These virtues distinguished the pioneer women of Middle Georgia sixty years ago.  As their husbands were honest and brave, they were chaste and pious; and from such a parentage sprang the men and women who have made a history for her pre-eminent among all her sister States.  Her sons have peopled the West, and are distinguished there for their high honor and splendid abilities; and yet at home she boasts Toombs, Colt, Stephens, Hill, Johnson, Campbell, and a host of others, who are proud specimens among the proudest of the land.  They have measured their strength with the proudest minds of all the Union, and won a fame unequalled, adorning her councils, its Cabinet, its Bench, and were the first everywhere.

George Michael Troup, one of the most distinguished of Georgia’s sons, was the son of an English gentleman, who emigrated to Georgia anterior to the Revolution.  He married Miss McIntosh, of Georgia, sister of General John McIntosh, of McIntosh County.  He took no part in the Revolution.  England was his mother country; to her he was attached, and in conscience he could not lift his hand in wrath against her.  This course did not meet the approval of the McIntoshes, and he retired from the State and country.  First, he went to England, but not contented there, he came to the Spanish town of Pensacola.  Here he met the celebrated Indian chief, Alexander McGilvery, who was hostile to the Americans, and who invited him to take refuge in his country.  McGilvery was a remarkable man; his father was a Scotchman, his mother a half-breed; her father was the celebrated French officer who was killed by his own men in 1732 at Fort Toulouse—­his name was Marchand,—­and her mother a full-blooded Creek woman.

McGilvery supposed him an English emissary, and invited him to go into the Creek nation and reside with his people.  From Pensacola he went to Mobile, and thence to a bluff on the Tombigbee, where he remained during the war.  This bluff he named McIntosh’s Bluff, and it bears the name yet.  Here George M. Troup was born.  At the close of the war he returned to Georgia, and fixed his residence among the relatives of his wife.  The McIntosh family were Highland Scotch, and partook of all the intrepidity of that wonderful people.  They immigrated to Georgia with General Oglethorpe in company with a number of their countrymen, and for one hundred and thirty years have continued to reside in the county named for the first of their ancestors who settled and made a home in the colony of Georgia.  It is a family distinguished for chivalry as well in Europe as in Georgia.  At the commencement of the Revolution they at once sided with the colonists.  Lachlin and John McIntosh became distinguished as leaders in that protracted and doubtful conflict, meeting in battle their kinsman in high command in the British army.  On one occasion, when John McIntosh had surrendered at the battle of Brier Creek, a British officer, lost to every sentiment and feeling of honor, attempted to assassinate him, and was only prevented from doing so by Sir AEneas McIntosh, the commander of the English army, whose promptness arrested the blow by interposing his own sword to receive it.