Conceived in Liberty (113 page)

The upshot of the controversy (which continued for years afterward) was, in a sense, a stalemate: the suspension of the habeas corpus was disallowed but the original large grants to land speculators were allowed to stand.

The tightness of oligarchic control over the South Carolina government in this era may be seen in the fact that
every one
of the colony’s governors from 1725 to 1756 was a member of a clique of six wealthy, heavily intermarried landed families. These were the planter families of Blake, Bull, Drayton, Fenwicke,
Izard, and Middleton. (Governor Johnson was related by marriage to the Blakes.) Furthermore, of the thirty-seven councillors of South Carolina during this period, no less than seventeen were members of this clan. The second big power group in the colony were leading Charleston merchants, generally natives of England with English business connections and influential at the Board of Trade. This group supplied eight councillors, and the very wealthy Henry Laurens was also a member of the group.

By the 1750s, the Council had accumulated a great deal of independent power in South Carolina, but after 1756, its power and prestige rapidly dwindled as the governor and the Crown dismissed recalcitrants and began to appoint largely royal bureaucrats completely dependent on the Crown. The Assembly then became the center of power and leadership among the colonists and hence of resistance to exactions of the Crown.

The South Carolinians, in agitating for a shift from proprietary rule, found it advantageous to scare the Crown about alleged French and Spanish pressures. This propaganda, as well as the Yamassee war, focused the attention of Great Britain on South Carolina and its borderland to the south.

The Spanish had settled north Florida and what is now the Georgia coast in the mid-1560s, with their center at the great port of St. Augustine. Settlement had extended as far north as Santa Elena (now Port Royal, South Carolina), where the Spanish destroyed a recently settled French Huguenot colony. The Spaniards, who concentrated on missionary activities among the Indians—particularly by the Franciscan order—named the Georgia coast the Gualé mission province and established missions and posts on the coast. Attacks by Gualé Indians forced abandonment of the mission posts at the turn of the seventeenth century, but the defeat of the Indians opened the way for renewed and expanded mission posts during the century. Attacks by the Westo Indians in the mid-1650s forced the Spaniards to retreat to below the Savannah River, thus paving the way for the English settlements in South Carolina. Hardly had settlement begun in the 1670s when the South Carolinians fomented trouble among the Indians. They soon became notorious in the colonies for their zeal in enslaving Indians, while the cattle of white settlers often destroyed Indian crops. Moreover, the colonists were eager for war against the Indians in order to gain a considerable supply of slaves, who commanded a ready market in West Indies plantations. The practice had begun as early as 1671, when the English colonists used a vague charge of conspiracy with the Spaniards as an excuse to make war upon the Kusso Indians and turn them into slaves. Eager to repeat this success, South Carolina launched a war
upon the Westo Indians in 1680, thereby going against the proprietary policy of peaceful trade and friendship with the Westos. The proprietors, however, maintained a monopoly of the Westo trade, so that this furnished an incentive for the disgruntled colonists to make war upon the Westos rather than remain in peace. A bloody struggle ensued. After three years, South Carolina, with the help of the Savannah tribe, annihilated the Westo Indians. The Savannahs settled near the Savannah River, replacing the slaughtered Westos. There they and South Carolina made a mutually profitable deal: the whites supplied the Savannahs with arms and the Savannahs, in turn, made war upon and enslaved neighboring Indians, after which they sold the slaves to South Carolina.

The Spaniards had made one fatal mistake in occupying Gualé: they sent missionaries to their Indian allies instead of arms. Beginning in 1680, South Carolina incited a series of Indian attacks against the unarmed Spanish Indians and mission posts. By the end of the Westo War, the aggressive policy of South Carolina had driven the Spanish mission stations out of Gualé. The Spanish Indians also fled, and the powerful Yamassee Indians, attracted by a winner, moved from Florida to South Carolina.

