Revolution in South Carolina

Oglethorpe had settled, colonized and defended Georgia with rare courage, energy and skill, not for personal glory and worldly gain, but for a great and benevolent purpose. Having firmly established the colony, he returned to England in 1743, where, after performing good military service for his king against the "Young Pretender," he retired to his seat in Essex. When General Gage returned to England from America in 1775, he was offered the chief command of the British army in this country, though he was then almost eighty years of age. His benevolent ideas did not suit the temper of the British ministry then, and General William Howe received the appointment. When, at the close of the Revolution, John Adams went to England as American minister at the British court, Oglethorpe was among the first to congratulate him because of the independence of his country. The brave Founder of Georgia died the next year, at the age of almost ninety years, with all his mental faculties in full vigor.

Oglethorpe was a benefactor in the higher sense of that term. For the good of his fellow-men, he had renounced ease of body and mind and the enjoyment of fortune and friends in his native land. He had encountered dangers in many forms unknown in England, not for the glory that leads a soldier to brave the perils of a strange land. He was gentle and good; merciful toward offenders and enemies; a father to the emigrants whom he led to the banks of the Savannah River; the warm friend of the Wesleys and kind guardian of the Moravians, with a missionary spirit ever anxious for the spiritual welfare and mental culture of the pagans around him; and it always gave him pleasure to relieve the poor and the weak of their burdens. Oglethorpe outlived most of the companions of his youth; but he was so loving and lovable that he made "troops of friends" on his long journey of life, who were to him in his vigorous old age like green branches nourished by his abounding virtues. Even in that old age, his person was spoken of as "the finest figure that ever was seen." His prominent eyes retained their brightness undimmed, and his person, tall and straight, was like a vigorous pine until the close of his life.

After the departure of Oglethorpe, Georgia enjoyed repose from conflicts with hostile neighbors. He left the country in a state of tranquillity. The same year it passed from the control of a mild military government to that of a civil organization, managed by a president and five councillors or assistants, under the supreme authority of the trustees, in England. Yet the colony languished for reasons already mentioned, and general discontent prevailed. The restrictive laws were generally relaxed and were generally evaded, especially those relating to slave-labor. Slaves were brought across the Savannah from South Carolina, and hired to the Georgia planters for a hundred years, the sum paid for such life-service being the market value of the slave. The transaction was practically the introduction of the slave-labor system into Georgia. It was not interfered with; and very soon ships laden with negroes from Africa came to Savannah, and men, women and children were offered for sale, in a way somewhat evasive of law, in the open market, by the auctioneer. In the year 1750, Georgia was really a slave-labor province. Then agriculture flourished, and the colony took its place as a planting State in an equal position by the side of its sister across the Savannah.

In 1752, when the twenty-one years named in the charter had expired, the trustees gladly gave that instrument to the king, and Georgia became a royal province. So it remained until the old war for independence.