Historic Events of Colonial Days

by Rupert Sargent Holland

With a few ships and eight hundred men Oglethorpe had defeated a Spanish fleet of fifty-six vessels and an army of more than 5,000 soldiers. Small wonder that the people of his province couldn't find praise enough for their leader! George Whitefield, a famous clergyman of Savannah, wrote of this war against the Spanish Dons, "The deliverance of Georgia from the Spaniards is such as cannot be paralleled but by some instances out of the Old Testament. The Spaniards had intended to attack Carolina, but wanting water, they put into Georgia, and so would take that colony on their way. They were wonderfully repelled, and sent away before our ships were seen."

The governors of the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina sent letters to Oglethorpe thanking him for his valiant defense of the southern seaboard and expressing their gratitude to God that Georgia had a commander so well fitted to protect her borders. The governor of South Carolina and most of his officers had done little or nothing to help their neighbor, but the people of that colony thoroughly disapproved of this failure to be of assistance and a number of them sent a message to Oglethorpe in which they said, "If the Spaniards had succeeded in their attempts they would have destroyed us, laid our province waste and desolate, and filled our habitations with blood and slaughter.... We are very sensible of the great protection and safety we have so long enjoyed by having your Excellency to the southward of us; had you been cut off, we must, of course, have fallen."

Even after this defeat, however, the Spaniards of Florida continued from time to time to molest the Georgia borders. A party of rangers was killed by Spanish soldiers, the settlement at Mount Venture was burned by Yamasee Spanish Indians. Oglethorpe had to be on the watch constantly lest the French or the Spanish should raid his territory. And the English government, though he wrote them time and again, neglected to send him proper reinforcements.

In the spring of 1743 the general was again camped on the St. Johns River. He heard that a Spanish army was marching against him, and he resolved to attack them before they should attack him. His Indian allies stole up on the enemy, and surprising them, drove them back in confusion. The Spaniards took shelter behind one of their forts, and Oglethorpe could not manage to draw them out to battle. He marched his men back to Frederica, and there by Indian scouts, by sentry-boats, kept an eye on the Spaniards, ready to spring out to meet them should they renew their raids at any time.

His soldiers never faltered in their obedience to the general's orders; his Indian allies, though they were often tempted, never forsook their allegiance to him. The Spaniards tried many times to buy the red men over to their side. Similli, a chief of the Creeks, went to St. Augustine to see what was being done there. The Spaniards offered to pay him a large sum of money for every English prisoner he would bring them, and showed him a sword and scarlet clothes they had given a chief of the Yamasees. They said of Oglethorpe, "He is poor, he can give you nothing; it is foolish for you to go back to him." The Creek chief answered, "We love him. It is true he does not give us silver, but he gives us everything we want that he has. He has given me the coat off his back and the blanket from under him." In return for his loyalty to his English friend the Spaniards drove the Indian from St. Augustine at the point of the sword.

The general had spent all his own money in protecting his people in Georgia, and the English government would not send him the sums he said were urgently needed for the province. Therefore he decided that he must go to England and see what could be done there. He put his forts on the border in the best possible shape for defense, appointed a deputy governor in Savannah, and sailed for England in July, 1743.

Was the colonial hero received with the praise his great services deserved from England? Instead of praise he was harshly criticized for this or that trivial matter; though a few of the wiser men came forward to do him honor. Parliament would not vote him the money his colony needed; he had difficulty in finding enough money to pay his personal debts. Yet he kept on appealing for aid for Georgia, while the government took the same attitude it had taken toward so many of the other American colonies, and appeared of the opinion that the province across the Atlantic must look after itself. Fortunately for Georgia, Oglethorpe had so trained its soldiers, had so befriended its Indian neighbors, had so protected it by forts that the colony was now able to go its own way without English help.

In 1744 Oglethorpe married Elizabeth Wright, the heiress of Cranham Hall, a manor in Essex. He was also in that same year chosen as one of the officers to defend England from a threatened invasion by France. His services were not needed for that purpose; but in the next year he was given the rank of major-general and took part in the suppression of the rebellion of the "Young Pretender." This kept him in England, and he left the government of Georgia to the care of the men he had trained there. From time to time, however, he bestirred himself to send new colonists across the sea to Savannah.

When the rebellion was ended General Oglethorpe and his wife settled at Cranham Hall. Here he lived the life of a country gentleman, delighting in the peace and quiet after his many turbulent years in Georgia. He lived to see the American Revolution, though he took no part in it; he said "that he knew the people of America well; that they could never be subdued by arms, but their obedience could ever be secured by treating them justly;" he learned that his colony of Georgia, with twelve of her sisters, had succeeded in winning her independence from that mother-country he had served so long and on whose lists he was now the senior ranking general; and he seems to have harbored no ill-feeling against the colonists for forming a new nation.

Georgia and America owe a great debt of gratitude to General James Edward Oglethorpe. None of the colonies had a more unselfish founder and governor, none were more bravely defended from enemies, and in none was more devotion shown to making a few scattered settlements in the wilderness blossom into the safe homes of a contented people.