With the crushing of the Yamassees and other Indians in the Yamassee war, the old Gualé region was now open for settlement and penetration. The Carolina proprietors agreed in 1717 to a fantastic scheme to establish a feudal Margravate of Azilia in the Gualé region. The proprietors were to grant the region to the promoters, in exchange for a quitrent of a penny per acre occupied. The main Azilia promoters were Sir Robert Montgomery, a Scottish baronet, and the poet Aaron Hill. Montgomery and Hill wrote promotional monographs, glowingly puffing the land as “our future Eden.” A myriad of elaborate townships were projected, to be spaced in concentric zones with the Margrave’s palace in the exact center. But, like many other wild schemes, the plan collapsed with the ending in 1720 of the inflationary and speculative South Sea Bubble on the London Stock Market.

One of the first acts of the new royal government in South Carolina was to build Fort King George at the mouth of the Altamaha River, the first English establishment in the Georgia region. The fort was to serve as a standing outpost against the French in the west and the Spanish in the south. The South Carolina Assembly resented paying for a new garrison, but the new governor, Francis Nicholson, was able to drive through the sizable appropriations.

Not only was the erection of the fort on former Spanish territory an insult and a threat to Spain, but soon the fort was being used to incite the Indians to raid Spanish settlements in Florida. The Spanish ambassador to London charged that the Floridians “could not stir out of their houses to cultivate their lands, or turn out their cattle without apparent danger from the said Indians.” The Crown sent two letters to Nicholson, ordering the end of the aggressive violence against the Spanish settlements. The great hope of Nicholson
and South Carolina was to use Fort King George during the hoped-for next round of wars, as a base to seize St. Augustine. To the Spanish insistence that the fort be dismantled, South Carolina irrelevantly kept turning to demands that runaway Negro slaves be forcibly returned by Spain. No one was more unhappy about maintaining the fort than its own garrison. From 1725 to 1727 the soldiers, disgruntled with a malarial swamp and with poor food, mutinied several times. A dozen soldiers defected to St. Augustine and the garrison allowed a fire almost to destroy the fort.

During the 1720s the proprietors kept title to Carolina (including Georgia) lands and insisted on keeping all new lands closed to settlement—while demanding collection of quitrents or a restoration of their own rule before they would consent to open the lands for settlement. All plans to settle Georgia during this period therefore proved to be abortive.

In 1727, Spain launched a desultory siege of the British port of Gibraltar. During this short-lived war between England and Spain, the Carolinians withdrew from the exposed Fort King George. Indeed, Indian tribes allied to Spain now raided frontier Carolina settlements. The Yamassee remnants, though reduced to three villages near St. Augustine, eagerly sought revenge by leading these border raids, and they were joined by Creeks and by runaway Negroes anxious to exact some revenge for their years in slavery. The South Carolinians, for their part, took the occasion to launch an expedition and to annihilate the Yamassee remnant. Going by sea, the South Carolinians, led by Colonel John Palmer, a member of the Assembly, devastated and burned the Yamassee towns, including the Catholic chapel near St. Augustine, and killed a number of Indians. Some of the Yamassees found refuge in the great fort of St. Augustine, but the Yamassee prestige had been irreparably injured.

So long as the proprietors who had closed off the unsettled land still held title to Carolina and Georgia, the Crown could not open up the Georgia land to settlement. But with the end of the proprietary claims in 1729, the crushing of the Yamassees, and the end of the brief Anglo-Spanish war, the path to settlement was now wide open. Furthermore, the royal authorities were particularly anxious to encourage settlement in Georgia as a buffer against the French, Spanish, and Indians.

It was at this time that the Gualé region was organized and settled on a unique basis: here was neither a proprietary nor chartered company organized for profit or for religious unity, nor a typically royal province; here was a proprietary colony run, not for profit, but for humanitarian and altruistic reasons. Here was an unparalleled model of the logical consequences of philanthropic altruism run rampant.

The major founder of the new philanthropic colony was Colonel James E. Oglethorpe, a prominent member of Parliament and an aggressive Tory. The most widely trumpeted aim of the new colony was humanitarianism: Englishmen were called upon to contribute with no hope of personal reward to a new
colony in Gualé (to be called “Georgia” in honor of King George II), which would colonize and help the poor and needy of England. Indeed, because of its humanitarian reputation, Georgia received tremendous publicity in the English press. Meetings of the trustees were reported in detail, and Oglethorpe was welcomed as a hero—replete with odes from leading poets such as Alexander Pope—upon his return from trips to the new colony.

