The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South by Noeleen McIlvenna

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South by Noeleen McIlvenna Julie Richter The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South. By Noeleen McIlvenna. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 143. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2403-7.) In The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South, Noeleen McIlvenna focuses on the first twenty years of Georgia’s history in order to challenge the view that early settlers failed in their attempt to establish a colony in which the worthy poor could succeed and where slavery was not essential to the economy. McIlvenna tells a complex, multilayered story of Georgia’s beginning in six chronological chapters that include details from a wide range of primary sources. The Short Life of Free Georgia begins in England in the early 1720s, a time when British philanthropists believed that the worthy poor could improve themselves through hard work. Discussions among James Oglethorpe, [End Page 903] John Viscount Perceval (the soon to be Earl of Egmont), and others led to the establishment of Georgia in 1732. McIlvenna makes it clear that Georgia differed from Britain’s other mainland colonies: its Trustees approved regulations designed to support the goal of improving the lives of the worthy poor, including a prohibition on slavery and limiting tracts of land to five hundred acres. Once in Georgia, Oglethorpe and others who settled in the colony—English servants, German Pietists, Lowland and Highland Scots, and Irish convicts— struggled to implement the colony’s regulations. McIlvenna points to the “rough equality stemming from frontier conditions” as a particular problem for settlers (p. 36). Elite colonists complained about laziness and the lack of deference shown to them. In 1735, soon after Georgia’s establishment, many Lowlanders, also known as the Malcontents, informed the Trustees that poorer settlers refused to work and that the colony would be stronger if Georgia had enslaved laborers. In the eyes of the Malcontents, two dissenting ministers—John Wesley and George Whitefield—further weakened Georgia’s social order in the late 1730s as they revitalized religious life in the colony. As the Malcontents continued to push the Trustees to allow slavery, external matters took on a greater importance in the wake of the 1739 Stono Rebellion and the beginning of the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Situated between South Carolina and Spanish Florida, Georgia acted as a buffer, a role that moved to the forefront, and between 1739 and 1742 the “central purpose of the colony became murky for the Trustees” (p. 58). Oglethorpe shifted his work from Georgia’s philanthropic mission to the fight against Spain. Although Oglethorpe failed in his attempt to seize St. Augustine, the 1742 battle of Bloody Marsh, in which Highland Scots, Chickasaws, and Creeks defended St. Simon’s Island against the Spanish, ended fighting in this region. Once Britain and Spain accepted the St. Johns River as the boundary between Georgia and Spanish Florida, the colony’s Trustees paid less attention to Georgia. In addition, Oglethorpe’s departure left Georgia without a strong advocate for free labor. James Habersham, Whitefield’s assistant, became Savannah’s leading figure and pushed the colony toward trade and away from agriculture. When Habersham asked South Carolinians for assistance, these planters used their transatlantic connections to persuade British officials that Georgia was a failure. In August 1748 Georgia’s Trustees decided to allow slavery “with some limitations by the following year” (p. 92). McIlvenna reminds her readers that there are different ways to assess success when one thinks about Georgia’s first twenty years. She demonstrates that early Georgians succeeded in many areas: they created farms, raised crops, tended livestock, and protected their colony against the Spanish. The true threat to the Trustees’ plans came from the South Carolina planters who worked to shape Georgia’s economy into one in which enslaved men and women labored for the benefit of their elite owners. McIlvenna finds the failure rests with the Trustees who did not realize that Georgia was on the cusp of thriving with an economy similar to that of Pennsylvania. [End Page 904] Julie...