In 1732, a group of twenty-two idealistic and ambitious Englishmen obtained a charter from King George II to conduct a kind of “holy experiment” designed to provide employment, religious freedom, democratic rights, and enlightenment to the natives, in an environment free of the curse of rum, slavery, or avarice among the trustees. In February of the following year, James Oglethorpe arrived with 114 settlers, of the 600 who had applied for the voyage. They landed in a place they called Savannah, on a high bluff overlooking a large river. A man not able to pay for his passage was promised fifty acres of land and a year’s support for his family. The more affluent were promised five hundred acres of land, the right to bring ten servants, and no property taxes for fifty years.

As a trustee of the new colony named for the king, Oglethorpe was prohibited from holding office or owning land, but he assumed all the responsibilities of a leader and was soon busy assuaging the Indians with blandishments and bribes, establishing the town of Savannah as a permanent settlement, resisting the decadence of nearby South Carolina, where slavery was encouraged and rum was imbibed freely, and defending the colony from Spanish troops in Florida.

Three years later, Oglethorpe went back to London and secured the title of “General and Commander-in-Chief of the Forces of South Carolina and Georgia,” along with authority to recruit forces to defend both colonies. By then, he could count 800 people in Georgia who had come from mainland Europe to seek their fortune or to find religious freedom. Forty-five of them were Moravians, 110 were German-speaking Salzburgers, and 42 were Jews, mostly from Spain and Germany, who had arrived in Georgia in 1733, just five months after the first settlers. The general was criticized for accepting this large Jewish settlement, but he was especially grateful to one of them, Dr. Samuel Nuñes Ribeiro, who provided invaluable services as the colony’s physician. These earliest settlers were peace-loving, appreciated their grants of land, and were loyal to the British crown. Oglethorpe also welcomed a group of Highland Scots, who volunteered to serve under him in defending Georgia against the Florida Spaniards. They were given attractive landholdings on the coast sixty miles south of Savannah in St. Andrews Parish, well placed to obstruct any invasion.

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