Brigadier General Count Casimir (or Kazimierz) Pulaski came from Poland to fight in the American Revolution (1775-1783). Frequently hailed as the founder of the American Cavalry, he served in the Continental Army from late 1777 and died in the Siege of Savannah in October 1779.

Casimir Pulaski was born in Warsaw, Poland on March 6, 1745, to Marjanna and Jozef Pulaski, members of an ancient and influential branch of the Polish aristocracy. Baptized as a boy, young Pulaski received a general education suited to male children of nobility. His family was heavily involved in the 1768 plot, known as the Confederation of the Bar, to liberate Poland from Russian political influence. Pulaski, who always presented himself as male, joined the effort and quickly showed his ability to command a powerful mobile force against Russian troops. In 1771, the Polish government implicated Pulaski in a plot to kidnap Stanislaus II, the Russian-controlled king, and charged him with treason. Pulaski sought protection in France and in 1773 briefly commanded an international force during the Russo-Turkish War (1768-1774).

In 1777, the Revolutionary War in America had caught Pulaski’s attention. He not only sympathized with the new nation’s struggle against oppression, but also saw the conflict as a possible means of regaining his military reputation in Europe and rebuilding his fortune. He enlisted the aid of Benjamin Franklin, one of the American ambassadors to France, and sailed for America in June 1777. Pulaski soon submitted his name to the Continental Congress for an officer’s commission. To demonstrate his zeal for the success of the war, he supplemented the request with a variety of military proposals, including an expedition to capture the French island of Madagascar.

Pulaski’s past military commands and reputation as a skilled cavalry officer did not cause George Washington or the Continental Congress to immediately accept him. They had grown tired of Europeans applying for military service and failing to live up to their vaunted reputation. Thus, Pulaski unofficially joined Washington’s forces on September 11, 1777, at the Battle of Brandywine in Pennsylvania, where he led a small force of horsemen and helped protect the Continental Army during its retreat. His fervor for the American cause and fighting ability convinced Washington and Congress to accept Pulaski as brigadier general and appoint him “commander of the cavalry”. He fought at the Battle of Germantown, also in Pennsylvania, later that year and briefly stayed at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania during the winter of 1777-1778. Most contemporaries who met Pulaski agreed that he excelled as a bold and energetic rider; a friend described him as a soldier who fought with the strength of ten men.

Again he faced the difficult task of combining four semi-independent continental dragoon commands. Speaking little English, Pulaski discovered to his dismay that Washington and most of his generals had failed to grasp the potential effectiveness of a cohesive, highly trained cavalry unit; indeed, sections of his corps were detailed as messengers and guards. Pulaski insisted that his men follow European-style cavalry tactics, act as shock troops in battle, and learn to harass the advancing enemy.

To make matters worse, Congress rarely appropriated sufficient funds for cavalry, and the prices of provisions rose steadily. Pulaski’s desire to supply and train his command properly caused him to act brashly at times and ignore the mundane tasks of administration. Few contemporaries questioned his commitment to the American cause, but his actions angered Congress, civilians, and military personnel. His letters to friends and acquaintances frequently conveyed a strain of melancholy disillusionment with life in the United States Army.

In the spring of 1778 Pulaski briefly resigned his commission with the intention of returning to France. But that year, Congress approved his command of an independent legion and gave him permission to train it the European way. Pulaski’s Legion quickly acquired an international character, with American, Hungarian, German, Polish, Swedish, Italian and French volunteers. Pulaski hoped to demonstrate the capabilities of his command, but setbacks continued to hamper his efforts. For example, a legion infantry unit suffered a surprise night attack from the British at Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey, in October 1778. Washington then assigned the legion to border patrol at Cole’s Fort in New York, located on the northern border. It proved an unsuitable place for cavalry tactics, and once again Pulaski decided to leave America.

But events in Georgia kept Pulaski in the military and brought him to the South. Earlier, in December 1778, British forces took Savannah by surprise. In response, Washington ordered Pulaski’s Legion and several Continental units to join the forces of General Benjamin Lincoln, commander of the Army of the South. Once in South Carolina, the Legion helped defend Charleston against a surprise British attack and fought at the Battle of Stono Ferry. In mid-September 1779, the Legion marched with Lincoln to join French troops under Count Charles Henri d’Estaing in a campaign to recapture Savannah.

In October, the Franco-American force began a devastating bombardment of the city that lasted five days. But d’Estaing’s fears for the supporting French fleet to remain too long in Georgia during the hurricane season forced the Allies to attack the British defenses head-on on the 9th. The approved plan called for a diversionary assault on the British left followed of the main attack of French and American troops on the British right at the Spring Hill redoubt. American infantry served as a follow-up force, while Pulaski’s men were to launch a cavalry charge whenever a breach occurred in the defenses to sow chaos among the enemy troops.

