and upcountry regions. This change stimulated the cotton boom in Georgia and much of the Deep South, resulting in cotton being a main economic driver, cultivated on slave labor. Based on enslaved labor, planters cleared and developed large cotton plantations. Many became immensely wealthy, but most of the yeomen whites did not own slaves and worked family subsistence farms.

On January 19, 1861, Georgia seceded from the Union and on February 8, 1861, joined other Southern states, all slave societies, to form the Confederate States of America. Georgia contributed nearly one hundred twenty thousand soldiers to the Confederacy, with about five thousand Georgians (both black and white) joining the Union Army. The first major battle in the state was the Battle of Chickamauga, a Confederate victory, and the last major Confederate victory in the west. In 1864, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's armies invaded Georgia as part of the Atlanta Campaign. The burning of Atlanta (which was a commercially vital railroad hub but not yet the state capital) was followed by Sherman's March to the Sea, which laid waste to a wide swath of the state from Atlanta to Savannah in late 1864. These events became iconic in the state's memory and dealt a devastating economic blow to the entire Confederacy.

After the war, Georgians endured a period of economic hardship. Reconstruction was a period of military occupation. With enfranchisement of freedmen, who allied with the Republican Party, a biracial legislature was elected. It established public education and welfare institutions for the first time in the state, and initiated economic programs. Reconstruction ended in 1875 after white Democrats regained political control of the state, through violence and intimidation at elections. They passed new laws and constitutional amendments that disenfranchised blacks and many poor whites near the turn of the century. In the Jim Crow era from the late 19th century to 1964, blacks were suppressed as second-class citizens, nearly excluded from politics. Thousands of blacks migrated North to escape these conditions and associated violence. The state was predominately rural, with an agricultural economy based on cotton into the 20th century. All residents of the state suffered in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The many training bases and munitions plants established in World War II stimulated the economy, and provided some new opportunities for blacks. During the broad-based activism of the Civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, Atlanta, Georgia was the base of African-American leader, minister Martin Luther King Jr. The state integrated public facilities. After 1950 the economy grew and became more diverse, with cotton receding in importance. Atlanta became a major regional city and transportation hub, expanding into neighboring communities through its fast-growing suburbs. Politically, Georgia was part of the Solid South until 1964, when it first voted for a Republican candidate for president. Democratic candidates continued to receive majority-white support in state and local elections until the 1990s, when the realignment of conservative whites shifted to the Republican Party. Atlanta was the host of the 1996 Summer Olympics, which marked the 100th anniversary of the modern Olympic Games. Georgia would grow rapidly both population wise and economically in the late 20th to early 21st century. In 2014, Georgia's population topped 10 million people, and was the fourth fastest growing U.S. state from 2013 to 2014.