p23  Projects for Colonization in the South, 1684‑1732

By Verner W. Crane

The half-century before the founding of Georgia has seemed to mark a complete hiatus in the process of English colonization in North America. No new provinces were planted, and meanwhile most of the familiar motives for founding colonies had lost their force. In England the fires of religious and political controversy had burned out. That England was over-populated was no longer the belief of publicists and statesmen. Hopes of riches from great landed estates in America had been dashed; towards existing proprieties, moreover, government was hostile. The continental areas now available for new provinces lay exactly within the zones, northern and southern, of international competition; and imperial rivalry, though later to promote, for a time served to check the fruition of colonial schemes.

But this was peculiarly an age of projects, and colonial enterprises were frequently mooted. The history of these schemes is something more than a curious record of failure. It reveals a definite transition from the seventeenth-century era of colonization to that of the eighteenth century with the westward movement as the new setting. Most of the current proposals for colonies had reference to that debatable land, south and west of the Savannah River, which was included within the overlapping claims of England, France, and Spain — the earliest theater of the great contest for the West. Against this background the founding of Georgia emerges, not as an isolated episode, but as the culmination of repeated efforts to occupy, in face of the Spanish and especially the French, an important frontier of empire.

The first endeavor of this sort — aside from the fleeting project in 1682 for a Florida proprietor­ship​1 — appears to have  p24 been the short-lived Scots settlement planted by Lord Cardross at Stuart's Town, Port Royal, in 1684.​2 Intended as an asylum for Covenanters, it thus belongs to a notable category of seventeenth-century enterprises. And the fate of Stuart's Town — extinguished in a Spanish raid of 1686 — has furnished a striking prologue for the drama of Darien. In border history the episode had a significance of its own. The Cardross colony was, of course, a more flagrant intrusion into Florida than the Ashley River settlement of 1670, which the Spanish had attempted, feebly, to overthrow. Moreover, there is evidence that Cardross expected to take up another county south of the Savannah River,​3 and so to expand his settlement into the ancient Spanish mission province of Guale. To facilitate such an advance it happened opportunely that in 1684 Guale was abandoned by its most powerful Indians, the Yamasee, whose revolt and migration to South Carolina led shortly to the disruption of the Guale missions.​4 (Thus was begun, on this frontier, the long process of disintegration of Spanish authority in North America, before the advance of the Anglo-Americans!) But other circumstances prevented the Scots from pressing their advantage. At home their backers had been hopelessly compromised in the Rye-House plot. In Carolina bitter disputes developed with the authorities at Ashley River,​5 so that Stuart's Town was left exposed to Spanish attack. Underlying the untimely quarrel over the claims of the Scots to independent jurisdiction was the effort of Cardross to monopolize the expanding inland Indian trade with the Creeks and other western tribes by way of the Savannah River. The Carolinians were determined then, as well as later against Virginia and Georgia, to maintain control of a trade which was their chief source of wealth, and which was becoming  p25 the essential instrument of English expansion in the South.

While the Charles Town traders, in the last decade of the century, were threading the forests of the Gulf Indians, opening trade with tribes as distant as the Mississippi​6 — and so establishing a southern Indian frontier against the French as well as the Spanish — there was revived in England a project for the colonization of that great area which links the age of Charles I with the new era of Anglo-French conflict for commercial and colonial supremacy.

Dr. Daniel Coxe was an English physician with an uncritical taste for tales of travel, and a persistent ambition to found vast western provinces in America.​7 Already a Jersey proprietor, in 1690 he sought in vain the favor of the Lords of Trade for a grant of an enormous area stretching westward to the South Seas from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York.​8 Sometime later Coxe got possession of the old Heath patent of 1629 to the region between 31° and 36°. Arranging to settle a French Protestant colony on a tract west of Apalache Bay, in 1698 Coxe sent out two vessels on his well-known exploring expedition of the Gulf. But news of his plans had hastened the rival French expedition under Iberville. Louisiana was established to forestall the English advance, and Captain Bond was turned back from the mouth of the Mississippi.

