Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections for July 9, 2021

On July 9, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was read aloud to General George Washington’s troops at the parade grounds in Manhattan.

On July 11, 1782, British colonists including British Royal Governor Sir James Wright, fled Georgia.

Wright had been the only colonial governor and Georgia the only colony to successfully implement the Stamp Act in 1765. As revolutionary fervor grew elsewhere in the colonies, Georgia remained the most loyal colony, declining to send delegates to the Continental Congress in 1774.

Congress ordered the creation of the United States Marine Corps on July 11, 1798, after the Corps was inactive for a period following the Revolutionary War. From 1799 to 1921, Marine Corps Day was observed on July 11, but is now celebrated on November 10, the date of it’s Revolutionary War establishment.

On July 11, 1804, Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. Burr was the sitting Vice President of the United States and Hamilton a former Secretary of the Treasury.

After he shot Hamilton, Aaron Burr quickly fled the nation’s capitol, making his way to St. Simons Island, Georgia, spending a month as a guest of Pierce Butler at Hampton Plantation.

Burr was a fugitive, but his killing Hamilton in a duel held a certain justifiable reasoning since dueling was not illegal, though morally questionable, to be sure. According to H. S. Parmet and M. B. Hecht in their Aaron Burr: Portrait of an Ambitious Man, after the duel, he immediately completed, by mid-August, plans which he had already initiated, to go to St. Simons, “an island off the coast of Georgia, one mile below the town of Darien.”

Jonathan Daniels’ “Ordeal of Ambition” handles the situation this way: “With Samuel Swartwout and a slave named Peter (‘the most intelligent and best disposed black I have ever known’), Burr secretly embarked for Georgia. There on St. Simons Island at the Hampton Plantation of his friend, rich former Senator Pierce Butler, he found refuge…” As Georgia Historian Bernice McCullar, author of “Georgia” puts it, Burr was “fleeing the ghost of Alexander Hamilton” when he arrived on the Georgia island.

“Major Pierce Butler,” she relates, “had fought in the British army and remained in America after the war.” He had married a South Carolina heiress, Miss Polly Middleton, and acquired two Georgia Coastal plantations, which he ran like a general storming after the troops. In fact, he was so strict that none of his slaves could associate with any of the others. He also required anyone who visited his plantations to give his or her name at the gate. With this tight security, Burr should have felt safe..

Actually, Butler’s invitation to visit the island fitted the escapee’s plans nicely. Not only was the Hamilton affair a bother, but also Burr needed to get away from a lady by the name of Celeste; however, the real reason, aside from being near his daughter, who was also in the South, was the nearness of the Floridas. No real purpose is given why the Vice-President wanted to spend “five or six weeks on this hazardous and arduous undertaking.”

Daniels underscores that from this St. Simons point Burr could “make any forays into Florida he wished to make. He traveled under the name ‘Roswell King.” After his Florida odyssey, he planned to meet his South Carolina son-in-law “at any healthy point.”

Parts of the Hampton Plantation survive in the form of tabby ruins on St Simons.

A house in St. Marys, Georgia bears a plaque stating that Aaron Burr visited there in 1804.

Clark lived in the home from 1804 until his death in 1848. He was appointed in 1807 by then-President Thomas Jefferson as customs collector for the Port of St. Marys, a position he held until his death. The year Clark bought the house, he is said to have provided a temporary hideout to Aaron Burr, who was traveling in the South to evade federal authorities holding a warrant for his arrest after he killed Alexander Hamilton in their infamous duel in July 1804.

Verification of Burr’s stay in St. Marys is hard to come by. But it is confirmed that he stayed on St. Simons Island and Cumberland Island late in the summer after he killed Hamilton. That Burr knew Clark is not disputed. The two attended law school together in Litchfield, Conn., but there is no mention in either man’s records that Burr stayed in the home.

President Zachary Taylor died of cholera on July 9, 1850. Millard Fillmore was sworn in as the 13th President of the United States on July 10, 1850.

