Conceived in Liberty (114 page)

Thus Oglethorpe, in the days of the inception of the Georgia scheme, told
his chief ally, Viscount Percival, that the Georgia plan was that the colonists “should be settled all together... and be subject to subordinate rulers, who should inspect their behavior and labor under one chief head; that in time they, with their families, would increase so fast as to become a security and defense of our possessions against the French and Indians of those parts; that they should be employed in cultivating flax and hemp, which being allowed to make into yarn, will be returned to England, Ireland, and greatly promote our manufactures.” The promotional literature of the trustees also pointed out how the Roman Empire had sent settlers to their frontiers: “It was by this policy that they elbowed all the nations around them.” In short, the recipients of “humanitarian” largesse, the very needy who needed “to be done good to,” were to be shipped to Georgia to live and work under the absolute power of their masters, in order to serve as docile fodder for military campaigns and as exploited labor in the interests of their rulers! Dependents upon charity, of course, are far more passive and susceptible to the orders of their masters and keepers than are independent and self-reliant workers and other citizens. The lineaments of power were becoming clearly discernible under the attractive trappings of altruism.

One interesting revelation of the trustees’ intent was their policy in selecting colonists to emigrate to the new land. An inescapable fact of nature is that largesse cannot be unlimited; hence, anyone who proposes such gifts must needs select and choose their recipients. What were the trustees’ criteria of selection? First, they were careful to select
only
the needy; clearly, those already earning their living at home would hardly prove docile or grateful workers or soldiers. Another frankly expressed reason for this criterion was to get some of the growing number of unsightly and annoying poor off the streets of London (to “carry off the numbers of... poor that pester the streets of London”). However, far from concentrating on distressed debtors, the trustees made sure that the applicants were “virtuous and industrious,” and detailed investigations were made of their moral character. It would not do, obviously, to have an unruly and unproductive group settle in the colony. Moreover, the trustees insisted that the populace be generally sturdy and able-bodied—here were not alms to the truly needy but a careful insistence that the Georgians be fit for the tasks to which the trustees meant to assign them.

One of the loudly proclaimed purposes of the new colony was to provide a haven for German and other Protestant refugees. A commendable humanitarian aim, to be sure. But we find that the trustees distrusted intensely religious refugees, and agreed to accept only applicants checked for their industry and sobriety.

The first colonists, numbering over one hundred, arrived in Georgia in early 1733, led by Oglethorpe himself, and founded the city of Savannah at the mouth of the Savannah River. More colonists soon arrived, including
Lutheran refugees from Salzburg in Austria who founded the town of Ebenezer.

The absolute dictatorship of humanitarians in power over their charges soon became manifest. The trustees laid down a genuinely totalitarian system of planning—of rules and regulations for the colonists. The crucial regulations were imposed over
land,
and ensured that no one had even a semblance of private property in land. The size of individual holdings was strictly and arbitrarily limited to a maximum of five hundred acres, depending on the number of servants the settler brought over. Each family was given fifty acres, which it was not allowed to sell, rent, or divide. The larger acreage allowed for servants, and brought a rather wealthier element to the colony. All settlers, however, including servants, were carefully selected and regulated by the trustees. Servitude proved impracticable in Georgia, since the servants persisted in rebelling against their masters, committing passive and active sabotage, and running away to South Carolina.

Each family only owned land in “tail male”; the land could be inherited only by a son, and
then
only if the son continued to work the land himself. If both of these conditions did not obtain, the land then automatically reverted to the trustees. But fifty acres could hardly support a family on Georgia land. Furthermore, since the land could not be sold or exchanged, each settler was frozen on a particular parcel of land no matter how uneconomic or infertile it proved to be. And why should a settler without a son willing to keep working on the particular assigned acres have any incentive to improve or even maintain land that would inevitably revert to the trustee government?

Typical of the destructive nature of the trustees’ absolute dictation over land was the situation in the town of Hampstead. The citizens of the town, in 1738, complained that their assigned land was infertile pine land, and petitioned the trustees (who had complete charge of such matters) for better land in exchange. But Oglethorpe replied that if the people were allowed to move to better land, this would put dark desires in the hearts of all their fellow Georgians to move to better land themselves.