Meanwhile, before the Board of Trade, Coxe had supported his claims and those of England by the recital of some undoubted Virginian and Carolinian exploits in western exploration, and by other more dubious tales.​9 Reverting to his proposal of 1690 he asked that a northern tract be added; and when it appeared that Carolana did not include the Gulf coast, he petitioned for a further southward extension! Coxe's scheme was to transform his propriety into a great stock-company, to be incorporated as the Florida Company. Among the objects proposed, beside  p26 the usual pretense of converting the Indians, was the relief of indigent debtors.​10 Coxe's title was held valid by the Attorney-General;​11 meanwhile, he had apparently reached an agreement with the Carolina Proprietors upon a mutual boundary at the Altamaha River. Although the Board of Trade seems to have been impressed by the plea that the French should be checked in the West, they raised a number of objections, on the score of the difficulty of defending an English colony on the Gulf, inconvenience in enforcing the Acts of Trade, suspicions of stock-jobbing, etc. The scheme was referred without recommendation to the Crown, as involving considerations of state.​12 Later, Coxe's son asserted that aid was promised by William III, which his death and the ensuing war prevented. In 1719 Coxe revived his claims. Again he was heard by the Board of Trade, which was seeking substantiation, from any quarter, of the English title to the West, to use in approaching boundary discussions at Paris.​13 It was at this time that Coxe proposed that an agreement be sought with the French on the basis of the acceptance of the Mississippi River as the Anglo-French boundary in the West. In 1722, after an attempt, characteristic of the time, to transform Carolana into a "bubble,"​14 the younger Coxe made literary salvage of his father's memorials in that curiosity of the literature of colonial promotion — famous for its plan of intercolonial union — A Description of the English Province of Carolana.

In America, Queen Anne's War had stimulated an aggressive imperialism which now furnished a noteworthy impulse towards colonization. On the southern frontier partisan warfare led to the ravaging of the Florida missions, and to attacks upon the Indian bulwarks of Louisiana which fell just short of the complete destruction of the new French colony. In the minds of the provincial leaders the goal was defined as the control of the  p27 lower Mississippi, and hence of the Indian trade of the vast interior.15

A leader in these expansionist efforts, and a striking type of the imperialist produced by the American frontier, was the first provincial Indian agent of South Carolina, Thomas Nairne. At the climax of the English offensive in the South, in 1708, Nairne sent home a memorial to serve as information when peace was made, "that the English American Empire may not be unreasonably Crampt up."​16 Confidently asserting the claims of England to the whole region traversed by the Carolina traders, he urged that only South Carolina could check French expansion in the West. Among other expedients to strengthen the southern frontier he discussed colonization. If England could spare colonists, it would be best to settle the immediate borders of South Carolina. But if new provinces were designed east of the Mississippi, he urged that one be planted on Florida neck, with the Apalachee country, lately conquered, as the seat of government. Another possibility was to settle in force a little way west of the Mississippi, conciliate with the Indians, develop the log-wood trade and an under-ground Spanish commerce, and perchance, at some favorable juncture, strike boldly at the Spanish mine-country! In this grandiose scheme Nairne's imagination carried him beyond the vision of his generation. But certain elements from his program persisted, to be incorporated in the first statement of British western policy.

Meanwhile, the South Carolina Indian system collapsed in the great southern Indian conspiracy of 1715. For a time, indeed, the Yamasee War threatened the extinction of the frontier colony. Thereafter the Spanish and the French recovered influence, especially among the Creeks. In 1717, at the forks of the Alabama, Fort Toulouse was established, an ominous eastern outpost of Louisiana; while a temporary intrusion of the French at Baie St. Joseph brought them closer to the new Lower Creek country on the Chattahoochee.​17 Soon alarmist rumors  p28 were current in Carolina, and conveyed to England, that the French, who were now visibly strengthening Louisiana, thought to penetrate overland eastward to the Altamaha. From ambitious projects of expansion the Carolinians turned to programs of defense. Between 1715 and 1729 the two-fold purpose of their solicitations in England was to secure (1) complete removal of proprietary control, and (2) effective aid in strengthening the southern frontier.

