Cover Story: Freedom from the very start

On Feb. 12, 1733, an idealistic English nobleman disembarked from his ship, along with 120 settlers and a novel idea: He would bar human bondage from the colony he was founding on the banks of the Savannah River.

As it turned out, slavery had beaten James Oglethorpe to Georgia. On Pipemaker's Creek, just upstream from Oglethorpe's new settlement of Savannah, Indian traders John and Mary Musgrove already owned a black man. Ironically, Georgia's first slave was named Justice.

The tension already had been drawn between two visions of a New World culture — visions that would compete for the next 130 years for the soul of the colony and the state. Today, our landscape is dominated by monuments to those who helped build the legacy of the Confederacy. But the "Lost Cause" was only a late chapter in Georgia's struggle over freedom and slavery. The first chapter in that struggle offers a moral beacon for all of us: It began when Oglethorpe planted the seeds of abolition in the Deep South.

He and his trustees designed the colony as an "asylum for unfortunates," a place where England's "worthy poor" could earn a living working on small farms; they found the idea of slavery inconsistent with their lofty goals.

Although Oglethorpe — at one time the employee of a slave-trading company — said bondage was cruel and inhuman, the argument against slavery was for the most part based on pragmatism. The trustees believed enslaved blacks — and the prospect of rebellion — would pose a constant threat to white women and children. They were convinced that blacks would ally themselves with foreign invaders during war. And they argued that slavery would encourage laziness and inequality among European colonists.

But the wilderness that greeted Oglethorpe and the settlers abounded with stark realities that would not yield to their idealism. The slave named Justice provided only the first sign that barring slavery by law and vanquishing it in reality were entirely different things. During the first weeks of settlement, four slaves were brought from Carolina to help saw trees and build houses. Oglethorpe conveniently ignored their presence. But as the number of slaves multiplied, his opposition hardened.

The British Parliament's passage in 1735 of a Georgia anti-slavery statute only intensified debate between the anti-slavery idealists and a growing pro-slavery lobby. Petitions and counter-petitions extolling and decrying the advisability of prohibiting slave labor were delivered to the colony's trustees in London.

Oglethorpe ridiculed the pro-slavery petitioners as men consumed by "idleness" and "luxury" whose ideas could jeopardize the colony's future. He anticipated the sentiments of 19th century American abolitionists by proclaiming that legalizing slavery would "occasion the misery of thousands in Africa ... and bring into perpetual Slavery the poor people who now live free there."

In 1739, Scottish settlers in the seaside village of Darien signed a petition urging Oglethorpe not to repeal the anti-slavery statute. The petition branded slavery a sin. "It's shocking to human Nature," they wrote, "that any Race of Mankind and their Posterity, should be sentenced to perpetual Slavery."

Historian David Brion Davis believes the Darien petition was "the first protest against the use of Africans as slaves, issued in the history of the New World." Davis argues that the ideas raised by the petitioners eventually reverberated throughout the abolitionist movement, culminating 126 years later in Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.

But worldly pressures seemed destined to overwhelm high principal and carry Georgia into the Southern colonies' slaveholding mainstream. While officials looked the other way, black slaves were smuggled in and used extensively as laborers and backcountry guides.

Tacit approval came with a price. Slaves in and around the colony regularly ran off, hiding themselves deep in the swamps of South Georgia. Many fugitives joined escapees from South Carolina and headed for the Spanish sanctuary of St. Augustine.

Oglethorpe's anti-slavery sentiments notwithstanding, he realized that St. Augustine was an important military target, the key to peace on Georgia's southern frontier. In 1739, the War of Jenkins' Ear erupted between England and Spain. Oglethorpe rushed to invade Florida.

He badly underestimated the strategic significance of Spain's policy of providing sanctuary to slaves. He probably was unaware of the existence of Fort Mose, an enclave garrisoned by 100 self-emancipated British slaves.

As the British invaders approached in January 1740, the Fort Mose militia and their families retreated to safety behind the walls of St. Augustine. Oglethorpe directed 140 battle-hardened Scots to occupy the abandoned fort.

But the Spanish launched a surprise counterattack. Under cover of night, the Fort Mose militia, together with 200 Spanish soldiers, overwhelmed Oglethorpe's men. Oglethorpe's predictions that slavery itself would create an enemy force for the colonists had come true. His humbling defeat brought an embarrassing end to the invasion.

Three years later, a Spanish armada appeared off the Georgia coast. The invaders — composed of Spanish troops, the Fort Mose militia and a regiment of black soldiers from Cuba — landed on St. Simons Island. But Oglethorpe and his militia defeated the Spanish in two major engagements. The second victory, at the Battle of Bloody Marsh, marked the turning point in a long struggle between England and Spain for control of southeastern North America.

Ironically, Bloody Marsh also eliminated Oglethorpe's most persuasive argument against slavery. With the erosion of the Spanish military threat, colonists no longer concerned themselves with the possibility of black slaves allying themselves with the Spaniards.

And just a year after that decisive battle, Oglethorpe himself was taken out of the picture. A disgruntled officer from the St. Augustine invasion filed treason and larceny charges against him. Ultimately, Oglethorpe was vindicated. But pro-slavery forces used the moment to pile on their own complaints, delaying his reimbursement for expenses incurred on behalf of the colony. Immersed in controversy back in England, Oglethorpe never returned to Georgia, and evasions of the anti-slavery statute proliferated.

By 1748, traffickers were landing Africans at Savannah and openly auctioning them. In 1750, the British trustees repealed Georgia's prohibition against the importation of slaves. Within 16 years, the number of slaves in Georgia grew from about 500 to more than 3,500. The colony experienced a population boom fueled by a highly profitable slave-driven economy.

But there were troubling side effects. Even before the American Revolution, there were constant threats of slave violence and rebellion. And wealth became concentrated in the hands of traders and planters, while a growing underclass of poor whites struggled to get by.

The colony's strife may have given Oglethorpe a bittersweet taste of vindication as he neared death in England, where he had become a respected elder statesman. In 1776, the now toothless, 89-year-old general still railed against slavery's evils. That October, he wrote an impassioned letter to a British abolitionist. In it, he took exception to philosopher David Hume's assertion that dark-skinned people were genetically inferior to Europeans.

"He must never have heard," Oglethorpe protested, "of Shishak, the Sesostris, of Hannibal or of Tirhaka, king of Ethiopia, whose very name frightened the mighty Assyrian monarch."

Georgia's founder showed near his end that he wasn't a mere pragmatist on the issues of slavery and race. He was guided by principals that wear well today, and his words and deeds should continue to serve as a point of pride. Because of Oglethorpe, our state's history is rooted in the cause of freedom from its very start.