On July 9, 1864, Confederate troops retreated across the Chattahoochee River from Cobb County into Fulton County. Upriver, Sherman’s troops had already crossed and moved toward Atlanta.

On July 10, 1864, Conferderate forces retreated south across the Chattahoochee and burned the bridge behind them. General Sherman wrote later of the day,

General Garrard Moved rapidly on Roswell, and destroyed the factories which had supplied the rebel armies with cloth for years.

Over General Garrard was then ordered to secure the shallow ford at Roswell and hold it until he could be relieved by infantry, and as I contemplated transferring the Army of the Tennessee from the extreme right to the left, I ordered General Thomas to send a division of his infantry that was nearest up to Roswell to hold the ford until General McPherson could send up a corps from the neighborhood of Nickajack.

General Newton’s division was sent and held the ford until the arrival of General Dodge’s corps, which was soon followed by General McPherson’s whole army.

On July 11, 1877, a Constitutional Convention convened in the Kimball Opera House in Atlanta to replace the 1868 Reconstruction Constitution.

On July 11, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Aid Road Act, establishing a federal program of paying for highway development.

The Scopes “Monkey Trial” began on July 10, 1925, in which a Tennessee public school teacher was tried for teaching evolution, against state law. Three-time Democratic candidate for President William Jennings Bryan volunteered to help the prosecution, and famed lawyer Clarence Darrow defended John Thomas Scopes.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the Democratic nomination for a fourth term on July 11, 1944.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower was nominated for President by the Republican National Convention on July 11, 1952.

July 11, 1969 was an epic day in rock and roll history, with David Bowie releasing “Space Oddity” and the Rolling Stones releasing “Honky Tonk Women.”

On July 10, 1985, “Classic“ Coke returned, joining the new formula on store shelves.

On July 11, 1985, Astros pitcher Nolan Ryan became the first major league player to strike out 4000 batters.

The Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games broke ground for Atlanta Olympic Stadium on July 10, 1993; after the Olympics, the stadium was modified for baseball and became Turner Field.

Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections

From FoxNews:

As the first pitch in the relocated MLB All-Star Game approaches, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is targeting Stacey Abrams and other prominent Democrats in a new ad campaign and reiterating his pledge to fight legal challenges to the state’s controversial election law.

Set to debut Friday and air during the All-Star Game, the 30-second ad features Kemp outside the Atlanta Braves’ home stadium, Truist Park, the site once selected to host this year’s event. The Republican governor asserts Abrams and other members of what he describes in the ad as a “liberal mob” disregarded the economic losses of local small business in favor of partisan political goals.

“We’re going to keep fighting,” Kemp said in an interview with Fox News. “The Elections Integrity Act is a good piece of legislation that makes it easy to vote and hard to cheat. In my opinion, Stacey Abrams, all these activists, a lot of these corporate ‘woke’ cancel culture people, including Major League Baseball, overplayed their hand here and we’re going to push back.”

Kemp said the Biden administration’s lawsuit constituted a federal effort to influence election laws debated and passed by a state legislature.

“They lost the federal takeover that they wanted to do that was an unconstitutional power grab,” Kemp said. “I think this is just the next course of action to show the activists and the folks that are pressuring them. The president got way out there talking about the bill and labeling it was Jim Crow 2.0 and whatever else. Didn’t even read our bill, didn’t even know what the bill did.”

Kemp singles out Abrams for criticism in the ad, declaring that she and other members of “the liberal mob forced the All-Star Game to move, despite the fact that we made it easier to vote and harder to cheat.” He adds that critics of the election bill will “put their political agenda ahead of jobs, small business, even the truth.”

The Georgia governor also pushed back on reports that Abrams urged the MLB to keep the All-Star Game in Atlanta before the decision was made to relocate, asserting the Democratic voting rights activist had “flip-flopped” on the issue.

“When they figured out this was not a good political position for them to be in, they started trying to put the narrative out there that oh, you shouldn’t move the game,” he added. “Well, you can’t have it both ways and we’re calling them out on that.”

