Georgia was the smallest and least radical of the 13 North American colonies.
Georgia did not even send a representative to the first Continental congress in 1774, and for the second Congress in 1775, the delegates couldn’t agree on a position and thus none went; one county, acting on its own, sent Lyman Hall to Philadelphia where he was the only representative from Georgia for quite some time.
The Patriot cause in Georgia was bolstered by the events of Lexington and Concord (1775), resulting in the second Provincial Congress of Georgia later that year. That body adopted the Association’s ban on trade with Great Britain, and set up local committees to enforce it.
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 counter-association. 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.
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 Florida and persuaded Florida 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 enslaved Africans 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. [from The New Georgia Encyclopedia, where there is a detailed article on the War in Georgia].
Battles took place in Georgia and adjacent British controlled Florida
Battle of the Rice Boats (Naval in Savannah, March 1776), Battle of Kettle Creek (February 1779), Battle of Briar Creek (March 1779), Siege of Savannah (September 1779), Siege of Augusta (May-June 1781. The evacuation of Savannah by the British took place in July 1782.
Thus Georgia narrowly avoided being retained by the British in the peace treaty signed in 1783, and the same treaty also returned Florida to Spain.
