It has been said that Georgia was the youngest, the poorest, and the most sparsely populated of the thirteen colonies. These observations are correct, but they do not describe what was by 1776 a rapidly developing province. The colony’s youth was beyond dispute even as the Revolution began: anyone older than forty-three was older than Georgia was. Still, by the time shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, this fledgling province was squarely in the mainstream of contemporary American experience, although it had not always been.

Although Georgia was different from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the other colonies in some...

The men who ruled Georgia in both trustee and royal times knew that many prospective settlers would need assistance and encouragement from the government to make the journey to the new land. Under the trustees, or proprietors, and under the king, settlers were solicited and valued. The last royal governor, Sir James Wright, saw the population triple during his long service, in part because of the exertions of his administration to bring in people and to help them become established. He had much to gain personally if Georgia prospered, for he was one of its largest landowners and planters. Wright’s...

Nothing so characterized the buildings of trustee Georgia as their simplicity and their continual dilapidation. On March 1, 1733, Oglethorpe, who himself lived in a tent until it was in tatters, drove the first pin in the first house to be raised in Savannah.¹ The house was not beautiful, for most structures of the trustee era were designed for utility alone. In the earliest days of the colony, European culture did not extend much beyond the streets and regular squares of Savannah, and buildings were of frame construction and modest dimension. Georgians used precise terminology to describe their structures. In...

The postal system that developed in Georgia toward the end of colonial times was neither efficient nor well functioning. Still, it might have seemed so to the men and women who first settled in the province three or four decades earlier. Life in those early years was austere. For a substantial group of men sent “on the charity” by the trustees when the colony was two years old, there was a prescribed standard of subsistence. Each man received a watch coat, musket and bayonet, hatchet, hammer, handsaw, shovel or spade, broad hoe, narrow hoe, gimlet, drawing knife, iron pot and...

Although Georgia was finally to find its place in the mercantile system of the British Empire on the basis of agriculture, men and women of many occupations were either sent or permitted to emigrate there in the trustees’ efforts to populate the colony and to provide for its needs. The original occupations of 827 persons who settled at trustee expense between 1732 and 1741 fell into 125 categories. Among these were 41 farmers, 49 husbandmen, 41 laborers, and 322 servants, all of whom probably found uses for their skills. But what of 5 locksmiths, 2 watchmakers, 3 tallow chandlers, 5...

The pressures brought by the Malcontents for the admission of slaves did not budge the trustees. Georgia had been founded partially as a buffer for South Carolina, and a principal reason that black slaves had been prohibited was the hazard they might pose in case of invasion. If slaves could have rendered South Carolina safe, it was contended somewhat irrelevantly, then Georgia would not have been needed as a shield; South Carolina had thousands of slaves.¹

Such arguments did not impress the Malcontents. It seemed to them that the proprietors had hatefully condemned them to austerity by denying them slaves,...

Colonial Georgia has often been thought of as a crude frontier, a primitive spot on a barely developed shore. Little cultural life has been envisioned there—few books, little music, little art. There are good reasons, of course, why such an attitude has persisted. For one thing, Georgia has suffered in comparison with its more cultured neighbor, South Carolina; the society of Savannah was never that of Charleston. For another, there are few physical remains, since books, prints, and paintings have largely disappeared. Only a fraction of colonial buildings now stand. And as buildings disappeared, so too did vital documents....

A year before the Anne’s passengers arrived at Yamacraw Bluff, the trustees turned to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts for assistance in advancing the practice of religion in Georgia. The S.P.G. had been founded in 1701 and sought rather openly to help the Church of England dominate religious life in the colonies, a fact resented by dissenters both in England and in America. To promote the Christian religion in general and its special interest in particular, the S.P.G. sent missionaries to many colonies and paid their salaries until local methods of support were devised....

Most education in provincial Georgia adhered to no formal structure. Mothers trained their daughters at the hearth to become wives and mothers in turn. The wife of William Spencer, for example, was a conscientious stepmother to her husband’s daughters and taught them “to be good House Wifes and also expert at their Needles.”¹ Fathers taught their sons to earn a livelihood at the anvil, in the fields, or at the workbench. Boys were trained as apprentices so that their trades could support a family. The home instruction in medicine that Noble Jones gave to his son was similarly an apprenticeship—...

In this review of the colonial past of Georgia, last founded of the thirteen American colonies, an interesting question arises: At what stage of development did Georgia enter the stream of the American experience? Did the province, in its forty-three-year history, repeat the entire process begun in the older colonies in the seventeenth century, or did its founding in 1733 immediately thrust it into the pattern of development then in progress in its sister colonies?

In two instances Georgia rather strikingly repeated stages already passed through elsewhere. Most important was the method of Georgia’s founding. A large number of the...