The conflict between Spain and Britain over control of Georgia began in earnest in about 1670, when the British colony of South Carolina was founded just north of the missionary provinces of Guale and Mocama, part of Spanish Florida. Guale and Mocama, today part of Georgia, lay between Carolina’s capital, Charles Town, and Spanish Florida’s capital, St. Augustine. They were subjected to repeated military invasions by both sides. The mission system was permanently destroyed by 1704, after which the coast of future Georgia was occupied by English-allied Yamasee Indians until they were decimated in the Yamasee War of 1715-1717. The surviving Yamasee fled to Florida, leaving the coast of Georgia thoroughly depopulated, opening the possibility of a new British colony. A few defeated Yamasee remained, becoming known as the Yamacraw.

Massive British settlement began in the early 1730s with James Oglethorpe, an Englishman in the British parliament, who promoted the idea that the area be used to settle the worthy poor of England, providing an alternative to the overcrowded debtors’ prisons. Oglethorpe and other British philanthropists secured a royal charter as the Trustees of the colony of Georgia on June 9, 1732. [2]. Ultimately, the colony was not founded by or for debtors, although the misconception of Georgia having been founded as a debtor or penal colony persists. With the motto, “Not for ourselves, but for others,” the Trustees selected colonists for Georgia. On February 12, 1733, the first settlers landed in HMS Anne at what was to become the city of Savannah.

Georgia, wrote Governor Wright in 1766,[Saye p 135} had

“No manufactures of the least consequence: a trifling quantity of coarse homespun cloth, woollen and cotton mixed; amongst the poorer sort of people, for their own use, a few cotton and yarn stockings; shoes for our negroes; and some occasional blacksmith’s work. But all our supplies of silk, linens, woollens, shoes, stockings, nails, locks, hinges, and tools of every sort… are all imported from and through Great Britain.”

From 1735 and 1750, the trustees of Georgia, unique among Britain’s American colonies, prohibited African slavery as a matter of public policy. However, as the growing wealth of slave-based plantation economy in neighboring South Carolina demonstrated, slaves were more profitable than other forms of labor available to colonists, due to the high mortality rates of white indentured servants. In 1749, the ban on slavery was overturned, and, from 1750 to 1775, Georgia’s enslaved population grew from less than 500 to approximately 18,000, providing the labor for rice and indigo plantations.[1] Beginning in the mid-1760s, Georgia began importing slaves directly from Africa, mostly from present-day Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia. These Africans were experienced in rice culture and brought their techniques to the colony.

South Carolinian emigrant planters, wealthier than the original settlers of Georgia, soon dominated the colony. They replicated the customs and institutions of the South Carolina Low Country. Planters had higher rates of absenteeism from their large coastal plantations. They often took their families to higher areas during the summer, the “sick season”, when the Low Country had high rates of disease.

The pacing and development of large plantations made the Georgia coast society more like the West Indies than Virginia. There was a higher proportion of African-born slaves, and Africans who came from closely related regions. The slaves of the ‘Rice Coast’ of South Carolina and Georgia developed the unique Gullah or Geechee culture (the latter term more common in Georgia), in which important parts of African linguistic, religious and cultural heritage were preserved. This culture developed throughout the Low Country and Sea Islands, where enslaved African-Americans also later worked at cotton plantations.