Even on its face it is a wonder that no one called the humanitarianism of this scheme into question. If one is so eager to help the English poor, is it so humanitarian to ship them to a new and unsettled land bordered by potential enemies? But apart from this, the workings of the new experiment revealed the logical consequences of outright altruism. For if A is to act as “his brother’s keeper,” if he is to be in a position to do good
to
his fellow man, then he must be his brother’s keeper in more than one sense. For how can A be truly
responsible for
(that is, keep) B unless he be given power to tell B what to do and what not to do, that is, be his keeper in the unpleasant sense of jailer? On the simplest level, for example, how can A be responsible for B’s health unless he is in a position to dictate B’s food consumption and to force him to wear rubbers in the rain? To do good
to
another, the recipient must be made to sit still and accept the largesse. And to be responsible
for
another, the humanitarian must have power over him. This is why, in the stark but telling phrase of the brilliant but neglected twentieth-century political thinker Isabel Paterson, “the humanitarian sets up the guillotine.”
*

If, then, one is to set up a “humanitarian” colony for the poor and unemployed,
and
as a corollary the colony is not to be run by the supposedly evil motives of profit-making, then what are the consequences? The supposedly cold and impersonal motives of profit furnish a potent checkrein on irresponsible actions. To make profits one’s production must be economic; specifically, to build up a profitable colony it is necessary to induce settlers to come to that colony and to be productive and economic. But the rejection of profit-making as a motive gave the proprietors almost unlimited rein to exercise irresponsible and arbitrary
power
over their charges. It also gave them a chance to indulge in general and vague motives, the outcome of which might be truly reprehensible, despite their superficial attraction for many people.

James Oglethorpe and his associates received a charter from King George II in 1732 for a colony of Georgia with jurisdiction between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers (now northern Georgia). By the charter, the proprietors were a group of twenty-one trustees—the Georgia Trust—none of whom was to be allowed to reap personal gain or profit from the colony. The Trust was to run the colony for twenty-one years, after which the land would revert to the Crown. All laws of Georgia were to be subject to the king’s approval. Religious freedom was to be enjoyed in the colony by all except Catholics, who apparently did not come under any sort of “humanitarian” jurisdiction.

The conjunction of altruism and absolute power could be discerned very early: the Common Council—a committee of trustees—was to have absolute power to decree laws and regulations for the inhabitants of Georgia. From its very inception, here was the only colony where the citizens had no representative assembly whatever and, indeed, little say over their own lives and actions.

Two myths soon surrounded the inception of the Georgia colony, myths that were convenient for Oglethorpe and the trustees to foster. One was that the humanitarianism was virtually permeated with religion, and second, that the philanthropy was directed specifically toward debtors who had been released from imprisonment. The first myth stems from the fact that the Georgia Trust grew out of a foundation called the Associates of Dr. Bray, which consisted of those who had been followers of the aggressive Anglican missionary and philanthropist, the Reverend Thomas Bray. Dr. Bray had been interested in a humanitarian colony in Georgia but died in 1730, and religious influence proved to be virtually nonexistent in the colony. In fact, Thomas Coram, a close friend of Bray’s, soon broke with the Georgia experiment because of the absence of any religious influence. The second myth arose because the bulk of Oglethorpe’s associates among the trustees had been connected with him in parliamentary jail committees on the state of debtors and others in prison. But the historian Albert B. Saye has shown that hardly any formerly imprisoned debtors were among the early settlers of Georgia.
*

In fact, there were other motives than humanitarian ones in establishing Georgia. These may be summed up in the advancement of the interests of the British ruling classes (that is, the imperial bureaucracy and the merchants and manufacturers subsidized and privileged by the state). In short, it was a typically mercantilist venture, despite its unconventional trappings. Specifically, the trustees—and the Crown—decided to people the Georgia frontier to serve as a military buffer and striking point against the Indians and other European colonies. In addition, it was expected that the settlers would supply the manufacturers of the mother country with a plentiful and hence cheap source of hemp, flax, timber, and even silk.