Video: 'Georgia in the Civil War'

(Saturday, January 19, 1861; ten weeks after the 1860 United States presidential election) — 74 days after Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the presidential election of 1860 on a platform which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories, Georgia became the fifth state to secede today when delegates to the Georgia Secession Convention of 1861 meeting at the Milledgeville statehouse voted 208-89 to leave the Union.

Georgia followed South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida and Alabama. By February, two more cotton states would follow (Louisiana and Texas), forming the Confederate States of America.