North Georgia in the context of "Metro Atlanta"

In the United States, Southern Unionists were white Southerners living in the Confederate States of America and the Southern Border States opposed to secession. Many fought for the Union during the Civil War. These people are also referred to as Southern Loyalists, Union Loyalists, or Lincoln's Loyalists. Pro-Confederates in the South derided them as "Tories" (in reference to the pro-Crown Loyalists of the American Revolution). During Reconstruction, these terms were replaced by "scalawag" (or "scallywag"), which covered all Southern whites who supported the Republican Party.

Tennessee (especially East Tennessee), Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Delaware, North Carolina, and Virginia (which included West Virginia at that time) were home to the largest populations of Unionists. Other (primarily Appalachian) areas with significant Unionist influence included North Alabama, North Georgia, Western North Carolina, the Texas Hill Country, northern Loudoun County in Virginia, North Mississippi, North Texas, the Arkansas Ozarks, and the Boston Mountains in Arkansas. These areas provided thousands of volunteers for Union military service. Western North Carolinians, for example, formed their own loyalist infantry, cavalry, and artillery regiments, while West Virginians formed a new Union state admitted in 1863.

Metro Atlanta, designated by the United States Office of Management and Budget as the Atlanta–Sandy Springs–Roswell metropolitan statistical area, is the most populous metropolitan statistical area in the U.S. state of Georgia and the eighth-largest in the United States, based on the July 1, 2024 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Its economic, cultural, and demographic center is Atlanta, and its total population was 6,411,149 in the 2024 estimate from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The core 5 counties of metropolitan Atlanta are Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, DeKalb, and Clayton, with over 60% of the metro area’s population residing in these counties. The metro area forms the core of a broader trading area, the Atlanta–Athens-Clarke County–Sandy Springs combined statistical area. The combined statistical area spans up to 39 counties in North Georgia. The CSA recorded in the 2020 U.S. census a population of 6,930,423. One in ten (10.7%) of residents served by the Atlanta Regional Commission (including the core 5 counties of the metropolitan area) live within Atlanta city limits.