Answer:
Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction
By the mid-19th century a vast majority of white Georgians, like most Southerners, had come to view slavery as economically indispensable to their society. Georgia, with the greatest number of large plantations of any state in the South, had in many respects come to epitomize plantation culture. When the American Civil War began in 1861, most white southerners (slave owners or not) joined in the defense of the Confederate States of America (Confederacy), which Georgia had helped to create.
