January 15, 1862, serial # 6543, stamped seal on obverse, a very fine note...........The Civil War and Its AftermathOn January 19, 1861, Georgia convention delegates passed the Ordinance of Secession, and the “Republic of Georgia” joined the Confederate States of America, to the accompaniment of wild celebration, bonfires, and illuminations on Milledgeville’s Statehouse Square. Nearly four years later, on a bitterly cold November day, Union general William T. Sherman and 30,000 Union troops marched into Milledgeville. When they left a couple of days later, the statehouse had been ransacked; the state arsenal and powder magazine had been destroyed; the penitentiary, the central depot, and the Oconee bridge were burned; and the surrounding countryside was devastated. In 1868, during Reconstruction, the capital was moved to Atlanta—a city emerging as the symbol of the New South as surely as Milledgeville symbolized the Old South.Milledgeville spent the remaining years of the nineteenth century trying to survive the loss of the capital. Through the energetic efforts of local leaders, the Middle Georgia Military and Agricultural College (later Georgia Military College) was established in 1879 on Statehouse Square. Where the crumbling remains of the old penitentiary stood, Georgia Normal and Industrial College (later Georgia College and State University) was founded in 1889. In part because of these institutions, as well as Central State Hospital, Milledgeville remained a less provincial town than many of its neighbors.