Georgia’s civilian population felt the economic effects of the Civil War (1861-65) nearly as soon as soldiers left home to fight. As the war progressed, those on the home front faced growing shortages of food, salt, cloth, and cash. Governor Joseph E. Brown and the state’s legislators were acutely aware of increasing deprivation, and they responded with a series of measures designed to prevent starvation and suffering. The general attitude toward welfare in the nineteenth century was that it should be provided as needed but not excessively, for fear of encouraging idleness and dependence on the government.

Monticello native William A. Connelly served as Sergeant Major of the Army, the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer in the U.S. Army, from 1979 to 1983. Courtesy of U.S. Army The New Georgia Encyclopedia does not hold the copyright for this media resource and can neither grant nor deny permission to republish or reproduce the image online or in print. All requests for permission to publish or reproduce the resource must be submitted to the rights holder.

Kidnapped from the Savannah waterfront when he was eight years old, William O. Golding chronicled his travels through a series of maritime drawings that he created near the end of his life while a patient at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Savannah. Between 1932 and 1939 he executed around sixty drawings, created from his memories of the ships he sailed and the ports of call he visited around the globe. Golding’s drawings reveal details of his remarkable life, as do the only two extant letters of this African American self-taught artist.

William  Pierce was an officer in the Revolutionary War (1775-83), a member of the Continental Congress, and a Georgia state legislator. Although traditionally believed to be a native Georgian, William Leigh Pierce was born in York County, Virginia, around 1753, the third and youngest son of Elizabeth and Matthew Pierce. Though frequently referred to with a middle name of “Leigh,” he always signed his name as “William Pierce Jr.,” perhaps to distinguish himself from an uncle of the same name.

Most southern women did not publicly express a desire for equal rights with men until well after the Civil War (1861-65), and suffrage, or the right to vote, came later to women in Georgia than to women in most other states. Northern women, inspired by the national reform movements in abolition and temperance, had held the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, and the first national women’s rights convention in 1850, in Worcester, Massachusetts.