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The Transatlantic Slave Trade Comes to Georgia
James A. McMillin
Georgia is often touted as the only British North American colony to outlaw slavery. True, the colonyâs founders, the Georgia Trustees, rejected slavery soon after the colony came into being in the early 1730s, but their ban only delayed the expansion of slavery, for a little more than a decade. After the trustees removed restrictions on slavery, the slave population grew rapidly, increasing from four hundred in 1751 to some sixteen thousand on the eve of the Revolutionary War. The overwhelming majority of these enslaved laborers were Africans. Convinced that slavery was critical to the colonyâs economic development, Georgia planters and merchants imported thousands of black captives, both directly from Africa and indirectly through South Carolina and the West Indies. Most of the forced migrants entered Georgia through the colonyâs principal commercial port, Savannah. By the Revolutionary War, slavery was a central element of Georgiaâs economy.1
In 1732, King George II of England granted a distinguished board of trustees, led by the British general and member of Parliament James Edward Oglethorpe, a twenty-one-year charter for the colony of Georgia. The British government and the trustees intended for the new province, located between the Savannah and Altamaha Rivers and stretching west to the Pacific Ocean, to provide a buffer between the Spanish in Florida and British South Carolina. By settling the borderland with white farmer-soldiers instead of planters and slaves, they hoped to shield South Carolinaâs rich plantation economy from Spanish invaders and Native Americans.2 They had other motives as well; the sponsors envisioned the colony as a haven for Englandâs âworthy poorâ and European Protestant refugees.3 The immigrants would âgain a comfortable subsistenceâ by producing silk and wine, which were in great demand in England, and would buy imported British manufactured goods, thus increasing âthe trade, navigation, and wealth of these our realms.â4 Convinced that only white Protestant yeoman farmers could accomplish these goals, the trustees banned Catholicism, slavery, and rum, and created a land system that limited individual property ownership.5
The trustees accomplished some of their goals. Oglethorpe maintained peaceful relations with the Creeks and Cherokees, and in 1742 he led British soldiers in a successful defense of the colony against a Spanish invasion. He founded and laid out Savannah, one of Americaâs most beautiful and well-designed cities. During the first ten years of colonization, the trustees sent eighteen hundred tradesmen and artisans from England and Scotland, and religious refugees from Switzerland and Germany, to Georgia. Another twelve hundred immigrants came to the colony at their own expense during the decade. But just about everything else went wrong. The trustees ran short of money and from time to time could not provide settlers with the food and supplies they had been promised. Oglethorpe was a poor administrator and, to some, overbearing. Settlers resented not having a voice in local government, as well as the land-ownership policies and the bans on rum and slaves. To make matters worse, the colonists produced only small amounts of silk and wine, and little else. Although the Lutheran Salzburgers who settled at New Ebenezer, inland on the Savannah River, prospered on a limited scale, many early immigrants either died or moved on. By 1751, of the three thousand whites who had migrated to the colony, only nineteen hundred remained.6
More than anything else, the trusteesâ land and slave policies stymied economic growth and immigration. Each colonist sponsored by the trustees received fifty acres; those who paid their own way could acquire more, but individual ownership was limited to five hundred acres. The allotments could not be sold, and only male heirs could inherit land. Since most of the land around Savannah was unsuitable for small subsistence farms â much less for raising silk worms or grapesâmany settlers were assigned land that they could neither farm nor sell. A shortage of labor and capital made matters worse. To clear land, make necessary improvements, and construct buildings, landowners needed capital and hardworking, affordable laborers. This was especially true for those who wanted to cultivate rice. Lacking capital, most settlers could not afford to pay free workers, who were in short supply. Once the land restrictions were lifted in the late 1730s and large quantities of inexpensive land became available, wage laborers became even scarcer. Like other North American colonists, Georgians preferred to work their own land rather than someone elseâs.7
Soon after they arrived in Georgia, settlers began complaining about the trusteesâ policies, especially the slavery ban. A group of Savannah settlers who became known as the Malcontents bombarded the trustees with letters, petitions, and pamphlets demanding slaves.8 Aware that slave-produced rice and indigo were bringing great wealth to planters just across the Savannah River in South Carolina, the Malcontents persistently argued that the semitropical climate and the scarcity of affordable labor made black slaves âessentially necessaryâ to the economic success of the colony.9 Oglethorpe and his fellow trustees vigorously opposed the Malcontents in the late 1730s and early 1740s, but the trustees themselves were not antislavery activists. Indeed, Oglethorpe had participated in the British slave-trading Royal African Company. And even during the time of the ban, slaves came to the colony. The trustees themselves had brought in slaves to assist with the building of Savannah. Other slaves were imported illegally, often from South Carolina.10 Still, Oglethorpe and his fellow trustees insisted that legalizing slavery would undermine their carefully designed, idealistic plan for Georgia and that eventually the colony would become merely an extension of South Carolina. It would also, as Oglethorpe accurately predicted, âoccasion the misery of thousands in Africa ⌠and bring into perpetual Slavery the poor people who now live there free.â11
