Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

the Jews from the colony. Particularly bitter and alarmed was the religiously
oriented Thomas Coram, who warned the trustees that Georgia "would soon
become a Jewish colony," with only Christian laborers—those whom the Jews
'`find most necessary and useful"—allowed to remain in the country. Oglethorpe,
however, was greatly impressed with the way that a Jewish physician,
Dr. Samuel Nunez Ribiero, was able to stop a severe epidemic, and allowed
them to stay. The Jews settled in Savannah, but in a few years the bulk of
them had migrated to Charleston.*
After a royal government replaced the hated proprietary in 1752, Georgia
swiftly became very much like the other royal colonies in America. The end of
proprietary planning led to rapid growth of the colony, with rice and indigo
culture spreading in the lowlands in lieu of such unfortunate projects as silk.
With slavery now permitted and the land free of encumbrance, large plantations
for rice and indigo could be profitably established. "South Carolina," in
fact, moved to the coast of northern Georgia. In addition, timber and naval
stores were now widely grown in the new royal province. Also arriving in
Georgia was a group of several hundred Puritans, originally from Massachusetts,
who now settled the Midway district on the coast, around the port of
Sunbury. All in all, Georgia began to resemble an undeveloped microcosm of
her neighbor to the north, including the typical royal-colony scheme of
appointed governor and Council in conflict with an elective representative
Assembly. In 1758, Georgia joined the other Southern colonies in establishing
the Anglican church. Dissenters continued to flourish in the colony, but soon
attendance at public religious services was made compulsory.
After Oglethorpe's departure, the forts south of the Altamaha were allowed
to fall into decay, and the Crown refused to spend money to rebuild what
could only serve as a standing challenge to Spain. Unoccupied and free of the
burdens of imposed sovereignty, the region south of the Altamaha became a
truly free land. Like Rhode Island and North Carolina in the mid-seventeenth
century, it became in the 1750s an individualistic haven for those discontented
with existing governments.
The most prominent dissident was Edmund Gray, a Quaker from Virginia.
Gray had already become influential in Augusta for openly daring to parcel
out land in the public domain to himself and to his fellow settlers without
bothering to worry about governmental sanction. Running for the first royal
Assembly, meeting in early 1755, Gray stirred up the people with eloquent
pleas for liberty and economic opportunity as well as criticism of emerging
royal rule. In the election, Gray won the Assembly seat from Augusta, and the
head of the Gray forces in Savannah, the lawyer Charles Watson, was elected
from that city. Gray claimed that the defeat of two of his other allies in the
Savannah election was due to fraud. Not only did the Assembly reject this
*The handful of Jews in the colonies, largely Sephardim and merchants, were concentrated
in the cities of Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.
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