James Oglethorpe's Georgia: Debtors, 50-Acre Caps and Bloody Marsh

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James Oglethorpe, a British politician who had investigated England's debtor prisons, where inmates paid fees for food, beds and even freedom from irons, wanted to give the worthy poor a fresh start as small farmers. King George II approved a 1732 charter for Georgia because he needed a garrison buffer between Spanish Florida and the Carolinas, which also explains Oglethorpe's ban on slavery: he wanted every colonist armed and facing south rather than policing plantations. A committee chose just 35 families, about 120 people, who sailed on the Anne in November 1732. On February 12, 1733, Oglethorpe reached Yamacraw Bluff on the Savannah River and secured land through negotiation with the elderly chief Tomochichi, who gained an ally and trade access.

Settlers sponsored by the trustees received 50 acres and a 60 by 90 foot town lot, wealthy arrivals could hold no more than 500 acres and 10 indentured servants, land could not be sold, and hard liquor was banned. During the War of Jenkins' Ear, Spanish forces invaded in 1742, and Oglethorpe's militia and Indigenous allies ambushed them on narrow causeways at Bloody Marsh and Gully Hole Creek on St. Simons Island. The social plan fared worse: colonists smuggled rum, rented enslaved people from South Carolina on 100-year terms, and threatened to leave. The rules fell one by one, slavery was legalized by 1751, the trustees surrendered their charter in 1752, and Georgia became a royal colony divided by the Revolution under Governor James Wright.

• Georgia's charter ran from the Savannah River to the Altamaha River and then due west to the South Seas.
• Scottish settlers at Darien petitioned against bringing slavery into the colony.
• Population rose from just over 2,000 in 1740 to over 15,000 in 1750 and over 66,000 by 1780.
• Patriots seized the Royal Magazine in Savannah, and Governor Wright escaped to a British warship in 1776.
• British forces retook Savannah in 1778, and Wright restored royal rule on the coast until the 1782 evacuation.