Representative George Walker Crawford

George Walker Crawford (December 22, 1798 – July 27, 1872) was a Georgia attorney, legislator, governor, and United States Secretary of War whose long public career spanned the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras. Born in Columbia County, Georgia, he was the fourth son of Peter and Mary Ann Crawford. His father, a Virginian who had served in the American Revolutionary War, settled in Georgia to claim a bounty grant of land awarded to veterans who had fought for independence. Peter Crawford acquired a sizable tract known as Belair Plantation, near the estate of his uncle Joel Crawford. Joel’s son, William H. Crawford, became a prominent national statesman and two-time presidential candidate, running in 1816 and again in 1824. Growing up at Belair, George Crawford was heavily influenced by his father’s legal and political pursuits and by the example of his cousin William, whose reputation included participation in two widely recounted duels. Peter Crawford, a practicing attorney, maintained a substantial personal library, and young George was largely homeschooled there. Peter also entered Georgia politics, serving as Columbia County’s first clerk of courts and as a ten-term representative in the state legislature, further immersing his son in the world of law and public affairs.

Crawford continued his education at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), where he studied law and received a bachelor’s degree in 1820. After college he read law under the noted attorney and writer Richard Henry Wilde, and in 1822 he was licensed to practice law. He established a legal practice in Augusta, Georgia, in partnership with Henry H. Cumming. Seeking further academic distinction, he obtained a master’s degree from the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, the founding college of the University of Georgia. In addition to his legal and academic pursuits, Crawford served from 1824 to 1825 as a second lieutenant in the 10th Regiment of the Georgia Militia, reflecting the early nineteenth-century linkage between civic leadership and military service. In 1826 he married Mary Ann MacIntosh; the couple had four children: William Peter, Sarah MacIntosh, Anna Elizabeth, and Charles. The following year, Crawford embarked formally on his political career when he accepted a gubernatorial appointment as Georgia’s attorney general.

Governor John Forsyth appointed Crawford to succeed Thomas F. Wells as attorney general in 1827, a post he held until 1831. Early in his tenure he became embroiled in a highly publicized and ultimately tragic affair that shaped his personal reputation. In 1828, angered by an anonymous letter to the editor in The Augusta Chronicle that sharply criticized the political views of his ailing father, Crawford demanded that the editor reveal the author’s name. The editor refused, claiming the writer was a woman whose identity he would not disclose. Thomas E. Burnside, a Georgia state legislator and uncle of future Union General Ambrose Burnside, then informed Crawford that he was the author. Crawford, regarding the letter as a slander on his father’s honor, immediately challenged Burnside to a duel. Although dueling had been outlawed in Georgia, the two men and their seconds traveled by train to Fort Mitchell, Alabama, where the practice remained legal, to settle what had become a well-publicized dispute. On the eve of the encounter, Burnside wrote a poignant letter to his wife expressing his belief in the principle for which he fought and his awareness of the possible consequences. In the duel that followed on January 24, 1828, Crawford shot Burnside dead. The incident prompted the Georgia legislature to enact new legislation forbidding persons involved in duels from holding public office, though the restriction applied only to duels fought after the law’s passage and did not affect Crawford’s ongoing service. Burnside was buried in the private burial ground of Colonel John Crowell, a War of 1812 veteran who ensured full honors at the interment. Burnside’s widow, who learned of her husband’s death only two weeks later, was said to have nearly died of grief and later moved with her children to Dahlonega, Georgia. Crawford carried lasting regret for what he termed a “deplorable and unfortunate affair,” and he was known to have made anonymous financial contributions to Burnside’s widow and children, while acknowledging that such gestures could not truly atone for the loss.

After leaving the attorney general’s office in 1831, Crawford continued his legal practice and remained active in state politics. In 1837 he was elected to the Georgia General Assembly as a member of the House of Representatives from Richmond County, where he distinguished himself as a fiscal conservative and an advocate of states’ rights. His legislative service enhanced his standing within the Whig Party, which was then emerging as the principal opposition to the Jacksonian Democrats in Georgia. In 1843 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives as a Whig to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Representative Richard W. Habersham. His service in Congress was brief, running from January 7 to March 3, 1843, but it placed him on the national stage and set the stage for higher office in Georgia. Later that year, the Whig Party nominated him for governor.

