Initially settled in 1733, for its first twenty years Georgia was a frontier colony. By 1760 the population was six thousand whites and thirty-six hundred blacks, outnumbered by neighboring Creek Indians with a population of thirteen thousand. With only two major towns, Savannah and Augusta, Georgia consisted of little more than a strip of land along the coast between the Altamaha and Savannah Rivers and some additional land inland along the southern bank of the Savannah. By the 1760s Georgia's economy, population, and territory had all begun to grow rapidly. Slavery was legalized in 1750, leading to the expansion of rice-growing coastal slave plantations. White immigrants were drawn by the promise of land. By 1775 the population had mushroomed to eighteen thousand whites and fifteen thousand blacks, but growth of this magnitude could only be maintained with cessions of land from the neighboring Creeks and Cherokees. Indian resistance to land cessions was overcome by misrepresentation, fraud, and the Indians' increasing dependence on trade. Between 1763 and 1773, six official conferences were held with the Creeks alone, five of which led to land cessions that quintupled the area of Georgia.
Initial responses to unpopular British imperial policies of the 1760s were muted. Active support for rebellion developed only after fighting broke out in Massachusetts in April 1775. In January 1776, the Council of Public Safety arrested royal governor James Wright, and in May 1776 the new state of Georgia sent a delegation to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia with instructions to support independence. Aside from three unsuccessful invasions of British East Florida beginning in 1776, large-scale military operations in Georgia began with the surprise British capture of Savannah in December 1778. The war would drag on thereafter, with neither side able to win a decisive victory. The continuing warfare divided a countryside deeply between Loyalists and Patriots, the British withdrawing from Savannah only in July 1782.
With the end of the war, Georgia continued to seek additional Indian lands, and in 1785 and 1786 large cessions were obtained from the Creeks with fraudulent treaties. Fighting erupted as settlers flooding into the contested lands were met by Creek soldiers, but neither Georgia nor the Creeks proved strong enough to win uncontested control. The situation helped convince many Georgians of the need for a stronger central government, and delegates from Georgia played an active role in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Georgia quickly ratified the new constitution by unanimous vote on 31 December 1787. Land hunger was the thread binding together Georgia's participation in the War of 1812 (1812-1815) as well. Georgians were behind an attempted invasion of Spanish Florida in 1812, and the state benefited from the Treaty of Fort Jackson (1814) that Andrew Jackson imposed on both Creek allies and enemies. The treaty forced the Creeks to part with over twenty million acres in Alabama and southern Georgia.
Georgia's population and economy continued to expand rapidly into the nineteenth century. The nonwhite population in particular grew in an economy increasingly based on large slave plantations growing cotton. According to the federal decennial census, there were 82,548 Georgians in 1790, and this number doubled by 1800 to 162,686. In 1810 it reached 251,407; by 1820 it was 340,989, and it reached 516,823 in 1830. In 1790, 36 percent of the population was black; in 1800 it was 37 percent, and from 1810 onward it remained at or slightly above 43 percent of the total population. Blacks were overwhelmingly slaves, as the free black population was always much less than 1 percent of the total state population and during this era around 1 percent of the black population (except for 1800 and 1810, when it approached 2 percent).
Concerns over territorial expansion also dominated Georgia politics. James Jackson established one of the most enduring political alliances of the era based on the popularity he gained by opposing Governor George Mathews during the Yazoo land fraud crisis of 1794-1795. The Yazoo crisis was sparked by the taint of bribery and corruption that surrounded the government authorization of the sale of around thirty-five million acres of western lands for $500,000, which was signed by Governor Mathews. Although the sale was overturned by Jackson's supporters, it remained a potent political issue in Georgia for decades to come.
Indian removal was the central theme of Governor Michael Troup's successful campaign to win the first popular election for governor in 1825. He influenced the fraudulent Treaty of Indian Springs of 1825, which extinguished the Creeks' title to all of their remaining lands. Creek resistance led President John Quincy Adams to an unprecedented step, the tearing up of a ratified treaty. Renegotiation resulted in the Treaty of Washington (1826), accepted by a people that recognized it had little choice. By 1827 the Creeks had been forced to cede their remaining land in Georgia, leaving only the Cherokees with sizable territory within Georgia's boundaries. The election of President Andrew Jackson in 1828 and the passage of his Indian Removal Act in the spring of 1830 signaled to Georgians that they would not have to wait long, and in 1838 the last of the Cherokees were rounded up by the army and sent west on their infamous Trail of Tears.