Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

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Georgia: The "Humanitarian" Colony
The South Carolinians, in agitating for a shift from proprietary rule, found
it advantageous to scare the Crown about alleged French and Spanish pressures.
This propaganda, as well as the Yamassee war, focused the attention of
Great Britain on South Carolina and its borderland to the south.
The Spanish had settled north Florida and what is now the Georgia coast
in the mid-15 60s, with their center at the great port of St. Augustine. Settlement
had extended as far north as Santa Elena (now Port Royal, South Carolina)
, where the Spanish destroyed a recently settled French Huguenot colony.
The Spaniards, who concentrated on missionary activities among the Indians
—particularly by the Franciscan order—named the Georgia coast the Gualé
mission province and established missions and posts on the coast. Attacks by
Gualé Indians forced abandonment of the mission posts at the turn of the
seventeenth century, but the defeat of the Indians opened the way for
renewed and expanded mission posts during the century. Attacks by the
Westo Indians in the mid-l65Os forced the Spaniards to retreat to below the
Savannah River, thus paving the way for the English settlements in South
Carolina. Hardly had settlement begun in the 1670s when the South Carolinians
fomented trouble among the Indians. They soon became notorious in the
colonies for their zeal in enslaving Indians, while the cattle of white settlers
often destroyed Indian crops. Moreover, the colonists were eager for war
against the Indians in order to gain a considerable supply of slaves, who commanded
a ready market in West Indies plantations. The practice had begun as
early as 1671, when the English colonists used a vague charge of conspiracy
with the Spaniards as an excuse to make war upon the Kusso Indians and turn
them into slaves. Eager to repeat this success, South Carolina launched a war
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