The attack did not go as planned. The Allied troops started late, as fog and a lack of clear directions delayed the French columns. Once the assault began, the Allies soon realized that the British knew their plans. Eyewitness accounts of Pulaski’s accusation vary. Captain Paul Bentalou, a member of the legion, wrote that the general went into battle when he learned that d’Estaing was wounded. Another legionnaire, Maciej Rogowski, claimed Pulaski and his men got caught in a crossfire between two batteries. D’Estaing recalled that Pulaski charged too quickly and cut himself off from support. All accounts carried the grim news that grapeshot from a British cannon had hit the general as he attempted to crash through enemy lines.

Pulaski died within two days of his injury. Rumors and controversies about the exact cause of death and place of burial emerged decades after Pulaski’s disappearance and continue to exist. James Lynah, the doctor who removed the deadly grapeshot, claimed he could have saved Pulaski if the general had remained in the American camp, but he insisted on boarding a ship. The standard account of Pulaski’s death comes from Captain Paul Bentalou in an 1824 essay titled “Pulaski justified from an unsupported accusation…”. in which he claims his commanding officer died of gangrene aboard the brigantine Continental Wasp. The rapid deterioration of the body forced a burial at sea near Tybee Island, of which Bentalou claimed to be an eyewitness. Another account has Pulaski buried in South Carolina, while another report speaks of a secret burial at Greenwich Plantation near Thunderbolt, Chatham County, Georgia.

When the city of Savannah erected a fifty-five-foot obelisk in Monterey Square to honor Pulaski in the 1850s, examiners unearthed the Greenwich Plantation grave believed to contain his remains. They pronounced the bones similar to a male of the same age and size as the general. City officials reinterred the remains under the monument in 1854. A more recent interpretation by Edward Pinkowski supports the Greenwich burial site and relies on a letter written by the captain of the Wasp, Samuel Bullfinch, dated October 15, 1779. Captain Bullfinch notes that his ship fired Thunderbolt and reported details of the burial of a recently deceased American officer on board the ship who was given a funeral ashore.

When plans were drawn up to dismantle and renovate the monument in Monterey Square in the fall of 1996, the Pulaski DNA Investigation Committee exhumed the grave and had DNA taken from the remains against that of the Pulaski family members buried in Eastern Europe. Proponents of the theory that Pulaski’s body lay in Monterey Square pointed out that the skeletal remains revealed broken bones in his right hand as well as head and tailbone injuries similar to injuries sustained by the general. Yet the unearthed remains had typically female pelvic bones and a delicate facial structure. At the time, DNA tests were inconclusive, but some bone samples were saved in hopes that DNA technology would improve in the future. On October 9, 2005, the 226th anniversary of the Siege of Savannah, the city held special funeral services and a final reburial ceremony in Monterey Square to honor the fallen soldier.

In 2015, Georgia Southern University anthropology professor Virginia Hutton Estabrook and then-graduate student Lisa Powell began re-examining the data. With support from the Smithsonian Channel, the team performed additional DNA testing, and this time the results were conclusive: mitochondrial DNA matched a known relative of Pulaski. Given the typically female pelvic bones and facial structure of the skeletal remains, the team concluded that Pulaski was intersex. According to the Intersex Society of North America, “intersex is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that does not appear to fit typical definitions of female or male” . Pulaski has presented as a man throughout his life and he may not have been aware of his condition. In 2019, this recent discovery, along with Pulaski’s distinguished military career, was featured in a Smithsonian Channel documentary. Pulaski is now publicly recognized as an important historical figure in an often hidden and marginalized community.

Fort Pulaski, built at the mouth of the Savannah River to protect Savannah from Union attack during the Civil War (1861-1865), and Pulaski County were named for the officer of the independance War.

Henry W. Grady, the “spokesman for the New South”, served as editor of the Atlanta Constitution in the 1880s.

A member of Atlanta’s Democratic political leadership circle, Grady used his office and influence to promote a New Southern agenda of Northern investment, Southern industrial growth, diversified agriculture, and white supremacy.

Youth and career

Henry Woodfin Grady was born on May 24, 1850 in Athens. His father, William S. Grady, a prosperous merchant who served as a major in the Confederate army during the Civil War (1861-1865), died in the fall of 1864 from wounds received during the siege of Petersburg, in Virginia. Raised by his mother, Anne Gartrell Grady, young Grady showed talent as a writer and debater. After graduating from the University of Georgia, he briefly studied literature and history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville before returning to Georgia in 1869 to pursue a career in journalism.

