After much marching about and some skirmishing around the town of Ninety-Six, Brown and his friends heeded South Carolina governor Sir William Campbell’s advice to await the arrival of the British. When he recovered, Brown retired into the Carolina backcountry, where he and other leaders enlisted hundreds of loyalists and threatened a march on Augusta. When he refused to swear to honor the Association, the crowd of Liberty men tortured him in various ways, scalping and fracturing his skull, burning his feet, and hauling him, unconscious, through the streets of Augusta as an object lesson to those who would denounce the Association. He attracted the anger of the Whigs by publicly denouncing the Association and summoning friends of the king to join a counter-association. Brown had come to Georgia with seventy or so indentured servants in November 1774 in answer to Governor Wright’s advertisement of the advantages of the newly Ceded Lands above Augusta and founded a settlement called Brownsborough. On August 2, 1775, members of the committee confronted Thomas Brown at his residence on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River above Augusta. The heavy-handed tactics of the local committee in Augusta led to the first violence in the backcountry. The Congress adjourned, leaving executive authority in a standing Council of Safety. Thus political power devolved upon artisans and farmers, considered by royal governor James Wright to be the “wrong sort” to be allowed in government. The single most important democratic action of the Congress was the establishment of local committees to enforce the Association’s ban.

The Congress named delegates to the Second Continental Congress already sitting in Philadelphia and adopted the Association’s ban on trade with Britain. Though Georgians continued to drink to the health of the king, they took government into their own hands when the Second Provincial Congress met in Savannah on July 4, 1775. Those who resisted royal government were usually called “Whigs,” and those who remained loyal to the king were known as “Tories.” Whigs were also referred to as “patriots,” though the British thought of them as “rebels.” Tories were also called “loyalists.” A group called the Sons of Liberty broke into the powder magazine in Savannah on May 11, 1775, and divided the powder with South Carolina revolutionaries. News of the battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts caused many Georgians who were wavering in their allegiance to join the radical movement. Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries.

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