it. He sought bounty land for building a mill and for the military service of himself and his deceased brother. What had been the Ceded Lands became, under Georgia's constitution of 1777, Wilkes County, the state's first county. Dooly served as its representative in the new one-house state legislature, which eventually gave him and fellow legislator John Coleman turns on the Executive Council that supervised the actions of the governor. Coleman and Dooly received orders from the council to qualify Thomas Waters and Isaac Herbert as justices of the peace in Wilkes County. For reasons not given, they instead gave the commissions to Edward Keating and Jacob Coleson, an action that the council ordered suspended. No further information on this matter appears in the council minutes but, a few months later, Thomas Waters came before the council to take an oath under the act for the expulsion of enemies from the state. John and George Dooly made payments to Georgia for grants of new land in 1778. With the death of Coleman from disease that summer, John Dooly rose to command his county's militia. In this position, he led his neighbors against Creek raiders and won a victory against the Indians at Newsome's Ponds. At almost the same time, Dooly also became the county's first sheriff and, as such, had suspected Loyalists arrested, searched, and confined in chains. In late December, the local electorate voted him as their colonel, with battle-scarred veteran Elijah Clarke as his lieutenant colonel and Burwell Smith as major. Clarke, an illiterate frontiersman of modest means, had been on the rise in the Revolution from his abilities as an almost fatally courageous military leader. Smith, formerly of Virginia, had received an appointment to Thomas Dooly's command in the Georgia Continentals following the latter's death.(n33) For John Dooly this success as a popularly elected leader came at a price. That December, a British land and naval force captured Savannah. Redcoats overran Georgia, except for Wilkes County, and occupied nearby Augusta by the end of January 1779. Fourteen hundred Georgians came forward to sign oaths accepting British protection and acknowledging an obligation to serve in the king's militia. A man named Freeman, apparently accompanying a party of local Baptists, arrived at Augusta to offer the surrender of the county's forts and civilians. Eighty Loyalist horsemen under Scottish captains John Hamilton and Dugald Campbell then set out to receive