Grady first wrote for the Courier from Rome before his bankruptcy in 1871. After marrying Julia King of Athens, he shared ownership of the Atlanta Daily Herald with Robert Alston and Alexander St. Clair Adams. On March 14, 1874, Grady published an editorial in the Herald entitled “The New South”, in which he advocates industrial development as a solution to the economic problems of the post-war South. His aggressive, no-frills writing style and his advocacy of railroad development in Atlanta brought him to the attention of Evan P. Howell and W. A. ​​Hemphill, major shareholders of the company. Atlanta Constitution. Howell offered Grady a quarter ownership of the newspaper for the price of $20,000, along with the position of editor. Grady accepted both offers enthusiastically.

Grady and the Atlanta Ring

As editor, Grady quickly transformed the Constitution into a platform to endorse one’s own political views. He wrote in support of anti-alcohol laws, building a new library, and caring for Confederate veterans. Grady also supported white supremacy and, under his leadership, the Constitution offhand copy sometimes printed that shed light on the lynching. Between 1880 and 1886, the Constitution became the main instrument of the Atlanta Ring, a loosely connected group of pro-industry urban Democrats that included Howell and Grady. Grady became the group’s leader and the dominant political force, helping to arrange for the Legislature’s election of another Ring member, Joseph E. Brown, to the U.S. Senate in 1880.

In 1883, Grady orchestrated the launch of party votes in favor of Henry McDaniel’s nomination for governor. When McDaniel declined to run again in 1886, challenges emerged from rival Democrats centered in Macon. Grady backed Ring member John B. Gordon for the party’s nomination, using the Constitution to coax voters with promotional items and speeches. Despite support from the Macon coalition of local newspapers, Grady’s political politics won Gordon’s election as governor.

Grady’s New South

With the Atlanta Ring’s influence on Georgian politics firmly established, Grady turned his attention to promoting the city’s economic development. After his coverage of the 1886 earthquake in Charleston, South Carolina, brought him national attention, he was invited to speak at the New England Society meeting in New York that year. . Grady preached promises of a New South, arguing that slavery and secession were dead in the region and that financial aid from the North would help reconciliation between old enemies while making profits. He also urged northerners to allow white southerners to manage the rights of black citizens. While these ideas were not original to Grady, his advocacy of unity and trust between North and South helped spur Northern investment in Atlanta industries.

Back in Atlanta, Grady published in the Constitution numerous articles proclaiming Atlanta’s superiority for its diverse small industry and “willing” labor force. Grady infuriated competitors from Augusta, Macon and Athens with these claims, but his promotional efforts paid off. In 1887, he successfully lobbied for the establishment in Atlanta of the Georgia Institute of Technology, a public school devoted to vocational and industrial education. In 1881, 1887, and 1895, Atlanta hosted cotton expositions, industrial fairs that attracted millions of dollars in investment and provided new jobs for the city’s growing population.

Mixed vision

Despite these accomplishments, Grady’s New South has not been universally accepted. Agrarian expert Thomas E. Watson criticized Grady for allegedly subjugating Georgia to Northern interests and oppressing farmers. Similarly, farmers could not follow Grady’s advice to grow other crops alongside cotton for additional income and higher cotton prices due to strict lender requirements.

Grady also struggled to portray a benign racial climate for Northerners interested in Southern industrial investment but troubled by the region’s oppressive racial order. In many Constitution editorials Grady claimed that African Americans received “fair treatment” in Georgia and throughout the South, despite the fact that many black workers were trapped in the state’s brutal convict hire system or stuck in debt toll due to unequal sharecropping contracts. While such rhetoric appealed to white Southern readers, few Northern reformers looked beyond the region’s record of black disenfranchisement, exploitation, and violence.

In 1889, northern Republicans introduced a bill providing for federal intervention in southern elections where black citizens were denied the vote. In response, an increasingly ill Grady traveled north to plead against him. During a speech in Boston, Grady argued that whites in the North and South had previously united to evict Indigenous peoples and exclude Chinese workers. He then argued that white people in both regions should never allow equality for African Americans in society. The US House of Representatives narrowly passed the bill, but it failed in the US Senate after Southern senators filibustered it.

Grady’s trip exacerbated an earlier illness, and he died shortly after returning to Atlanta on December 23, 1889. His influence as a spokesperson for the New South was considerable, providing both the political framework and the motivation rhetoric of Atlanta as a rising symbol of the New South. A few years after his death, Atlanta erected a statue in his honor. While Grady’s bronze figure was cast in Massachusetts, the granite for the base was quarried in Georgia.

Grady County, established in 1905, is named in his honor, as are Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta and the University of Georgia Grady School of Journalism. Henry W. Grady High School in Atlanta was also named in his honor in 1947, but was renamed Midtown High School in 2021 after several students and residents protested the name in light of Grady’s support for white supremacy . He was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2004.

