A Georgia Unionist who opposed secession and the state’s role in the Confederacy, Joshua Hill served the state as a representative and senator to the United States Congress and was Georgia’s last Republican U.S. Senator until the 1980s.
Born and raised in the Abbeville District of northwestern South Carolina, Hill migrated to Monticello, Georgia, around 1830 during the cotton boom in central Georgia. In Monticello, he practiced law alongside his brother and began acquiring large tracts of farmland. Joshua Hill married Emily Reid before relocating his practice to the more prosperous railroad town of Madison in the late 1840s. They had eight children, most after their move to Madison. By 1860 Joshua Hill had become one of Morgan County’s leading citizens with a fine in-town home and a large plantation south of Madison. Hill owned fifty-nine enslaved laborers and over 2,000 acres of land.
Politics and War
Hill became involved in Whig Party politics in Jasper County and carried that affiliation when he moved from Monticello to Madison. When the Whig Party collapsed in the mid 1850s, Hill joined the American Party (Know-Nothings). The voters of the Seventh District sent him to Congress in 1857 over Democrat Linton Stephens, half-brother of Alexander H. Stephens. Hill was reelected in 1859. His district included fertile cotton land of the lower Piedmont stretching roughly from Milledgeville to Athens (south to north) and from Covington to Greensboro (west to east). Enslaved people constituted a significant majority of the district’s population.
In the 1860 Presidential campaign Hill helped organize the Constitutional Union Party and served on its national committee. The party’s nominee for president, John Bell, carried forty percent of the Georgia vote, trailing southern Democrat John C. Breckenridge but finishing well ahead of the northern Democratic ticket headed by Stephen Douglas and featuring Georgian Herschel Johnson for Vice President. After Abraham Lincoln’s election, Hill denounced secession from Washington and criticized Governor Joseph E. Brown for his seizure of Fort Pulaski. For this stance he incurred the wrath of most of the Georgia press and suffered hanging in effigy in at least one town. When secession came, Georgia’s congressional delegation resigned in unison except Hill, who submitted a separate resignation letter that did not acknowledge secession.
Many prominent Georgia Unionists such as Herschel Johnson and Alexander Stephens served in the Confederate government after secession, but Hill largely remained out of wartime politics. In 1863, however, he did allow supporters to put forth his name for governor as a gesture of discontent against incumbent Brown and Timothy M. Furlow, an ally of Jefferson Davis. The press and voters widely regarded Hill as the peace candidate, though he refrained from explicitly using the term to campaign. Hill did not expect to be elected and received only 28 percent of the total vote, but he carried much of Unionist north Georgia, including Brown’s home county.
Hill’s second son, Hugh Legare Hill, entered the Confederate Army and died near Cassville in the Atlanta Campaign. Using his Unionist reputation and congressional acquaintance with John Sherman, brother of U.S. General William Tecumseh Sherman, Hill obtained permission to retrieve his son’s body from the battlefield. While in Atlanta on this quest in September and early October1864, Hill met with Sherman and became a key player in the General’s unsuccessful effort to peaceably remove Georgia from the war. When the northern wing of Sherman’s March to the Sea passed through Madison on November 18, 1864, Hill met with Union officers to urge restraint. This episode led to stories that Hill “saved” Madison. The exact details of Hill’s intervention, including a possible personal meeting with Major General Henry W. Slocum, are not confirmed by available firsthand accounts, but contemporary correspondence confirms that Hill had some contact with Union officers. It is likely that Hill’s intervention limited damage to residences in the town. Hill’s plantation about six miles south, however, was thoroughly sacked, probably by “bummers” (foragers) attached to Sherman’s army.
Reconstruction
Many political observers expected that President Andrew Johnson would tap Joshua Hill as Georgia’s Provisional Governor in 1865, but Johnson appointed James Johnson, a personal friend and less strident Unionist. Hill nevertheless served as an influential delegate to Georgia’s 1865 Constitutional Convention, and many observers expected the legislature would appoint him as United States Senator the next year. Instead, the body defiantly selected the former Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, a choice that inflamed public opinion in the Republican north; the Senate then refused to seat Stephens. Two years later, in 1868, the legislature deadlocked its Senate selection between Democrat Stephens and Joseph Brown, who was then affiliated with the Radical Republican faction. The body chose Hill, a moderate Republican, as a compromise.
Before Hill was seated, the Georgia legislature expelled its Black members. In consequence of this and other actions, Congress refused to seat the state’s delegation. Following two years of hearings, delay, and compromise, Hill took his seat in 1871 and served the remainder of his term to 1873. As a senator, Hill pursued a course between conservative Democrats and Radical Republicans. He endorsed Black voting and favored civil rights for freed people but only on a segregated basis. By 1873 white Democrats again dominated the Georgia General Assembly, and Hill was replaced by Confederate hero Major General John B. Gordon. (Not until Mack Mattingly in 1980 did Georgia elect another Republican to the Senate.) Hill became the senior statesman of Georgia Republicans, but with the party diminished by Reconstruction’s end, he had little political power. His last prominent political role was as a delegate to the state’s 1877 Constitutional Convention.
Hill died in Madison on March 6, 1891, leaving a large estate. All four of his sons and his reclusive wife predeceased him, but his daughters survived into the twentieth century.