While the Proprietors were under attack from their subjects and from the Board of Trade, their failure as wardens of the southern marches the chief count against them, there was developed a plan — the best remembered of the pre-Georgia schemes — for solving the problem of frontier defense quite in the feudal spirit of their régime. The Margravate of Azilia, designed to occupy precisely the region which became Georgia, has otherwise seemed chiefly remarkable as involving a unique degree of sub-infeudation, and for its singular plan of settlement. The projector, Sir Robert Montgomery, whose father had been concerned with Cardross, envisaged a military-barrier colony. In his Discourse (1717),​18 with its extravagant eulogy of "our future Eden," he unfolded a highly artificial scheme for planting compact, fortified township settlements, with servants to till the proprietors' land, and a class of gentlemen-tenants. The Lords Proprietors, anticipating quit-rents, readily conferred upon him a grant of land, with the privilege, so far as they could convey it, of a separate government.​19 Montgomery's petitions, like his pamphlets, listed hopefully the many valuable exotic commodities which Azilia, like all colonies projected in this area, was expected to produce. But in the appeals to the colonial authorities the emphasis was placed upon Azilia's strategic value  p29 in Anglo-French even more than in Anglo-Spanish rivalry.​20 By Montgomery's associate, the poet-projector Aaron Hill, it was pointed out, in terms which strikingly recall the Nairne scheme, that "under covert of this grant, a settlement may unexpectedly, and without noise, be made somewhere on the river of Apalachia." Seated upon the Gulf, the English would be then in a position to watch the designs of the French, "and be a check to their ambition."21

Already aroused to the French danger in the West by the Carolinians, and by Spotswood of Virginia, whose well-known warnings were largely an echo of the clamors from South Carolina, the Board of Trade was favorably disposed towards a new barrier colony. But in line with their policy they proposed that the Carolina Proprietors first surrender their powers of government in the new province.22

Azilia had many competitors for public support in that period of the South Sea excitement. Transformed, apparently, into a "bubble," the project disappeared with the ebbing of the tide of speculation in 1720.​23 It left only a name on contemporary maps, and several interesting promotion pamphlets. Two of these, of 1720, advertised the modified scheme for colonizing St. Catherine's and the other so‑called "Golden Islands" of the Azilian coast.​24 From the Carolina agents the revised scheme  p30 met with opposition,​25 for now the results of the Revolution of 1719 in South Carolina, in the overthrow of the proprietary government, had been accepted by the Crown.

In 1721 actual English occupation of the old Spanish province of Guale began, with the building of Fort King George at the mouth of the Altamaha River. It was erected, under royal direction, by a frontier planter and Indian fighter of South Carolina, John Barnwell, who had lately returned from an important mission in England for the revolutionary South Carolina government.​26 It was garrisoned for half-a‑dozen years by a company of British invalids, until they were removed to Port Royal, following the burning of the original fort.​27 By the Board of Trade, in 1727 and again in 1730, the rebuilding of the fort was insisted upon as vital.​28 Evidently this feeble stockade, distant •sixty miles from the margin of English settlement, was valued out of all proportion to its dubious military usefulness in shielding the border from the Spanish and the marauding Yamasee. In fact it was intended — as was Georgia later, in large measure — as a strategic move in the Anglo-French conflict for the West. In 1720 the Board of Trade had prepared two important reports on South Carolina which contained the initial formulation of a British western policy.​29 Therein was advocated a program for building posts all along the southern and western borders, on the Chattahoochee and the Tennessee as well as the Altamaha, to offset the encroachments of the French from Canada and Louisiana. It is especially noteworthy that in advancing this plan the Board was merely endorsing an  p31 elaborate scheme for western garrisons which had been set forth in the memorials of the South Carolina agent, John Barnwell, certain features of which recall the earlier project of Nairne.​30 The provincial origins of this early statement of British western policy are indubitable. The program as a whole failed to win the support of the Crown: Fort King George was the sole residuum. This isolated border post was established, then, to assert English sovereignty in that region, and as the key to the overland route to the Gulf — to close that door to the French, to keep it open to the English.