Perhaps best known as the longtime president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Benjamin Mays was a distinguished African-American minister, educator, scholar, and social activist. He was also an important mentor to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and was among the most outspoken and outspoken critics of segregation before the rise of the modern civil rights movement in the United States. Mays has also held leadership positions in several prominent national and international organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Young Men’s International Christian Association (YMCA), the World Council of churches, the United Negro College Fund, the National Baptist Convention, the Urban League, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, and the Peace Corps Advisory Committee.

Education

Benjamin Elijah Mays was born on August 1, 1894 or 1895 in a rural area outside of Ninety-Six, South Carolina. He was the youngest of eight children born to Louvenia Carter and Hezekiah Mays, sharecroppers and freedmen. A recurring theme in Mays’ childhood and early adulthood was her quest for education against the odds. He refused to be limited by the widespread poverty and racism of his birthplace. After some struggles, he was accepted into Bates College in Maine. After earning his BA there in 1920, Mays entered the University of Chicago as a graduate student, earning a master’s degree in 1925 and a doctorate. at the School of Religion in 1935.

Career and achievements

of may education in Chicago was interrupted several times, first by stints as a professor at Morehouse and South Carolina State College. During his tenure with the latter, he met his future wife, Sadie Gray. They had been married since forty-three years, from 1926 until his death in 1969. Mays’ work for the Urban League and YMCA also carried forward his doctoral efforts. In 1933, with co-author Joseph Nicholson, Mays published a groundbreaking study titled The Church of the Negroeswhich describes the unique origins and character of this central African-American institution, offering a critique of some of its problematic clerical practices.

Less than a year before completing his dissertation in Chicago in the spring of 1935, Mays accepted a position as dean of the Howard University School of Religion in Washington, D.C. Mays distinguished himself as an effective administrator, elevating the Howard Program to legitimacy and distinction. among the schools of religion. During his tenure there, Mays also traveled extensively, which would become a consistent aspect of his career. Perhaps the most significant of these trips was a trip to India in 1936, where he spoke at length with Mahatma Gandhi, anticipating an exchange of ideas that would materialize during the civil rights movement a few years later. Mays also continued her academic endeavors. In 1938 he published The Negro’s God, as reflected in his literaturea study of the image and concept of God in African-American Christianity.

In 1940 Mays became president of Morehouse College. There he achieved national prominence, enjoying great influence over key events in United States history. His most famous student at Morehouse was Martin Luther King Jr. During King’s years as an undergraduate at Morehouse in the mid-1940s, the two developed a close relationship that continued until the King’s death in 1968. Mays’ unwavering emphasis on two ideas in particular—the dignity of all human beings and the incompatibility of American democratic ideals with American social practices—became vital tensions in King’s language. and the civil rights movement. Although Mays’s essays and sermons throughout his years at Morehouse chronicled these ideas, their clearest explanation came in his book Seek to be Christian in Race Relationspublished in 1957.

As a trustee of Morehouse, Mays expanded and streamlined the structure of the institution and improved its academic reputation. He was a very successful fundraiser, securing the necessary financial support for Morehouse to pursue its educational goals. Beyond these practical concerns, Mays left a legacy of distinguished Morehouse graduates and lent the college its own inimitable style, characterized by rigor and enthusiasm for the Morehouse mission.

After his 1967 retirement from Morehouse, Mays remained active in several prominent social and political organizations and was in demand as a lecturer and lecturer. As the school board’s first black chair, hWe oversaw the desegregation of Atlanta Public Schools between 1970 and 1981. He also published two autobiographies during those years, Born to rebel (1971) and Lord, people pushed me (nineteen eighty one). He died in 1984.

Hugh McCall is generally considered Georgia’s first historian, based on his two volumes History of Georgia.

The first volume was published in 1811, followed by the second in 1816. Details of his own life story remain elusive. Historian Otis Ashmore later noted the irony that McCall, “who with such commendable effort rescued from oblivion many of our state’s earliest traditions, should himself have left little material to his own biographer”.

Hugh McCall was born in 1767 to Elizabeth and James McCall in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, the second of the couple’s eight children. Hugh’s older brother Thomas produced a detailed genealogy of the McCall family, which chronicles a typical Scots-Irish sojourn from Ireland to Pennsylvania to the Carolinas, beginning in the 1730s and continuing through the 1760s. His father, James, was born in Pennsylvania in 1741 and later moved to Mecklenburg County, where he was involved in the regulators’ movement against British tax practices in the late 1760s. In 1771 or 1772 he moved family in South Carolina, where he served as an officer in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), eventually attaining the rank of colonel. According to Thomas McCall, his father led troops in seventeen battles with the British, but died of both smallpox and a battle wound in April 1781.