From the Associated Press via Yahoo:

AP: What’s your bottom-line argument about your accomplishments and what’s left to do?

KEMP: I think just our resiliency to fight through COVID, but also the record. We have so many good things to talk about, the great economy, still the No. 1 state in the country for business. We’re setting records right now and have been during the global pandemic with economic development. We have the lowest unemployment rate of the 10 most populous states in the country. That’s a testament to us trying to do two things: protect lives and livelihoods.

We also have a great agenda that we pushed on education. We have the largest teacher pay raise in state history. We’ve done away with ridiculous amounts of high-stakes testing that was stressing our kids, our parents and our educators. Public safety is a huge issue. People are scared to death, especially in the city of Atlanta. We’ve done as much as anybody in the country when it comes to not only ending human trafficking, but also supporting the victims. We want to continue doing that work.

AP: Does it hurt you politically if (former University of Georgia and NFL player) Herschel Walker runs for Senate and President Trump comes to Georgia to criticize you?

KEMP: I learned in politics a long time ago, you can’t control what other people are doing. I’m focused on what I can control, what I can do. I love Herschel Walker. The guy’s a Georgia icon. He’s been a friend, still is, and a supporter of mine. I have no idea what Herschel’s going to do. I think he might be the only one that really knows what he’s going to do himself. … I think he certainly could bring a lot of things to the table. But as others have mentioned, there’s also a lot of questions out there on that.

As far as President Trump, he did some great things for our country. And I supported and really fought (for) and defended a lot of his policies. I know he feels very strongly about the election. (But) I had to follow the law and the Constitution. I did what I thought was right, and I did what I thought Georgians wanted me to do.

AP: Some of the narratives, especially outside Georgia, caricature you as a central casting Southern governor from another era. Does that bother you, or does it work for your politics?

KEMP: I can’t really control what they’re casting me as, but I know what the truth is. And I think Georgians, at least a lot more of them than in November 2018, know what the truth is versus what they were saying. (Democrats’) whole campaign was I was a racist and I’m a vote suppressor. Well, obviously that’s not true. We’ve done some historic things there. One of them is appointing John King, first Hispanic constitutional officer ever in the state of Georgia (as) insurance commissioner, first Asian and Asian female to the state Supreme Court, first African American female superior court judge in Gwinnett County. So, the record is there for people to know that that is just a lie.

Look, I am a hardworking country guy, (been) in agriculture and farming. I’m proud of the rural roots that I’ve developed over the years. I tell people all the time I’ve been on the back of a backhoe, but I’ve also been in the boardroom. That’s actually good for our state because parts of our state are very different, (and) you need somebody that can relate and resonate with all of those factions.

First Lady Jill Biden visited Savannah to promote COVID vaccination, according to the Savannah Morning News.

First lady Jill Biden visited Beach High school Thursday and urged community members to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Biden made two stops at the Savannah high school and was joined by Sen. Raphael Warnock and Savannah Mayor Van Johnson.

The event was a part of the Savannah-Chatham County Public School System’s efforts to vaccinate students ahead of in-person instruction starting in the fall.

Before leaving the vaccination site, the first lady stopped to thank the healthcare workers who Johnson called “the best in the nation.”

“I hope that people honor you by coming out and getting vaccinated because you came, you worked every single day and you put your lives on the line,” Biden said. “We appreciate all that you’ve done.”

At their second stop in the gym around 4:15 p.m., Mayor Johnson gave a few remarks to over 100 community members and introduced Warnock, a Savannah native, who opened his speech with three questions: “How many of you know somebody who has died because of COVID? How many of you have been affected by COVID? How many of you know someone else that was impacted?”

“Even one hospitalization, one life lost, is too many,” Biden said. “When you decide to get vaccinated, you’re protecting yourself and your community. You make it safer for your kids, your family members, your church friends.”

Georgia First Lady Marty Kemp spoke to a human trafficking conference, according to the Athens Banner Herald.

Georgia first lady Marty Kemp spoke to about 70 members of the law-enforcement community Thursday in Watkinsville, thanking them for their efforts to stem human trafficking.

