In our examination of the origins of Southern culture and identity we have studied how the plantation culture of the Caribbean was transmitted to the North American mainland. Most of our focus to this point has been on the colony of South Carolina, as that is where the Caribbean plantation culture was first articulated in the South. Recently we have expanded our focus beyond the Carolina Lowcountry to the neighbouring colony of Georgia. As we’ve noted, Georgia got a later start than Carolina and at first rejected the plantation culture. Its extremely poor economic and demographic performance led colonial leaders to (reluctantly, in at least some cases) embrace the plantation model – a societal model which made the colony a nearly overnight success and put it firmly in the Caribbean-centred plantation civilisation that many nineteenth century Southerners and Northern sympathisers referred to as the ‘Golden Circle.’
Dr Paul M Pressly in his book On the Rim of the Caribbean: Colonial Georgia and the British Atlantic World (University of Georgia Press, 2013) describes in chapter eleven (‘Nationalizing the Lowcountry’) how Georgia benefitted greatly from its position within the British Empire. Its people enjoyed a new prosperity that was quickly catching up to that of neighbouring South Carolina. Georgia was also protected from enemies such as the Spanish in northern Florida and the American Indian tribes in the Upcountry. As well, British troops provided security in the event of a slave uprising. In its embrace of the British military Georgia was much more like the Caribbean colonies (which were enthusiastic supporters of basing more troops on their islands) than the mainland colonies. Even South Carolina, which had been colonised by English-Barbadians who had largely replicated the Barbadian model in the Carolina Lowcountry, was significantly less supportive of the British military and Empire in general than was Georgia. Dr Pressly writes:
Fort King GeorgeWhile Carolinians dug in to defend the “rights of Carolina Englishmen,” Georgians had fewer reasons to rebel against British rule than other Americans. For historical reasons, the colony received an annual grant of £3,000 sterling to cover the cost of the civil list, substantially reducing the tax burden on its citizens and making them cautious about any irrevocable step ending that relationship. Nor were Georgians insensitive to the fact that the sparse settlement in the upcountry made them vulnerable to the Creeks, who outnumbered whites until the very end of the period. Reliance on the protection of the British army remained a strong desire even if no British troops were stationed in the colony. …On a deeper level, the diversity of the province presented a roadblock to developing a common stance. The Germans around Ebenezer lacked any background in representative government, had found the religious freedom they sought, and tended to support the Crown, at least at the outset. By way of contrast, the Congregationalists of St. John Parish were passionate Whigs and pushed hard for a decisive break with Britain.
However, issues of trade and commerce, and more generally, the very real advantages of the imperial system weighed heavily in people’s thinking. Few wanted to risk the economic boom that had carried the colony to new heights. Georgia was very much attached to the empire – and the habit of looking to the Caribbean and Britain, rather than to the middle colonies and New England, for sources of inspiration.
The above economic and political reasons for supporting the British Empire were also strengthened by the social isolation of Georgia from the other mainland colonies. Pressly notes that ‘The colony was much less tied to the economic, cultural, and political life of the North American continent than was South Carolina.’ One important way this was reflected was in marriages. Georgians rarely married outside of the colony, and when they did it was generally to South Carolinians – who had largely colonised Georgia (those with Carolinian roots made up more than half of the planters in the Georgia Lowcountry prior to the American Revolution) in the first place. ‘If few Georgians married Carolinians, virtually no one married someone from elsewhere in the North American mainland. “Northward” brides or grooms were almost never found,’ Pressly writes. Beyond marriage, education was an important factor that in the colonial and throughout the Antebellum period united the mainland colonies. The Northeast had most of the early universities and it was common for upper class Southern young men to be sent to New England for college. However, ‘[Georgians] did not follow their Carolinian peers to Newport, Rhode Island, and other summer spots far removed from the stultifying heat and malaria-bearing mosquitoes of the southern seacoast. Very few traveled to the mid-Atlantic colonies for education and no one, it would appear, went to any institution in New England.’
These factors led to a ‘sense of disenfranchisement from the mainland’ and influenced Georgians’ view of the revolutionary, anti-British sentiments coming out of New England and the other colonies. Georgia’s three delegates to the Continental Congress refused to take their seats in Philadelphia. The only strong anti-British, pro-Revolution support in the colony was found in St John Parish ‘dominated by the Congregationalists with their New England ties.’ Pressly notes that ‘When the congress met in Savannah on January 18, [1775] only five parishes turned up, and they voted in tentative fashion for a watered-down resolution in favor of the [Continental] Association.’ The delegates informed their colleagues in Philadelphia via a letter that Savannah’s merchants ‘flatly opposed the boycott’ of commerce with Britain. Importantly, the ‘watered-down resolution’ that did pass contained ‘an omission that permitted Georgia’s lucrative commerce with the West Indies to go forward.’
It would take another year and the continued agitation of revolutionaries to stir up enough rebel support in Savannah to endanger Britain’s position in the colony. Even then many Georgians, especially the Scottish merchants and the Lowcountry planters, remained supportive of the Empire. It was the outbreak of war itself which, as Pressly writes, had the effect of ‘nationalizing the lowcountry’ and bringing it more into the North American sphere. The American Revolution effectively severed the Golden Circle, cutting off Carolina and Georgia in particular from their sister colonies in the British Caribbean. That severing ultimately had the fateful results of binding the Southern mainland plantation colonies to the New England and Mid-Atlantic colonies in a Union in which Southerners were the minority. As well, it greatly reduced the political influence of the remaining British plantation colonies (in the Caribbean) and empowered the abolitionist movement in English urban centres. In the end the British turned against their remaining plantation colonies in the Americas, opting to essentially destroy (with the imposition of democracy and equality) those highly affluent English outposts in the Caribbean in favour of a focus on African and Asian colonization. Likewise, only several decades after the American Revolution the Northern States were aggressively agitating (to the point of carrying out terrorists attacks in Virginia and Missouri) against the South. The great cultural, political and economic differences between the regions, reinforced by the resentment built up over decades of agitation and bitter political struggle ultimately led to Southern secession, Northern invasion and the subsequent destruction of the plantation South.
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