General John Twiggs and the American Revolution

Georgia’s legendary John Twiggs had a distinguished public career during and after the American Revolution, but he left almost no other information about himself, as reflected in the extremely concise and brief text on his tombstone and obituary. The family descends from the Twiggs family of Devonshire, England, reportedly including Thomas Twiggs (died 1614) of Jamestown, Virginia.[1] A biographical sketch published in 1849, apparently from information provided by John’s sons, gives Maryland as his place of birth and a date of June 5, 1750, the same date that is on his tombstone.[2] His parents, George Twiggs and his second wife, Elizabeth Bryan, were reportedly poor and died after arriving in Georgia in 1751. He then lived with David Emanuel Sr.

Twiggs’ biographer described him as five feet ten inches tall, stoutly made, well proportioned, with gray eyes and a florid complexion. He had a limited education and became a carpenter who built a mill in what became Richmond County, Georgia, following his marriage, in or after 1769, to Ruth Emanuel (died 1827), the sister of a later governor of Georgia, David Emanuel Jr.[3]

The earliest reference now found to any Twiggs in Georgia is to John witnessing a deed in 1772.[4] A copy of now-lost public records, certified in 1897, shows him commissioned as a first lieutenant in a newly formed regiment of colonial militia in St. Paul Parish (used as the boundaries of original Richmond County in 1777), Georgia, on June 10, 1772. That same document also shows his promotion to captain in February 1774. He likely served in the disastrous defeat of the colony’s notoriously poorly trained and equipped militia by Creek warriors on the frontier in the summer of 1773.[5]

Information on how Twiggs came to join the American Revolution has not survived. He was a tradesman, the class from whom Georgia Royal Governor Sir James Wright and Loyalist Elizabeth Liechtenstein remarked that the rebels came. They regarded such middle-class men as, with milk, the scum who rose to the top.[6]