Nothing is known of Hugh McCall’s early years, or when he became a Georgian. He first entered the historical record in 1794, at the age of twenty-seven, when US Army records mention him as an ensign. He rose through the ranks, becoming a captain in 1800 and a brevet major in 1812; it was decommissioned in 1815. His first recorded association with Savannah was in 1806, when he became city jailer, a position he held until 1823.

It was probably McCall’s fascination with the military and political spheres that led him to undertake a history of Georgia, which he wrote while still engaged in military and civic service. Entitled The History of Georgia: Containing Brief Sketches of the Most Remarkable Events Down to the Present Day (1784)the first volume, published in Savannah in 1811, covers the political and diplomatic events leading up to the founding of the colony in 1732 and the arrival of the first settlers in 1733. The volume then proceeds as a year-by-year chronicle of the development of the colony up to 1771. McCall’s second volume, published in 1816, also in Savannah, traces the course of the Revolutionary War as it was fought in Georgia and ends with a brief reference to the state constitutional convention of 1784.

McCall’s story is an impressive achievement for a number of reasons. The absence of any archival collection of documents or correspondence, on which most historians would rely to recreate a story on this scale, compelled McCall to collect informal and scattered sources, including oral interviews with a number of Revolutionary War veterans. These veterans would have been elderly and relying on decades-old memories by the time McCall spoke to them. As a result, his account is marred by a number of inaccuracies and is therefore not as reliable as later histories of 18th-century Georgia.

McCall was physically disabled and in poor health when he wrote his story. In 1909 the whole was reprinted in a single volume by an Atlanta publisher, who paid homage to McCall in a new preface, noting:

He wrote his History of Georgia while in constant, tormenting pain and confined to a wheeled chair by his physical disabilities. Having served faithfully in the armies of his country, he did not want the record of what was truly his heroic period to be lost, and inasmuch as he could preserve this record, despite age, weakness and pain, He did it. .

McCall’s was the first of three state histories to be produced in Georgia in the 19th century. William Bacon Stevens completed the first volume of his state history in 1847 and the second in 1859, and Charles C. Jones Jr. completed his two volumes in 1883. Each history was titled the [or A] Georgia History, each consisted of two volumes, and curiously none of the three extended its coverage beyond the end of the 18th century. (Jones planned to write two more volumes but never finished them.)

Despite his disabilities, McCall was listed as a military storekeeper in both Savannah and Charleston, South Carolina, in 1821 and 1822. The accuracy of his service records, however, is somewhat questionable, given that he is said to have also served as Savannah’s jailer during this time. . He remained celibate all his life and died in Savannah in 1824. He is buried there in the Colonial Cemetery. In 1994, the Georgia Association of Historians honored McCall by establishing a Hugh McCall Award, which is given every three years to a historian “in recognition of academic achievement, teaching excellence, and/or encouraging the study of history”.

Savannah’s notable city plan is distinguished from those of earlier colonial cities by its repeated pattern of connected neighborhoods, multiple plazas, streets, and designed expansion into city-held land (the common). It is unique in the history of city planning in several ways, not the least of which is that plazas allow for more open space in Savannah than in any city plan in history.

Founded in 1733, Savannah sits on a forty-foot-tall bluff overlooking the Savannah River, eighteen miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Laid out by General James Edward Oglethorpe, it was the last colonial capital to be established by Britain in America.

Diversity in a logical framework

The basic plan unit is a quarter, 600 feet on a side in the north-south direction and 540 feet by 600 feet in the east-west direction. Streets and building lots are organized around a central open space or plaza. Each district has a name. The wards were originally organized into town wards with a direct correlation to the garden and farm lands in Oglethorpe’s wider regional plan system.

The streets delimiting the neighborhoods allow an uninterrupted movement of traffic. The interior streets are interrupted by the squares to create a pedestrian scale. The resulting model has eight blocks per neighborhood. The four largest blocks on the north and south sides of the square are called the tithe blocks and are further divided by east-west lanes. Four smaller blocks face the plazas to the east and west. These are called trust blocks. Tything blocks are subdivided into 60 foot wide lots which are sometimes divided into 20 or 30 foot increments, creating a diverse pattern of building sizes and types.

Savannah’s plan reflects the political and organizational considerations of the time. Each ward had tythingmen, who shared guard and other duties. The neighborhoods were linked to a larger regional plan of garden lots and farms. The repetitive, non-hierarchical placement of equal-sized quarters, squares, and lots indicates the colony’s utopian ideals. The regularity of these lots controlled the size and pace of development in the third dimension to create a visually diverse, human-sized city.

