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The Province (and later State) of Georgia was a significant battleground in the American Revolution. Its population was at first divided about exactly how to respond to revolutionary activities and heightened tensions in other provinces. When violence broke out in 1775, radical Patriots (also known as Whigs) took control of the provincial government, and drove many Loyalists out of the province. Georgia also served as the staging ground for several important raids into British-controlled Florida.
Though Georgians opposed British trade regulations, many hesitated to join the revolutionary movement that emerged in the American colonies in the early 1770s and resulted in the American Revolutionary War (1775–83). The colony had prospered under royal rule, and many Georgians thought that they needed the protection of British troops against a possible Indian attack. Georgia did not send representatives to the First Continental Congress that met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1774. The Congress asked all colonies to form a group, called the Association, to ban trade with Great Britain. Georgia delegates gathered in a provincial congress in Savannah on January 18, 1775, to discuss whether to join the Association and to elect representatives to the Second Continental Congress. Those who were elected declined to go to Philadelphia, however, because the delegates were divided on the action to be taken. St. John Parish, acting alone, sent Lyman Hall to the Second Continental Congress.[1]
News of the battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts caused many Georgians who were wavering in their allegiance to join the radical movement. A group called the Sons of Liberty broke into the powder magazine in Savannah on May 11, 1775, and divided the powder with the South Carolina revolutionaries.[1]
Though Georgians continued to drink to the health of the king, they took the government into their own hands when the Second Provincial Congress met in Savannah on July 4, 1775. The Congress named delegates to the Second Continental Congress, which was already sitting in Philadelphia, and adopted the Association's ban on trade with Britain. The single most important democratic action of the Congress was the establishment of local committees to enforce the Association's ban. Thus political power devolved upon artisans and farmers, considered by the royal governor James Wright to be the "wrong sort" to be allowed in government. The Congress adjourned, leaving executive authority in a standing Council of Safety.
The heavy-handed tactics of the local committee in Augusta led to the first violence in the backcountry. On August 2, 1775, members of the committee confronted Thomas Brown at his residence on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River above Augusta. Brown had come to Georgia with seventy or so indentured servants in November 1774 in answer to Governor Wright's advertisement of the advantages of the newly Ceded Lands above Augusta and founded a settlement called Brownsborough. He attracted the anger of the Whigs by publicly denouncing the Association and summoning friends of the king to join a counterassociation. When he refused to swear to honor the Association, the crowd of Liberty men tortured him in various ways, scalping and fracturing his skull, burning his feet, and hauling him, unconscious, through the streets of Augusta as an object lesson to those who would denounce the Association.[1]
When he recovered, Brown retired into the Carolina backcountry, where he and other leaders enlisted hundreds of Loyalists and threatened a march on Augusta. After much marching about and some skirmishing around the town of Ninety Six, Brown and his friends heeded South Carolina governor Sir William Campbell's advice to await the arrival of the British. Brown retreated to East Florida and persuaded its governor, Patrick Tonyn, to allow him to recruit a corps of rangers who would lead Indians to fight on the frontiers in conjunction with the expected landing on the coast. Meanwhile, rumors of a British-instigated plot to enlist slaves and Indians to help defeat the American patriots alarmed Georgians and Carolinians. Though false, the rumors were generally believed, and John Stuart, the Indian Commissioner, fled in fear for his life from Charleston, South Carolina, to Florida.[1]
