This podcast contains graphic descriptions of death and decay.

Please listen with care. Weigh, Land. Game.

Campside Media.

The founders of the state of Georgia opposed slavery, but not on principle. The Spanish were in Florida at the time and offered freedom to any enslaved person who would fight for them.

So the founders believed that bringing enslaved people to Georgia put white colonists at increased risk of attack from the enemies to the south.

But that stand on slavery didn't last long. The Spanish

were defeated in the mid-17 hundreds and stolen people were soon imported from Angola,

Sierra Leone, and the Gambia.

By the time the Civil War started in 1860,

nearly half of Georgia's population,

almost half a million people, were enslaved.

People who were enslaved were

were forced to work under the threat of violence, rape, and family

separation. Conditions were so bad that on one plantation in Georgia,

10% of the people enslaved there died every year.

In 1864, a boy named Monroe was born into slavery on a plantation in northwest Georgia.

Monroe was listed as mulatto in a later census,

meaning the child of one black parent and one white.

It's unclear who exactly his father was,

but most likely one of the white men whose family owned the plantation.

The war ended a year after Monroe was born.

Black people in Georgia were freed.

...