An Egalitarian Design

Savannah was established as a refuge for distressed and persecuted Protestants. Following extensive planning by the 21 Trustees who would administer the colony for its first 20 years, the first 35 families set sail aboard the Anne in November, 1732, accompanied by one of the Trustees, James Edward Oglethorpe, age 37. Making landfall at Charles Town in January, the colonist proceeded down the coast to the Savannah River where Oglethorpe laid out on high ground a few miles from the coast what would become the oldest planned city in the United States. The new colony, Georgia, was a utopian experiment to a certain extent, based on an idealized concept of agrarian equality and with the motto "not for ourselves but for others," nom sibi sed allis. While other colonies had been established with large land grants to gentry, this last of the 13 colonies was more egalitarian, at least at its inception. Families were each given a town lot around one of the four initial squares, a garden plot and a fifty-acre farm plot. Slavery, strong drinks though not beer, lawyers, and Catholics were all banned from the colony's founding though the prohibitions all fell by the wayside within a few years. The colony was intended to give poor, hardworking protestant families a chance in the New World and to provide a buffer between Carolina and the Spanish presence at Saint Augustine in Florida. Georgia was a commercial as well as a social experiment. The colony's economy was to be based on the production of a number of commodities with great expectations placed on revenues from the production of silk and wine. Many mulberry trees were planted in the new colony. The Trustees established a garden to determine the viability of other crops in the warm, wet climate. It was the climate, in fact, that crushed hopes of silk production. However, rice, forest products and eventually cotton, gave the port of Savannah a brisk trade during colonial years.

Founder General James Edward Oglethorpe