The New Georgia Encyclopedia is supported by funding from A More Perfect Union, a special initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Judicial Building in Atlanta houses the Supreme Court of Georgia, as well as the Court of Appeals and the Attorney General's office.
Courtesy of the Supreme Court of Georgia
Freedmen, pictured in September 1867, registered to vote during Congressional Reconstruction in drives conducted by the U.S. military. Between 1867 and 1872, sixty-nine African Americans from Georgia served either as delegates to the 1867 constitutional convention or as members of the state legislature.
From Harper's Weekly
U.S. president Andrew Johnson signs documents at the White House in 1865 to pardon members of the Confederacy. In October 1865 Georgia delegates held a convention in which they satisfied Johnson's requirements for readmission to the Union. Johnson's policies, however, were later overturned by Congress.
From Harper's Weekly
Thomas Nast's depiction of a tearful Andrew Johnson, published in 1866 as part of a political cartoon entitled Tearful Convention, foreshadows the even greater frustration that the president would feel over Congress's resistance to his Reconstruction policies, including the ease with which southern states were readmitted into the Union.
From Harper's Weekly
The state capitol in Milledgeville, pictured circa 1850, housed the General Assembly from 1807 until 1868 and was the site of the state's secession convention in 1861. Known today as the "Old Capitol Building," the structure currently houses Georgia Military College and the Antebellum Capitol Museum.
On January 21, 1861, the ordinance of secession was publicly signed in a ceremony by Georgia politicians. Two days earlier, delegates to a convention in Milledgeville voted 208 to 89 for the state to secede from the Union.
The Georgia Platform established Georgia's conditional acceptance of the Compromise of 1850. Much of the document followed a draft written by Charles Jones Jenkins, who later served as Georgia's governor from 1865 to 1868.
The state capitol building, completed in 1889, features a cornerstone, interior floor and steps, and many walls made of Georgia marble. Marble mined in the state was also used to construct 60 percent of the monuments and the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Courtesy of Explore Georgia, Photograph by Ralph Daniel.