Both in Barnwell's memorials and in the Board's reports, moreover, it was intended that the Altamaha fort and the others suggested would become centers of frontier settlement. Thus as early as 1720, under pressure from the Carolina imperialists, the settlement as well as the fortification of the region which became Georgia had been definitely approved by the Board of Trade. But for more than a decade various obstacles prevented the fruition of this imperial purpose. Despite the zeal of the Board, government was indifferent. Moreover, until 1729 — so long, that is, as the Proprietors held title to the soil — the proprietary land policy checked the efforts which were made to divert the mounting stream of foreign Protestant immigration to the Carolina borders.

The most striking illustration of the effects of the proprietary blight was the failure of the first project of Jean Pierre Purry to settle a Swiss colony on the southern margins of South Carolina. In his Mémoire, published in London in 1724, Purry proposed an ambitious plan to project gradually westward from Carolina, along the parallel of 33° — the zone of the ideal climate throughout the world, as he argued, a wedge of foreign Protestant settlement, which would eventually reach the Mississippi and cut off Louisiana from New France.​31 Chimerical though it was, the scheme has this interest, that it was conceived in the prevailing spirit of Anglo-French rivalry, which was quite as much the atmosphere of the decade that produced Georgia as of  p32 the earlier period of the southwestern projects of Coxe and Nairne and Montgomery. But even Purry's modern beginnings in directing Swiss settlement towards the South were frustrated, after he had brought together several hundred colonists, by the fickleness of the Proprietors, who repeatedly altered the terms of their assistance.​32 Instead of a predecessor of Georgia, Purrysburgh became a feeble sister-colony. With the earlier pamphlets, however, Purry's advertisements no doubt helped to direct attention to the southern border.

By 1730, when the picturesque visit of the seven Cherokee Indians to England gave added notoriety to the southern frontier, the idea of colonization beyond the Savannah was thoroughly familiar, and for reasons of empire, cordially approved. But all attempts to plant new colonies there had failed, through inherent weakness or proprietary obstruction. There remained an alternative: the extension of the existing Carolina settlements into the unoccupied region, under a system which should take account of the peculiar strategic problem. Such a system was the New England township plan, already copied in Virginia. Repeatedly urged by the Carolinians themselves​33 — with John Barnwell again the prime-mover — it was at length indorsed by the Board of Trade and the Privy Council in the instructions issued in 1730 to Robert Johnson, appointed royal governor following the purchase, in 1729, of the proprietary title. These were drafted in the winter of 1729‑30 in close conference with the appointee. In several memorials Johnson revived the Barnwell township scheme.​34 His proposals, to be sure, referred specifically to the region from the Savannah northward, where he urged that ten inland townships be planted upon the principal rivers, under conditions which would attract poor settlers. But when the instructions were completed by the Board in June, 1730 they included the significant addition of two townships on the river Altamaha.35

In view of the surrounding circumstances, it appears that  p33 these instructions of 1730 for frontier townships on the Savannah and the Altamaha must be given an important place in the genesis of Georgia. At the time they were formulated Oglethorpe and his associates had already sketched a plan for debtor colonies, which, as yet, they located only vaguely somewhere in America. On the Gaols Committee of the House of Commons, whose activities had turned the mind of Oglethorpe in that direction, had served and were then serving members of the Board of Trade, notably that energetic veteran of the Board, Martin Bladen.​36 It was almost certainly the initiative of the Board, already converted by the Carolinians to a forward movement of settlement on the southern frontier, which determined the locale of the charitable colony project, in a region long the favorite of projectors and now a special concern of the colonial administration. In the place intended for the Altamaha and Savannah townships, therefore, soon appeared the new province of Georgia.

