This history of the American Revolution in Georgia offers a thorough examination of how landownership issues complicated and challenged colonists’ loyalties. Despite underdevelopment and isolation, eighteenth-century Georgia was an alluring place, for it promised settlers of all social classes the prospect of affordable land--and the status that went with ownership. Then came the Revolution and its many threats to the orderly systems by which property was acquired and protected. As rebel and royal leaders vied for the support of Georgia’s citizens, says Leslie Hall, allegiance became a prime commodity, with property and the preservation of owners’ rights the requisite currency for securing it. As Hall shows, however, the war’s progress in Georgia was indeterminate; in fact, Georgia was the only colony in which British civil government was reestablished during the war. In the face of continued uncertainties--plundering, confiscation, and evacuation--many landowners’ desires for a strong, consistent civil authority ultimately transcended whatever political leanings they might have had. The historical irony here, Hall’s study shows, is that the most successful regime of Georgia’s Revolutionary period was arguably that of royalist governor James Wright. Land and Allegiance in Revolutionary Georgia is a revealing study of the self-interest and practical motivations in competition with a period’s idealism and rhetoric.

The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia document the colony through its first twenty-five years and includes correspondence between Georgia founder James Oglethorpe and the Trustees for Establishing the Colony, as well as records pertaining to land grants; agreements and interactions with Indigenous peoples; the settlement of a small Jewish community and the Salzburgers, German-speaking Protestant refugees; and the removal of restrictions on land tenure, rum, and slavery in the colony. Most of the local records of colonial Georgia were destroyed during the Revolution. Under Governor James Wright’s direction, merchant John Graham loaded much of the official records on his vessel in the Savannah River. During the Battle of the Rice Boats in March 1776, the Inverness was burned while it lay at anchor. The destructive civil war that occurred in the latter phases of the Revolution resulted in further destruction. The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, drawn from archival material in Great Britain, remain a unique source. Volume 27, spanning the years 1754–56, contains the papers of Georgia’s first governor, John Reynolds, as well as the correspondence of various inhabitants. The Georgia Open History Library has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this collection, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Integrating social, cultural, economic, and political history, this is a study of the factors that grounded--or swayed--the loyalties of non-Spaniards living under Spanish rule on the southern frontier. In particular, Andrew McMichael looks at the colonial Spanish administration’s attitude toward resident Americans. The Spanish borderlands systems of slavery and land ownership, McMichael shows, used an efficient system of land distribution and government patronage that engendered loyalty and withstood a series of conflicts that tested, but did not shatter, residents’ allegiance. McMichael focuses on the Baton Rouge district of Spanish West Florida from 1785 through 1810, analyzing why resident Anglo-Americans, who had maintained a high degree of loyalty to the Spanish Crown through 1809, rebelled in 1810. The book contextualizes the 1810 rebellion, and by extension the southern frontier, within the broader Atlantic World, showing how both local factors as well as events in Europe affected lives in the Spanish borderlands. Breaking with traditional scholarship, McMichael examines contests over land and slaves as a determinant of loyalty. He draws on Spanish, French, and Anglo records to challenge scholarship that asserts a particularly “American” loyalty on the frontier whereby Anglo-American residents in West Florida, as disaffected subjects of the Spanish Crown, patiently abided until they could overthrow an alien system. Rather, it was political, social, and cultural conflicts--not nationalist ideology--that disrupted networks by which economic prosperity was gained and thus loyalty retained.

This work offers a look at the history of Georgia through over 100 primary documents. "The Empire State of the South: Georgia History in Documents and Essays" offers teachers of Georgia history an alternative to the traditional narrative textbook. In this volume, students have the opportunity to read Georgia history rather than reading about Georgia history. Encompassing the entirety of Georgia history into the twenty-first century, "The Empire State of the South" is suitable for all courses on Georgia history. This text is divided into 16 chapters comprising 129 documents and 33 essays on various topics of Georgia history. The primary documents represent a wide range of genres, including speeches, newspaper columns, letters, treaties, laws, proclamations, state constitutions, court decisions, and many others. Some documents outline general themes or movements in Georgia history while others address more narrow issues. The thirty-three essays are excerpts from larger pieces that were written by specialists in Georgia history. Each chapter consists of several parts. First is a short narrative introduction. The second part contains the documents themselves. Following the documents are two essays written by historians regarding some topic relevant to the chapter. At the end of each chapter is a short list of suggested readings. The documents themselves range from the usual: state constitutions, laws, and speeches, to the inordinate: plans for constructing what is regarded as the state's first concrete home, a corny campaign song for Eugene Talmadge, an attempt by the General Assembly in 1897 to ban the playing of football, and a 1962 letter Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote from an Albany prison that preceded his more well-known Birmingham letter. Georgia has indeed had a colorful history and "The Empire State of the South" tells that story.

The biography of Washington written by his close friend and military aide

From Empire to Revolution is the first biography devoted to an in-depth examination of the life and conflicted career of Sir James Wright (1716–1785). Greg Brooking uses Wright’s life as a means to better understand the complex struggle for power in both colonial Georgia and the larger British Empire. James Wright lived a transatlantic life, taking advantage of every imperial opportunity afforded him. He earned numerous important government posts and amassed an incredible fortune, totaling over £100,000 sterling. An England-born grandson of Sir Robert Wright, James Wright was raised in Charleston, South Carolina, following his father’s appointment as the chief justice of that colony. Young James served South Carolina in a number of capacities, public and ecclesiastical, prior to his admittance to London’s famed Gray’s Inn to study law. Most notably, he was appointed South Carolina’s attorney general and colonial agent to London prior to becoming the governor of Georgia in 1761. Wright’s long imperial career delicately balanced dual loyalties to Crown and colony and offers a new perspective on loyalism and the American Revolution. Through this lens, Greg Brooking connects several important contexts in recent early American and British scholarship, including imperial and Atlantic history, Indigenous borderlands, race and slavery, and popular politics.