Expansion by replication

Equally important is how the city developed between the American Revolution (1775-1783) and the Civil War (1861-1865). Until the middle of the 19th century, the city plan was regularly expanded by the addition of wards in the common until a total of twenty-eight wards had been created. According to urban historian John Reps, “Savannah. . . used the power gained through municipal ownership of the commons to shape growth in the public interest. decisions to do so. . . produced the most unusual city map in America. All but four of these repeated quarters had the characteristic squares.

With the reclamation of Ellis Square in 2010, twenty-two squares remain, each approximately one acre. A park system also runs along the Savannah River at the top of the cliff; Forsyth Park culminates the plan to the south while the intervening streets and avenues have central or lateral tree lawns. The result is an urban forest of unparalleled beauty and utility. Savannah plazas form a public outdoor extension of the restricted living space of narrow urban lots. Many squares are further adorned with monuments commemorating various aspects of the city’s history.

Regime Influence

The Savannah Plan influenced other settlement proposals, including Ebenezer, Darien, Brunswick, and Radnor, South Carolina. He continues to be a source of inspiration, as evidenced by the 1993 establishment of Bois-Franc, a 500-acre development in Saint-Laurent, Quebec. To create a flexible street/block pattern that would accommodate a range of residential and recreational densities and uses, Canadian planners adapted Savannah’s street grid to allow for the development of individual yet continuous neighborhoods.

The area of ​​Savannah’s original plan was included in a National Historic Landmark District designation in 1966. This district received additional protection in 1973 when a Historic Review Board was created. Appointed council members ensure that the buildings surrounding the plazas are visually compatible and of an appropriate scale, and thus define the plan.

Synthesis of urban ideals responding to social, military, environmental and philosophical needs, the Savannah plan stands out from American colonial urban plans. The plan continues to adapt favorably to contemporary needs by providing a model for new urban developments.

Savannah’s plan is one of the most studied and analyzed in the history of American urban planning. There are several theories about the influences and sources from which its distinctive disposition was derived. John Reps sees it as a derivation from the colonies established by the British in Northern Ireland in the 17th century, with which Oglethorpe was familiar. Other scholars still support Savannah historian William Harden’s 1885 claim that architect Robert Castell, a friend of Oglethorpe who later died in debtor’s prison in London, England, inspired the founder of Georgia for his plan. In his book Illustrated Ancient Villas (1728), Castell cited the principles of the Roman architect Vitruvius which are directly reflected in the design of Oglethorpe. Other theories attribute significant influences on the design of Savannah to the garden designs of George II’s royal estates or the new plan for London devised after the Great Fire of 1666.

The first drawing of the plan, titled “A View of Savannah as it Stood the 29th of March, 1734” is also the source of scholarly debate. There is widespread disagreement about the artist responsible for this document and much speculation about the accuracy of the drawing.

Noted for their contributions to the intellectual life of 19th-century Georgia, the LeContes originally prospered as rice and cotton planters in Liberty County and later gained recognition for their scientific work.

In 1787, New Jersey native John Eatton LeConte became the sole owner of 3,356 acres of land in Liberty County. Known as Woodmanston Plantation, the estate eventually passed to John Eatton’s sons, Louis (1782-1838) and John Eatton (1784-1860). By 1810 Louis had settled permanently in Woodmanston, acquired enslaved laborers, and was farming rice and cotton. Young John Eatton lived in New York until 1852, when he moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A noted naturalist, he often visited Woodmanston and made important contributions to the study of Georgian wildlife. His son John Lawrence LeConte (1825-1883) achieved international recognition as an entomologist.

Also widely recognized as a naturalist, Louis LeConte was particularly appreciated for the large botanical garden he cultivated at Woodmanston. Married to Ann Quarterman in 1812, Louis LeConte fathered seven children, one of whom died in infancy. The six surviving children were William, Jane, John, Lewis, Joseph and Ann. All four sons of Louis and Ann Quarterman LeConte are graduates of the University of Georgia, and Lewis also graduated from Harvard University Law School. Jane married John MB Harden, a Liberty County physician and naturalist who published notable articles on medical and scientific subjects. Ann also married a physician, Josiah P. Stevens, and their son Walter LeConte Stevens became a well-known professor of physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and later at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. The most famous of Louis LeConte’s children, however, were John and Joseph.

Born in 1818, John graduated from the University of Georgia in 1838 and the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York in 1841. He married Eleanor Josephine Graham in 1841 and they had three children: Mary Tallulah, Louis Julian and John Cecil. . In 1841 John established a medical practice in Savannah, and early in his career he published several articles on medical subjects. His main interests were chemistry and physics, however, and he became professor of chemistry and natural philosophy at the University of Georgia in 1846. He resigned in 1855 following a disagreement with the president of the university, Alonzo Church, and returned to the College of Physicians and Surgeons as a lecturer. From 1856 to 1868 he was professor of natural and mechanical philosophy at South Carolina College (later the University of South Carolina), located in Columbia.