The failure of all earlier projects had been due, in part, to specific weaknesses: they were visionary Edens, or mere speculators' "bubbles," or they were cast in the discredited mold of proprietary provinces. But in addition there had hitherto lacked any such effective impulse towards transplanting colonists as the religious and political controversies of an earlier time had furnished. Now, at last, such an impulse was provided by those organized forces of piety and philanthropy so characteristic of this epoch. To the imperialism of the Carolinians and the Board of Trade — anti-Spanish, but even more aggressively anti-French — there was added that strong current of "ecclesiastical imperialism"​37 of which Dr. Thomas Bray had been for many years the vigorous leader.

One of the main channels through which the rising tide of English piety and social reform was flowing consisted of the numerous religious societies which came into being at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. To a remarkable degree these societies drew their inspiration from the zeal of Dr. Bray. As I have elsewhere attempted to  p34 show,​38 it was a small religious society established by Dr. Bray to cherish two of his favorite charities which was transformed, between 1730 and 1732, into the Georgia Trust. In this circumstance is the clue to the anomaly that Georgia in organization reverted to the proprietary type.

It would require a more elaborate analysis than is here possible of the personnel of the various pious, philanthropic, and colonizing movements which converged to produce Georgia to show how closely they were interwoven. The interlocking member­ship of the Board of Trade and the Gaols Committees has been mentioned as significant; and elsewhere it has been shown that the Gaols Committees were represented in the enlarged Associates of Dr. Bray which formed the nidus of the Georgia board.​39 But the connections were even more involved. In 1725‑26, Dr. Bray and his religious friends had been in touch with the Swiss promoter Purry.​40 Thus the appeal that Georgia made to foreign Protestants was quite in keeping with the Bray tradition. One of the obscure springs of the Georgia enterprise may perhaps be found in Bray's plan for artisan-mission settlements on the frontiers, to raise a barrier against Indian barbarism, which he advanced in 1727 in opposition to Dean Berkley's more famous project.​41 Bray was a more sympathetic critic of the Maine-Nova Scotia scheme of his friend Thomas Coram, but deemed its site too far northward for the charitable colony which in his last days he hoped to see planted for the relief of the poor and of foreign Protestants.​42 From Coram's testimony and from other evidence​43 there is some reason to believe that Dr. Bray, who anticipated Oglethorpe in prison investigation,​44 anticipated him also in suggesting the debtor-colony plan.

 p35  Certainly such projects were in the air.​45 In a famous commercial tract by Joshua Gee, The Trade and Navigation of Great Britain Considered (first edition, 1729) there appeared a proposal for transporting the unemployed as well as convicts to America, to be settled on the frontiers of the southern colonies, there to cultivate flax and hemp.​46 Such colonists, said Gee, would multiply rapidly, "by which Means those vast Tracts of Land now waste will be planted, and secured from the Danger we apprehend of the French over-running them." It has not, apparently, been noted that Gee's suggestions were almost verbally reproduced in the first recorded description of Oglethorpe's charitable colony plan.47

Oglethorpe, of course, was the real founder of Georgia, in the sense that it was he who mobilized the forces of piety and charity to accomplish a task of imperial as well as of philanthropic interest. Georgia, however, promised to realize the dreams of many men, Englishmen and colonials — hence, in part, its extraordinary vogue in those early years. To be sure, for the most part the promoters who preceded Oglethorpe had prepared the way only as they had advertised the region. But a larger value attaches to the work of the Carolina imperialists and the Board of Trade in developing that frontier policy — anti-Spanish, but also anti-French — of which Georgia became, after 1732, the concrete embodiment.

