Location

Georgia

Georgia had begun in 1732 as the last of Britain's mainland colonies, shaped by James Oglethorpe's founding vision of a defensive and socially ordered outpost on the southern frontier. Its early restrictions on slavery and large landholding did not endure, and by the eve of the Revolution the colony had become more fully integrated into the plantation world of the lower South. Even so, Georgia entered the imperial crisis more cautiously than Massachusetts or Virginia, partly because of its exposed frontier and recent origins, yet the logic of events steadily drew it into the movement for independence. Lyman Hall, Button Gwinnett, and George Walton signed the Declaration of Independence, making clear that even the newest colony had accepted the claim that governments derived their just powers from consent rather than from distant authority. The war in Georgia was hard and uneven, marked by the 1778 capture of Savannah and repeated contests over whether the backcountry would align with patriots or the Crown. Georgia also sent Abraham Baldwin to the Constitutional Convention, where he played a notable role in questions of representation and federal structure. The colony and state mattered to American constitutional history because they showed how the revolutionary and constitutional settlement had to incorporate not only the older centers of English America but also the vulnerable southern borderlands, where war, slavery, and expansion all pressed upon the meaning of union.