John LeConte published several important papers during his tenure in Georgia and South Carolina, including studies of the formation of columns of ice in frozen ground and the effects of musical sound on a gas-jet flame. During the Civil War (1861-1865), he served as superintendent of a Confederate nitre plant, which manufactured explosives. In 1869 he became the first professor at the new University of California at Berkeley. In addition to teaching physics, John served as acting president of the institution in 1869 and president from 1876 to 1881. Among his important scientific contributions during his years in California were papers on the nature of sound in the water (1882) and on the activities of small objects floating in water (1882, 1884). John LeConte was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 1878. He died at his home in Berkeley in 1891, leaving behind his wife and eldest son, Louis Julian, who had become an engineer.

Joseph LeConte, born in 1823, graduated from the University of Georgia in 1841. He enrolled in the College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1844 and received an MD in 1845. He married Elizabeth Caroline Nisbet in 1847 and established a practice medical in Macon. Because his first love was geology, however, he enrolled in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard College in 1850 to study with the famous naturalist Louis Agassiz. After completing his education in 1851, he returned to Georgia and became professor of chemistry and natural history at Oglethorpe University (then located near Milledgeville). In 1852 Joseph was appointed professor of geology and natural history at the University of Georgia. Involved in a dispute with the president of the university, he left the university a year after the departure of his brother, and in 1857 he became professor of chemistry and geology at South Carolina College. During the Civil War he aided the Confederacy, first in the production of medicines and later in the works of Nitre.

Like his brother John had done, Joseph joined the faculty of the University of California, leaving for the West Coast in 1869. Although he often expressed a desire to return to the South, he easily adapted to his new state, where he became famous for his success as a professor of geology and physiology. Author of approximately 200 publications, including nine books, Joseph LeConte has earned special recognition for his elements of geology (1877), Sight: an exposition of the principles of monocular and binocular vision (1881), and Evolution and its relationship to religious thought (1888). Revised four times, the geology textbook remained in use well into the 1920s. A detailed study of the physiology of human vision, View was the first work of its kind in America. Evolution had notable success as an effort to reconcile the theory of evolution with Christian beliefs.

Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1875, Joseph LeConte served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1891) and the Geological Society of America (1896). A dedicated camper and mountain lover, he was a founding member of the Sierra Club. His Journal of Ramblings through the High Sierra from California was published in 1875 and reprinted in 1930 and 1960. His Autobiography was published in 1903, and its ‘Ware Shermanan account of his escape from Union troops near the end of the Civil War, was published in 1937 and reprinted in 1999. LeConte died in 1901 while camping in Yosemite National Park.

Joseph LeConte was the father of five children: Emma Florence, Sarah Elizabeth, Josephine Eloise (died in infancy), Caroline Eaton and Joseph Nisbet. Emma LeConte’s diary of the events surrounding Union General William T. Sherman’s attack on Columbia, South Carolina, in February 1865 was published as When the world ended in 1957 and reissued in 1987. Her husband, Farish Furman, became a farmer near Milledgeville and developed a highly effective fertilizer for growing cotton. Joseph Nisbet spent his career as a professor of engineering at the University of California and served for many years as an officer with the Sierra Club.

The LeConte name has been commemorated in many ways. A pear, turtle, sparrow, mockingbird, and other species are named after John Eatton LeConte or his son John Lawrence LeConte. Each of the three universities where John and Joseph LeConte taught named a building in honor of the brothers, and several landmarks are associated with their names: Mt. LeConte in the Smoky Mountains honors John LeConte, while three places in the Sierra Mountains, a glacier and a ferry in Alaska, and various other things are named after Joseph LeConte and testify to the esteem in which he is held.

The history of early Georgia is largely the history of the Creek Indians. For most of Georgia’s colonial period, the Creeks outnumbered European settlers and enslaved Africans and occupied more land than these newcomers. It wasn’t until the 1760s that the Creeks became a minority population in Georgia. They ceded the rest of their land to the new state in the 1800s.

Ancient history

The Creek Nation is a relatively young political entity. When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, such a nation did not exist. At that time, most natives of the southeast lived in centralized mound-building societies, whose architectural achievements are still visible today in places such as the Etowah Mounds at Carterville and the Ocmulgee National Monument in Mason.

Around AD 1400, for reasons still debated, some of these large chiefdoms collapsed and reorganized into smaller chiefdoms spread across Georgia’s river valleys, including the Ocmulgee and Chattahoochee. Spanish incursions into the Southeast in the 16th century devastated these peoples. European diseases such as smallpox may have killed 90% or more of the native population. But by the late 1600s, the Southeast Indians began to recover.

