The charter.
The company was given a charter under the name of "The Trustees for establishing the Colony of Georgia in America," its land-grant extending from the Savannah to the Altamaha. There were twenty-one trustees, with full powers of management; they were to appoint the governor and other officials during the first four years,—after that the Crown was to appoint. No member of the company was to hold any salaried colonial office. Never was a colony founded upon motives more disinterested. It was to be, literally, "an asylum for the oppressed." The settlers themselves were not given any political privileges, for it was thought the trustees would be better managers than a class of people who had not heretofore proved their capacity for business affairs. Slavery was prohibited, because it would interfere with free white labor, and a slave population might prove dangerous in case of a frontier war with the Spanish. That immigration might be encouraged, and thus that the colony might be strong from a military point of view, it was ordered that no one should own over five hundred acres of land. It was also ordained that all foreigners should have equal rights with Englishmen, that there was to be complete religious toleration except for Roman Catholics, that none but settlers of steady habits should be admitted, that no rum should be imported, and that the colonists were to practise military drill.
Savannah founded.
In November, 1732, Oglethorpe,—appointed governor and general, without pay,—set out from England with thirty-five selected families, and in February (1733) founded the city of Savannah, on a bluff overlooking Savannah River, some ten miles from the sea. In May he made a firm alliance with the neighboring Creeks, whom he treated with great consideration. The second year (1734) there arrived a number of German Protestants, persecuted exiles from Salzburg, who had been invited to America by the English Society for Propagating the Gospel. |Other settlements.| The Salzburgers proved a desirable acquisition, setting a much-needed example of industry and thrift. The Germans settled the town of Ebenezer; in the same year Augusta was planted, two hundred and thirty miles up the Savannah River, as a fortified trading outpost in the Indian country; while two years later (1736), another armed colony was sent to found Frederica, at the mouth of the Altamaha, on the Spanish frontier.
The fur-trade.
Augusta, which in 1741 numbered but forty-seven permanent inhabitants, in addition to a small garrison, was the chief seat of the Georgia and South Carolina fur-traffic. It was the eastern key to the Creek, Chickasaw, and Cherokee hunting-grounds. In 1741, it was estimated that about one hundred and twenty-five white men—traders, pack-horse men, servants, and townsmen—depended for their livelihood upon the traffic centring at the Augusta station; another estimate, made in the same year, placed the number of horses engaged at five hundred, and the annual value of skins at fifty thousand pounds. The profits were great, and would have been larger but for sharp competition in the far-away camps of the barbarians; there the Georgians and Carolinians met Frenchmen, who had wandered from far Louisiana by devious ways, part water, and part land, and Virginians, who found their way to the southwest through the parallel valley system, thus escaping the necessity of climbing the mountain wall.
117. Slow development of Georgia (1735-1755).
Dissatisfaction of the colonists.
The trustees perceived at last that men who had failed at home were not likely to be successful as colonists, and they sent over a party of Scotch Highlanders and yet more German Protestants. The colony now proved a success. Savannah was well built, courts were established, the land-system was well arranged, and Salzburgers, Moravians, and Highlanders soon came out in considerable numbers (1735-1736). Yet there was no lack of discontent. The very class for whom the colony was founded formed its most undesirable inhabitants; hardly a regulation originally established for their supposed benefit was to their taste, idle and worthless fellows were numerous, and some of them, finding their complaints unheeded, fled to the Carolinas or to join the rough borderers. Among the settlers were three enthusiastic sectaries, Charles Wesley, secretary to Oglethorpe, his brother John, a missionary to the Indians, and George Whitefield, who succeeded the latter after he returned to England. Whitefield in later years deeply stirred the American colonists, from Florida to New England, in his efforts to arouse in them a strong religious conviction (page [190].)
Expedition against Spanish Florida.