“We’ve really done some great work,” she said, noting the General Assembly has unanimously passed seven bills to battle a crime that preys mostly on women and children. One of the measures provides training for state employees on how to recognize human trafficking.

Kemp’s brief address came during a meeting of the Northeast Georgia Intelligence Network, where law officers from federal, state and local branches huddle to share information on crimes.

“A meeting of this nature is extremely important because of the networking aspect,” GBI Director Vic Reynolds told the Banner-Herald. “By bringing these people under the same roof for a subject matter like human trafficking, it gets them to share that information, and that is extremely important.”

“Our goal is to stop trafficking, but to also to make sure survivors get the appropriate services available to them so they can turn their lives around,” said Reynolds, a former district attorney for Cobb County. “Human trafficking cases are difficult to investigate because they are so mobile in nature. If someone sets up a trafficking situation in, say, Barrow or Oconee County and law enforcement gets wind of it, it’s not unusual for them to pick it up and move to another county in a day or two.”

The Georgia Department of Natural Resources Coastal Resources Division is not objecting to the licensure of Spaceport Camden, according to the Georgia Recorder.

The Coastal Resources Division of the Department of Natural Resource issued a letter Thursday saying it collaborated with Camden County officials and the Federal Aviation Administration to develop ways to minimize the potential hazards of a new facility where rockets are launched into orbit.

State environmental regulators reviewed the county’s plans and determined planned rocket launches won’t violate state laws protecting the ecosystem of nearby barrier islands.

“Launch vehicle operators wishing to use the facility must obtain a separate FAA Launch Operator License that has undergone additional environmental and safety review for the specific rockets they intend to launch, including federal consistency review by DNR,” the state agency’s letter says.

The state’s assessment is bad news for conservationists and environmentalists who worry that the agencies haven’t adequately addressed the threat of rocket explosions on the nearby Little Cumberland Island, Cumberland Island National Seashore and the beaches, marshlands and waterways.

Camden County Administrator Steve Howard said Thursday that with favorable reviews from the Coastal Resource Division and federal regulators so far, spaceport supporters hope to “hear good news from the FAA by the end of the month.”

Georgia Senate President Pro Tempore Butch Miller (R-Gainesville) announced he has raised more than $2 million dollars in his campaign for Lieutenant Governor, according to the Capitol Beat News Service via the Albany Herald.

The fundraising haul for the Republican was jump-started by a campaign kickoff event in his hometown of Gainesville last week that drew more than 1,000 supporters, including former Gov. Nathan Deal and former U.S. Sen. David Perdue.

“We’re just getting started,” Miller said. “We’re traveling the state, we’re getting a tremendous response, and these numbers tell that story. I have a long record of conservative policy victories that have brought prosperity to Georgia, and I have a conservative vision to ensure that even better days are ahead for Georgia families and businesses.”

One other candidate is running for lieutenant governor on the Republican side, Savannah GOP activist Jeanne Seaver. Her campaign finance report had not been posted on the commission’s website as of Thursday.

State legislators continue meeting to hear public comments on redistricting, but actual work on maps is delayed due to the federal government not yet releasing census data, according to the Augusta Chronicle.

While normally the Census Bureau releases data in April, this year it will likely be September before the committees have the final numbers showing demographic shifts across the state. State Sen. Harold Jones, D-Augusta, who serves on the Senate committee, said it is hard to know what will happen without data.

“It’s very difficult to say at this early stage,” he said. “We’re having the meetings but we still don’t have (the data).”

The committees did hear from residents in Athens-Clarke County on Tuesday. Many of the speakers expressed concern over what they felt were arbitrary legislative districts dividing the community.

“Each December my fellow nine commissioners and mayor, all Democrats and progressives, meet with our five state representatives – three in the assembly and two in the Senate,” [Clarke County District 8 Commissioner Carol Myers] said. “We share with them local legislation, issues we would like them to address in the state level. Four of our five representatives are Republicans. For the most part, they do not advance the legislation that we ask them to represent and sometimes even put forth legislation that runs counter to will of the local government.”