The compulsory egalitarianism of placing a maximum limit on everyone’s acreage was even more destructive than the practice of monopolizing land grants in other colonies. The settlers soon saw and complained that there was no incentive to try to better their condition. As one of the trustees’ agents reported: “There being many lazy fellows in the number, and others not able to work, those who work stoutly think it unreasonable the others should enjoy the fruits of their labor, and when the land is cleared, have an equal share and chance when lots are cast for determining each person’s division.”

Another important grievance was the high quitrent charged by the trustees. Yet, Oglethorpe stubbornly claimed that the complaints only came from the selfish and shiftless and from those stirred up by subversive land speculators from South Carolina.

Since the funds all came philanthropically to Georgia from abroad, the citizens paid no taxes and had no right to protest. The trustees employed storekeepers in the colony, and the storekeepers were instructed to dole out precisely fixed and detailed rations to each of the settlers; the precisely detailed doles, as Professor Boorstin comments, “have more the ring of a well-run jail... than of a colony of free men seeking their fortune in a new world.”
*

Totalitarian regulation, of course, encompassed the sphere of alleged morality as well. To preserve their charges against the evils of luxury and indolence, the trustees prohibited the importation of any whiskey into Georgia. All liquor found in the colony would be publicly destroyed and the sale of alcoholic beverages condemned as a crime. The prohibition on rum imports, however, crippled trade with the West Indies, an important market for Georgia timber.

Slavery was also prohibited in the colony, but not at all from any humanitarian considerations toward the Negro. On the contrary,
free
Negroes as well as slaves were barred from the colony, and the main reason was the fear that Negroes would be the natural allies of possible Spanish or French invaders. Indeed, the humanitarian Oglethorpe himself owned a slave plantation in South Carolina and invested heavily in the African slave trade.

If the trustees could not profit personally from their absolute power over the people of Georgia, their
agents
could—and did. For their agents were empowered with the crucial right to distribute all the subsidized stores in the colony. Whenever there is monopoly privilege to distribute, it is almost an historical or sociological law that the distributor will take steps to sell that privilege. Thomas Causton, for example, the official storekeeper of the colony, had absolute power over all supplies and hence virtually of life and death in the colony. In this capacity, he naturally became the most hated man in Georgia. Once he trumpeted publicly that the Georgian “had neither lands, rights, or possessions; that the trustees gave and that the trustees could freely take away”—and, of course, everyone knew that Causton himself was the trustees’ surrogate in the colony. And Causton sold the privileges at his disposal, engaging in profiteering, bribery, short and spoiled rations, etc. As agent of the trustees, Causton
was
the government and thus immune to legal prosecution.

Wildest and most cherished of the trustees’ plans was the promotion of the expensive growth of silk in the Georgia colony. The projectors had high hopes, totally ungrounded in economic reality, of Georgia becoming a center of silk culture. (For one thing, the trustees had not yet realized that the mulberry trees of Georgia were completely unsuited for silk culture.) The trustees proceeded blithely to force and cajole silk production. On the one hand, they established a guaranteed inflated buying price for all silk grown, as well as
subsidies and prizes for silk exported to England; on the other, they required each hapless settler, as a necessary condition of his claim, to plant at least fifty mulberry trees on every fifty acres. The silk scheme proved to be a fiasco in economic planning, despite large-scale propaganda campaigns in behalf of Georgia’s silk. Silkworms could not flourish there and it was uneconomic for labor to be applied to this commodity.

The humanitarian trustees had absolute confidence in the merits of their dictatorial power. “The Board (itself) will always do what is right,” it had the gall to resolve unanimously in 1735, “and the people should have confidence in us.” But somehow the settlers proved to be ingrates and continually complained of their food, land, and equipment. Since they were placed in a position of forced dependence upon the trustees, they could only better themselves by begging or demanding from the trustees, rather than each running his life independently as he saw fit. Furthermore, the prohibition against liquor was proving unenforceable. One contemporary writer explained that “as it is the nature of mankind in general, and of the common sort in particular, more eagerly to desire and more immoderately to use those things which are most restrained from them, such was the case with respect to rum in Georgia.”