---

The Author's Notes:

1 Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 1681‑1685, pp278‑79, 296, 305.

2 The fullest narrative of the Cardross colony is in G. F. Insh, Scottish Colonial Schemes, 1620‑1686 (Glasgow, 1922), chap. VI.

3 Letters, Illustrative of Public Affairs in Scotland, Addressed by Contemporary Statesmen to George, Earl of Aberdeen, Lord High Chancellor of Scotland, MDCLXXXI-MDCLXXXIV. Edited by John Dunn (Printed for the Spalding Club, 1851), 48. See also Public Record Office, Colonial Office Papers (hereafter cited as C. O.) 5:287, p139.

4 A. G. Barcia, Ensayo Cronológico para la Historia General de la Florida (Madrid, 1723), 287. C. O., 5:287, pp136, 142.

5 C. O., 5:287. Folios 136‑41.

6 V. W. Crane, "The Southern Frontier in Queen Anne's War," American Historical Review, XXIV, 381‑82.

7 G. D. Scull, "Biographical Notice of Dr. Daniel Coxe, of London," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, VII, 317‑26.

8 Cal. of State Papers, Col., 1689‑1692, pp251, 761.

9 Board of Trade Journals, October to December, 1699, passim. Cal. of State Papers, Col., 1699, pp517, 522, 527‑28, 531, 572.

10 Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MSS., A, 305, f. 2.

11 Cal. of State Papers, Col., 1699, p572.

12 Ibid., 578‑80.

13 C. O., 391:117,º pp105‑7. British Museum Add. MSS., 15903, f. 116. Board of Trade Journals, August, 1719, passim.

14 Historical Manuscripts Collection, Eleventh Report, Pt. IV (Townshend MSS.), 256.

15 American Historical Review, XXIV, 385‑94.

16 C. O., 5:382.

17 Ft. de Crevecoeur (1717‑1718) is shown on D'Anville, Carte de la Louisiane . . . Dressée en Mai 1732 (1752), and other contemporary maps. The Lower Creeks had moved westward to the Chattahoochee; the French were now seeking to draw them farther down the river toward their post. Archives Colonies, C 13, A 5: f. 117, f. 155. For a Spanish account of this intrusion, see Barcia, op. cit., 338‑39, 341, 345‑46.

18 Sir Robert Montgomery, A Discourse Concerning the Design'd Establishment of a New Colony to the South of Carolina, in the Most Delightful Country of the Universe (London, 1717). One copy of this pamphlet in the John Carter Brown Library contains an appendix with a revised plan for the payment of subscriptions, not to Montgomery, but to trustees.

19 C. O., 5:292, pp93‑94. The minutes of the Lords Proprietors show that Amos Kettleby, until recently agent of South Carolina, was associated with Montgomery. Copies of the lease and release are in C. O., 5:1265, Q. 144‑45 (1).

20 C. O., 5:1265, Q. 143.

21 Aaron Hill, Works (London, 1753), II, 187‑96; compare C. O., 5:1265, Q. 143. See also Dorothy Brewster, Aaron Hill, Poet, Dramatist, Projector (New York, 1913), 58.

22 C. O., 5:383, p145.

23 But the ghost of Azilia and the Golden Islands occasionally stalked. See C. O., 5:358, A 48; 5:362, D 57; 5:290, f. 259; also Historical Manuscripts Commission, Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont: Diary of Viscount Percival, Afterwards First Earl of Egmont (Vol. I, 1730‑1733. London, 1920), 398.