Gwinnett County Sheriff Keybo Taylor’s office will begin offering health insurance assistance for released inmates, according to the Gwinnett Daily Post.

The office announced the establishment of the Re-Entry Health Insurance Program on Thursday with the opening of an access kiosk at the Gwinnett County Detention Center. The office said it is the first law enforcement agency in the U.S. to offer the program, which is designed to ensure people released from jail, prison and halfway houses get immediate access to health insurance.

“Guiding residents towards medical insurance is another key component to the criminal justice reform. Individuals transitioning out of incarceration often include adults with significant mental health and physical needs that also experience social and economic challenges,” Sheriff Keybo Taylor said.

Sheriff’s Office officials said the health insurance program is part of ongoing efforts to target recidivism. They asserted that half of the people who end up incarcerated have not only mental health issues, but also suffer from substance addiction issues, and that those issues increase their chances of being re-arrested.

“Getting medical insurance promotes greater stability in their lives and ultimately reducing the recidivism rate,” Taylor said. “We are pushing to help as many people as possible and be a trailblazer for surrounding agencies to do the same thing.”

Macon-Bibb County will host three public meetings to hear citizen ideas about preventing violent crime, according to the Macon Telegraph.

After Macon saw more than 50 homicides countywide in 2020, the killings have continued in 2021 with 32 homicides — 25 of which are potential murders.

“We’re going to reach out to each and every person in the community that will participate across all zip codes, no boundaries in Macon-Bibb County, to get the engagement we need to help solve this important issue,” [Mayor Lester] Miller said at the announcement.

The Georgia Municipal Association held a press conference for mayors to discuss the federal infrastructure legislation, according to the Augusta Chronicle.

“This is the largest investment in our infrastructure in a century, the largest investment in public transit in American history,” [Augusta Mayor Hardie] Davis said. “For those of us in Augusta, in the CSRA, it will allow Augustans and individuals across this region to benefit from improved transit access, and it will bring huge boosts in our efforts to not only move towards climate friendly electric busses that we just announced on this past Monday, but more importantly, these investments will allow us to move forward with clean drinking water and wastewater infrastructure that in many of cities have languished for decades.”

The agreement was a compromise reached on June 24 between President Joe Biden and a bipartisan group of senators. While legislation has not been put forward yet, the agreement proposes $312 billion for transportation and $266 billion for other infrastructure, including power, water, resilience and broadband infrastructure.

“Internet access is a crucial utility, and with an allocation of $65 billion for broadband infrastructure we have an opportunity to not only meet the needs of rural Georgians but even urban Georgians,” Davis said. “Right here in the heart of Augusta I’ve got individuals who do not have internet access … We’ve got an opportunity to fix that.”

Besides Davis, Union City Mayor and GMA President Vince Williams, East Point Mayor Deana Holiday Ingraham, Brunswick Mayor Cornell Harvey and Columbus Mayor Skip Henderson also spoke in support of the proposal.

Tybee Island City Council is considering a new ordinance to change the law’s treatment of marijuana possession, according to WTOC.

Tybee Island city council voted on the first reading of an ordinance that would change the punishment for marijuana possession in the city.

This ordinance would make possession of up to two ounces of marijuana a ticketing offence instead of jail time.

Some council members want to look at records and remove similar offences from past records. Officials say they would consider removing those charges from offenders in the last six months to a year.

Tybee Island City Council declined to vote on a 90-day service agreement with Chatham County for fire service leadership, according to WTOC.

The original proposal came with strong opposition from residents.

“We’ve got to keep our fire department in this community and not farming out to someone else. I’m devastated at the thought process could happen,” said one.

Council instead voted to expand the list of options outside of Chatham EMS with a physical presence on Tybee to temporarily fill the role as Fire Chief and Assistant Chief.

The city manager and city attorney will have the next seven to 10 days to find people to fit the role, if possible. As well as put the word out for a new chief to fill the Chief position permanently.