Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

son and South Carolina was to use Fort King George during the hoped-for
next round of wars, as a base to seize St. Augustine. To the Spanish insistence
that the fort be dismantled, South Carolina irrelevantly kept turning to
demands that runaway Negro slaves be forcibly returned by Spain. No one
was more unhappy about maintaining the fort than its own garrison. From
1725 to 1727 the soldiers, disgruntled with a malarial swamp and with poor
food, mutinied several times. A dozen soldiers defected to St. Augustine and
the garrison allowed a fire almost to destroy the fort.
During the 1720s the proprietors kept title to Carolina (including Georgia)
lands and insisted on keeping all new lands closed to settlement—while
demanding collection of quitrents or a restoration of their own rule before
they would consent to open the lands for settlement. All plans to settle Georgia
during this period therefore proved to be abortive.
In 1727, Spain launched a desultory siege of the British port of Gibraltar.
During this short-lived war between England and Spain, the Carolinians
withdrew from the exposed Fort King George. Indeed, Indian tribes allied to
Spain now raided frontier Carolina settlements. The Yamassee remnants,
though reduced to three villages near St. Augustine, eagerly sought revenge
by leading these border raids, and they were joined by Creeks and by runaway
Negroes anxious to exact some revenge for their years in slavery. The South
Carolinians, for their part, took the occasion to launch an expedition and to
annihilate the Yamassee remnant. Going by sea, the South Carolinians, led by
Colonel John Palmer, a member of the Assembly, devastated and burned the
Yamassee towns, including the Catholic chapel near St. Augustine, and killed
a number of Indians. Some of the Yamassees found refuge in the great fort of
St. Augustine, but the Yamassee prestige had been irreparably injured.
So long as the proprietors who had closed off the unsettled land still held
title to Carolina and Georgia, the Crown could not open up the Georgia land
to settlement. But with the end of the proprietary claims in 1729, the crushing
of the Yamassees, and the end of the brief Anglo-Spanish war, the path
to settlement was now wide open. Furthermore, the royal authorities were particularly
anxious to encourage settlement in Georgia as a buffer against the
French, Spanish, and Indians.
It was at this time that the Gualé region was organized and settled on a
unique basis: here was neither a proprietary nor chartered company organized
for profit or for religious unity, nor a typically royal province; here was a proprietary
colony run, not for profit, but for humanitarian and altruistic reasons.
Here was an unparalleled model of the logical consequences of philanthropic
altruism run rampant.
The major founder of the new philanthropic colony was Colonel James E.
Oglethorpe, a prominent member of Parliament and an aggressive Tory. The
most widely trumpeted aim of the new colony was humanitarianism: Englishmen
were called upon to contribute with no hope of personal reward to a new
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