24 These were An Account . . . of a Design . . . for a Settlement on the Golden Islands, and the rare tract, A Description of the Golden Islands, with an Account of the Undertaking Now on Foot for Making a Settlement There. (Both are in the John Carter Brown Library.) The former has sometimes been attributed erroneously to John Barnwell, whose letter describing the sea-islands is quoted. The latter pamphlet indignantly repudiated the reputation of the scheme as a "bubble." Preparations already made for a first settlement at St. Catherine's were described. A combined military-industrial community, with gentlemen as commanders in war and overseers in agriculture, was pictured, which vividly recalls the early "plantation" type of settlement. Besides profits from quit-rents, subscribers to allotments were promised further profits from a monopoly of trade in Azilia. All products would be purchased at a fixed price, to discourage the rise of staple agriculture, and to encourage the raising of the desired exotic commodities.

25 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Eleventh Report, Pt. IV (Townshend MSS.), 256. Board of Trade Journals, September 15, 1720. Dictionary of National Biography, XXXVIII, 321 (Montgomery).

26 Barnwell's graphic journal of the building of the fort is in Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, MSS., B, Vol. V, no. 257. Other papers are in C. O., 5:358, A 34.

27 South Carolina Council Journals (MSS. in office of Historical Commission, Columbia), February 2, 1726. C. O., 5:387, p152.

28 C. O., 5:383; 5:400, p283.

29 Reports of August 30 and September 23, 1720, C. O., 5:409, pp31, 126. Compare the representation of September 8, 1721 in New York Colonial Documents (E. B. O'Callaghan, ed.), V, 622‑30.

30 C. O., 5:358, A 8, 9.

31 J. P. Purry, Mémoire Presentéº à sa Gr. Mylord Duc de Newcastle sur l'État Présent de la Caroline et sur les Moyens de l'Ameliorerº (Londres, 1724). A translation was privately printed at Augusta, Georgia in 1880.

32 C. O., 5:292, pp149, 151; 5:387, pp119, 120; 5:383; 5:361, C 80; 5:401, p32.

33 Commons House of Assembly Journals (MSS. in office of Historical Commission, Columbia), June 19, 1722. C. O., 5:387, p51.

34 C. O., 5:361, C 62, 76, 78, 85.

35 C. O., 5:400, p291.

36 House of Commons Journals, February 25, 1729 and February 17, 1730.

37 E. B. Greene, "Anglican Outlook on the American Colonies," American Historical Review, XX, 65.

38 V. W. Crane, "The Philanthropists and the Genesis of Georgia," American Historical Review, XXVII, 63‑69.

39 Ibid.

40 C. O., 5:387, pp119‑20.

41 T[homas] B[ray], Missionalia; or, a Collection of Missionary Pieces Relating to the Conversion of the Heathen, Both the African Negroes and American Indians (London, 1727). This rare volume I have seen in the British Museum.

42 Thomas Coram to Benjamin Colman, April 30, 1734. "Letters of Thomas Coram," Edited by W. C. Ford, in Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, LVI, 20‑21.

43 American Historical Review, XXVII, 66, note 15. I should not now exclude so positively the possibility of Bray's agency in suggesting the charitable colony.

44 C. F. Secretan, Memoirs of the Life and Times of the Pious Robert Nelson . . . (London, 1860), 102. American Historical Review, XXVII, 65, note 9.

45 A tantalizing clue to an early debtor-colony proposal is furnished by the editor, H. J. Todd, of the second edition of Publick Spirit Illustrated in the Life and Designs of Thomas Bray (London, 1808). Todd had access to the lost early journals of the Associates; to the statement that "a design was formed of establishing a Colony in America" he added a note that "Proposals, with a view to this object had been published by John Norris. They were dedicated to the Members of Parliament." The design described was for relief of the poor.

46 See especially chap. XXVII; and compare Percival's Diary, I, 44‑45, for Percival's record of Oglethorpe's conversation of February 23, 1730.

47 For a fuller development of the striking parallel between the Gee and Oglethorpe schemes, see my essay on "The Promotion Literature of Georgia," in Bibliographical Essays; a Tribute to Wilberforce Eames (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), 284‑85.

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