As early as 1738, the trustees were beginning to realize that the whole experiment was proving to be an abject failure. Their plans were going awry. The colony was stagnant rather than expanding, and only rising complaints and protests were greeting their unselfish benevolence. Their humanitarianism strained to the breaking point, the trustees soon concluded that the poor “who had been useless in England, were inclined to be useless in Georgia likewise.”

Slowly, grudgingly, the trustees began to relax their power and their fixed dictatorial plans for the colonists. In 1738, they commenced lessening their absurd land regulations: females were now permitted to inherit land. In the succeeding years, childless farmers were permitted to bequeath their lands, leases were allowed, and the maximum size of holdings was increased to two thousand acres. Furthermore, quitrents were reduced and soon abolished, and free exchange of land began to be allowed. But complete private property in land, including complete freedom to exchange or bequeath, was not permitted until 1750, when the trustees were preparing to abandon the colony. To the last, Oglethorpe insisted on the wisdom of the land regulations.

Similarly, in 1742, the trustees, recognizing reality, managed to repeal the prohibition of liquor, but only over Oglethorpe’s violent objections. In 1750, the trustees submitted to popular pressure, in turn stimulated by South Carolina slave traders, and permitted Negro slavery in the colony.

But the trustees persisted in their silk folly virtually to the end. In 1751, the trustees at last allowed a representative assembly—but
only
to make suggestions to the trustees—and promptly required that no one could serve on
the Assembly who did not have at least one hundred mulberry trees on every fifty acres of his land, and at least one female member of his family instructing others in silk reeling, or who did not produce at least fifteen pounds of silk on each of his fifty acres. Also, every slave owner was required to own at least one Negress skilled in silk raising to every four male Negroes.

The trustees’ mounting concessions to the peoples’ rights did not, however, still the tide of petitions and protests in Georgia. Furthermore, many Georgians were deserting the colony for the far freer atmosphere and opportunities of the Carolinas and the other American colonies. Over against the rising and unquenchable tide of popular protest, English philanthropic support was dwindling steadily. At first, the English public contributed handsome sums for the supposed Georgia charity: in the first eight years, voluntary subscriptions totalled 18,000 pounds. But the great bulk of contributions came from Parliament, the government contributing over 130,000 pounds in the years of the Georgia proprietary. But by the end of the 1740s, English interest was dwindling rapidly. And Oglethorpe, the soul of the proprietary, was in disgrace.

Finally, in 1751, the trustees announced their intention to relinquish Georgia a bit ahead of time, and the transfer of Georgia to the Crown was effected the following year. But the trustees did not, as one might have hoped, learn the lesson of the disastrous failure of the humanitarian in power. On the contrary, they remained smugly self-righteous to the last, Lord Percival complaining that “it is a melancholy thing to see how zeal for a good thing abates when the novelty is over....” And they drew from the silk fiasco only the lament that they did not have more money to pour into silk culture in Georgia.

At the end of two decades of humanitarianism and central planning, Georgia, the settlers charged, saw her original settlers “scattered over the face of the earth; her plantations a wild; her towns a desert; her villages in rubbish; her improvements a by-word, and her liberties a jest....”

If the trustees failed dismally in their plans for the Georgia colony, they did manage to pursue energetically the policy of using Georgia as a military and border weapon against foreign colonies. As soon as Oglethorpe arrived, he began to sink funds in a series of military posts. In Parliament, Oglethorpe had persistently called for a more aggressive, warlike policy toward Spain. Now he exulted in daring to build a chain of forts south of the Altamaha boundary. This brazen encroachment on Spanish territory centered on the fort of Frederica, just south of the Altamaha, and extended as far south as Fort Saint George on the St. John’s River in Florida. Naturally, the Spanish government bitterly protested these military incursions, and also demanded the recall of Oglethorpe, but to no avail. Instead, the English prepared for war and Oglethorpe in 1737 was named commander-in-chief of all the royal forces in Georgia and South Carolina. Oglethorpe also acted to bolster alliances among
the Indians; he had already constructed Fort Augusta upriver on the Savannah, to promote trade and alliance with the natives.