Crawford was elected Georgia’s 38th governor in 1843, defeating Democratic nominee Mark Anthony Cooper by a vote of 38,813 to 35,325 and succeeding Charles J. McDonald. He thus became the first—and, as of 2019, the only—Whig to occupy the Governor’s Mansion in Georgia. The Whigs simultaneously secured majorities in both houses of the state legislature, enabling Crawford to advance a program centered on debt reduction, fiscal restraint, and institutional reform. He was reelected in 1845, defeating Democrat Matthew H. McAllister by a margin of 1,751 votes, and served two terms from 1843 to 1847. Under his administration, state expenditures were reduced by more than $66,000 in the first year, and Georgia’s debt of approximately $500,000 was nearly eliminated by the time he left office. Crawford’s government promoted the expansion of educational opportunities and accelerated construction of the state-owned Western and Atlantic Railroad, a critical transportation link for Georgia’s economic development. His administration also succeeded in establishing the Supreme Court of Georgia, an institution that had eluded prior reform efforts for decades. He oversaw the redrawing of the state’s congressional districts, reformed the state penitentiary to make it a more economically sustainable institution, and achieved a long-standing Whig objective by dismantling the Georgia Central Bank, which Whigs viewed as a source of fiscal mismanagement and political patronage.

With the election of General Zachary Taylor to the presidency in 1848, Crawford’s national prominence increased further. In 1849 Taylor appointed him United States Secretary of War, a position he held until 1850. During his tenure, Crawford became involved in the settlement of a long-standing claim on behalf of the heirs of George Galphin, an eighteenth-century Indian trader. Acting in his capacity as Secretary of War, Crawford oversaw payment of the Galphin claim and received a substantial gratuity for his legal services. Political opponents seized on the payment to allege impropriety, and the controversy became known as the Galphin Affair. Although a commission investigated the matter and completely exonerated Crawford of wrongdoing, the episode damaged his public standing and effectively ended his prospects for further national office. When President Taylor died unexpectedly on July 9, 1850, Vice President Millard Fillmore succeeded to the presidency. Rather than remain in the cabinet under the new administration, Crawford resigned along with the other principal Taylor appointees and withdrew from national politics into what appeared to be retirement.

The secession crisis of 1860–1861, however, drew Crawford back into public life. In 1861 he was elected a delegate from Richmond County to the Georgia Secession Convention, convened in Milledgeville to determine the state’s response to the election of Abraham Lincoln and the deepening sectional conflict. On the convention’s first order of business, Crawford was elected Permanent President by unanimous vote, and he presided over the deliberations that led Georgia to secede from the Union. As president of the convention, he is generally regarded as the principal author of Georgia’s Ordinance of Secession, the formal document announcing the state’s intention to leave the federal Union—initially as an independent republic and ultimately to join the Confederate States of America. The ordinance was approved on January 19, 1861, by a vote of 208 to 89, and delegates signed it in a public ceremony two days later in the square before the statehouse in Milledgeville. In later years Crawford lived to see the heavy human and material cost of the war that followed and is reported to have lamented the bloodshed that resulted from the course the convention had chosen.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Crawford’s prominent role in secession exposed him to potential legal and political penalties. He was at one point to be tried for inciting rebellion because of his leadership in presiding over Georgia’s secession and was initially excluded from the general amnesty proclamations issued by Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, which barred leading Confederates from automatic restoration of rights. In 1865, however, Crawford submitted a direct application for individual amnesty to President Johnson. Johnson approved the request, thereby restoring Crawford as a citizen of the United States in good standing, with full protection of his person and property against reprisals. Although he did not return to elective office, this act formally closed the question of his legal status and allowed him to spend his remaining years at his Belair estate near Augusta.

Crawford died at Belair on July 27, 1872. His funeral was held at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Augusta, and he was interred in Summerville Cemetery in that city. His memory was later honored during World War II when, on November 16, 1943, the keel was laid for the SS George Walker Crawford, a Liberty ship built by the J.A. Jones Construction Company in Brunswick, Georgia. The vessel was launched on January 1, 1944, and delivered into federal service on January 13, 1944. Assessments of Crawford’s career by contemporaries and later historians have emphasized his administrative ability and personal integrity. His biographer Len Cleveland observed that Crawford’s political life appeared to be driven more by a traditional sense of duty than by strong ideological passion. The influential Georgia politician Robert Toombs praised him by saying, “There are but few abler and no purer men in America, and he has administrative qualities of an unusually high order.”