They built a complex political alliance, which united the indigenous peoples of the Ocmulgee River in the west with the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers in Alabama. Although they spoke a variety of languages, including Muskogee, Alabama and Hitchiti, the Indians were united in their wish to remain at peace with one another. In 1715, English newcomers to South Carolina called these allied peoples “Creeks”. The term was shorthand for “Indians living on Ochese Creek” near Macon, but traders began to apply it to all native residents of the Deep South. They were about 10,000 at that time.

Relations with the English

When General James Oglethorpe and his Georgian settlers arrived in 1733, Creek’s relationship with the English was already well established. Early interactions between the Creeks and settlers centered on the exchange of slaves and buckskins for foreign goods like textiles and kettles. Shortly after the establishment of South Carolina in 1670, the Creeks created a vibrant business capturing and selling Florida Indians to their new neighbors. By 1715, this segment of the trade had almost disappeared due to lack of supply and demand. Deer skins then became the main currency.

In the 1730s, tens of thousands of hides left the port of Charleston, South Carolina each year for English factories, where they were cut into breeches, stretched into book covers and sewn into gloves. Savannah, Georgia later joined Charleston as a leading port, and by the 1750s it was exporting perhaps more than 60,000 skins each year. In the Creek towns, trade profits included cloth, kettles, guns, and rum. These objects have become integral parts of the culture, facilitating the work tasks of the Creeks. However, they also created conflict by enriching some, but not all, Indians.

The trade also encouraged closer cultural ties between natives and newcomers. Some Georgia traders made their home among the Creeks, settling in towns on the Chattahoochee, Coosa, and Tallapoosa rivers. They married Creek women and had children, some of whom later became important Creek leaders, such as Alexander McGillivray and William McIntosh. Along with others, they encouraged the indigenous people of Georgia to join the plantation economy that was spreading through the South.

Many of the newcomers from Georgia were enslaved Africans and they also forged ties with the Creek Indians. During the 18th century, hundreds of fugitives from slavery settled in the towns of Creek. They too shaped the Creek peoples, including encouraging them to oppose slavery.

The Road to Rapture

Brooks largely avoided the American Revolution (1775-1783), but their lives changed dramatically afterward. The buckskin trade collapsed due to the dwindling white-tailed deer population. The new state of Georgia therefore viewed the Creeks as obstacles to the expansion of plantation slavery rather than trading partners. Under pressure from Georgia, the Creeks ceded their lands east of the Ocmulgee River in the Treaties of New York (1790), Fort Wilkinson (1802), and Washington (1805). The first treaty, the Treaty of New York, solidified Alexander McGillivray’s position as national chief of the Creeks, who were often crippled by a decentralized political system.

At the same time, the United States launched a program to turn the Creeks into ranchers and planters. Although some Creeks voluntarily adopted the program, many opposed it. The tension between the two factions was so enormous that it erupted into a civil war in 1813. American troops and state militia entered the conflict, and a final and final battle in March 1814 at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama , General Andrew Jackson led a force that killed 800 Creeks in action. The Red Rod War, as it is known, officially ended in August 1814 with the Treaty of Fort Jackson. In this agreement, the Creeks were forced to cede 22 million acres, including a huge tract in southern Georgia.

The Brooks were soon dispossessed of their remaining lands. In the Treaty of Indian Springs (1825), Georgia agents bribed Creek chief William McIntosh to give up all Creek territory in the state in exchange for plantation land along the Chattahoochee River. Creeks, who was already outraged by McIntosh’s alliance with General Jackson during the Red Rod War, officially voted to put McIntosh to death for his treason. Although the United States rejected the fraudulent Indian Springs Treaty, the Creeks acknowledged that the Georgia government would not back down. The following year, Creek’s representatives signed the Treaty of Washington, ceding their remaining Georgian lands.

Georgian citizens played a pivotal role in removing the remaining 20,000 Creeks in Alabama. In 1832, the Creeks signed a treaty accepting their resettlement in Indian Territory (later known as Oklahoma). Columbus, Georgia-based land speculators saw an opportunity in the Creeks’ misfortune. They illegally purchased land from Creek and then secretly encouraged hostilities between whites and Indians, hoping to start a war that would rid the Southeast once and for all of its native residents. They found success in a brief conflict between the United States and the Creeks in 1836. At its conclusion, American troops, assisted by Georgia and Alabama militia and led by General Winfield Scott, mustered de force the Creeks and sent them to Indian Territory. Some left in chains, watched by armed soldiers. The brooks had to start living again in the lands west of the Mississippi.