The Birth of an American State: Georgia: An Effort of Philanthropy and Protestant Propaganda

Abstract

Students of the history of the communities now established in a great Republic and a great Dominion on the northern continent of America have this advantage: that they can begin at the beginning of things, at a definite point or from a line drawn, so to say, in the open plain in the light of the full day. There is for them no search for the head-springs of the river in almost impenetrable fastnesses, no dim twilight before the dawn, no doubtful region of myth or tradition or biassed chronicle. A plain tale of truth and fact is there for their perusal from the first. And I suppose in the case of no one of the States which has a beginning before the Declaration of Independence is this more conspicuous than in the case of the last of them formed from overseas, Georgia, the subject of the present essay. The authentic materials are ready to hand in the Public Record Office in abundance: in State papers, in entry books of letters, in books of appointments and grants to settlers, in journals of trustees, in minutes of the Common Council, in proceedings of the president and assistants for the town and county of Savannah from 1741 onwards, and in a mass of original correspondence, memorials and the like.