James Edward Oglethorpe

General

• Born: December 22, 1696
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: June 30, 1785
• Place of death: Cranham Hall, Essex, England

English administrator and military leader

With his social vision, promotional genius, military ability, and personal guidance, Oglethorpe established the colony of Georgia. His repulsion of the Spanish from southeastern North America in 1742 effectively ended Spanish incursions in the southern mainland colonies and secured Great Britain’s southern frontier.

Areas of achievement Military, government and politics

Early Life

James Edward Oglethorpe was the seventh and last child of Sir Theophilus and Lady Eleanor Wall Oglethorpe, two Jacobites who surrounded young Oglethorpe with intrigue and endowed him with the family’s strong moral courage, conviction, loyalty to the Crown, and military and parliamentary tradition. Oglethorpe received the education of an English gentleman, first at Eton and then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where Jacobite sentiment was strong.

Oglethorpe then held a commission in the British army but resigned to join Eugene of Savoy in fighting the Ottoman Turks. He gained a reputation for military prowess at the Battle of Belgrade (1717). After a brief Jacobite flirtation at Saint Germain, France, where his widowed mother and sisters attended the pretender James III (also known as James the Old Pretender), Oglethorpe returned to the family estate of Westbrook at Godalming in Surrey. The move ended his Jacobite interest.

In 1722, Oglethorpe was elected to Parliament, succeeding his father and two elder brothers as representative for Haslemere, a seat he would hold for thirty-two years. In Parliament, Oglethorpe shook off suspicions about his Jacobitism. He won respect for integrity and hard work. More important, for his ambitions and interests, he cultivated several powerful friends. In Parliament, Oglethorpe opposed royal extravagance and the machinations of Robert Walpole and advocated naval preparedness, mercantile and colonial expansion, relief for the oppressed, and, later, the Industrial Revolution. Oglethorpe’s humanitarianism, probably a product of his family’s high-mindedness, first appeared in The Sailor’s Advocate (1728), an anonymously published pamphlet attacking the Royal Navy’s practice of impressment. The pamphlet went through eight editions. Throughout his life, Oglethorpe also professed antislavery beliefs. It was Oglethorpe’s interest in penal conditions, however, that led him to his life’s work.

Life’s Work

In 1729, James Edward Oglethorpe was named chairman of a committee to inquire into the state of England’s jails. In three reports issued in 1730, the committee cataloged the abuses of debtors’ prisons. The reports electrified the public, in part because of their lurid detail and in part because such exposés were rare in an indifferent age. Oglethorpe’s investigation convinced him that the nation and the debtors would be better served by settling the debtors in British colonies. There they could render service to the Crown by colonizing and defending new territory and producing crops and other goods needed in the mother country, while remaking their own lives.

Such an argument was hardly new to England in the eighteenth century, for since the Elizabethan age colonizers had promised similar benefits. What gave Oglethorpe’s appeal energy was the renewed public interest generated by his reports on penal conditions and his friendship with such influential men at court and in Parliament as John Lord (later the first earl of Egmont) and Thomas Bray (founder of several religious and philanthropic societies), who shared his interest in reform and in America.

Oglethorpe, Egmont, and eighteen other associates received a charter in June, 1732, creating the “Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia in America.” The proprietary grant was for a period of twenty-one years, after which the colony would revert to the Crown. The associates benefited from the British government’s interest in placing a buffer colony on Carolina’s southern frontier to protect against French, Spanish, and American Indian attacks and also from its desire to increase imperial trade and navigation. Relief for domestic unemployment was a third consideration, but it lagged behind the former two. Indeed, the interest of defense and the production of exotic crops and naval stores for the mother country so outweighed the humanitarian objective that few debtors were actually recruited for the colony.

Oglethorpe quickly proved himself an energetic promoter for a project that would evoke the most vigorous and extravagant promotional literature in the British North American experience. In 1732, at his own expense, he published A New and Accurate Account of the Provinces of South Carolina and Georgia, stressing the commercial and agricultural advantages of the colony. Georgia’s strategic position, combined with Oglethorpe’s and the appeals of the trustees, helped secure regular financial support from Parliament. When his mother died in 1732, leaving Oglethorpe free of domestic responsibilities, he decided to accompany the first group of settlers to the colony—a move that fundamentally influenced the colony’s development.

In November, 1732, Oglethorpe and 116 emigrants set sail for Georgia on the Anne. Arriving in America in January, 1733, after a successful voyage, Oglethorpe directed the settlers to the Savannah River. There he chose the site for the principal city. Oglethorpe conciliated the indigenous peoples of the area, securing from them both a grant for the land and an agreement whereby they would cut their ties to the French and Spanish. He laid out Savannah’s distinctive pattern of squares and grids, which dominates the city even today, and then parceled out the land according to the trustees’ system of entailed grants designed to hold the settler to the soil. The cumbersome land system—which prohibited the holder from selling his property or bequeathing it to any but a male heir—would cause much trouble soon enough, but Oglethorpe imposed military discipline on the first settlers. He made a treaty with the Lower Creeks and fortified the southern reaches of the colony.

In 1734, Oglethorpe set out for England to answer charges that he was overspending and being uncommunicative. Accompanied by several American Indians, Oglethorpe received an ecstatic public welcome. The press revived interest in the colony. Strengthened by the public showing, Oglethorpe gained additional support from the trustees, including new restrictions on the colony that prohibited the sale of rum and black slavery and regulated the American Indian trade through a licensing system. Meanwhile, Oglethorpe’s policy of religious toleration encouraged other emigrants to join the experiment, a policy that, in 1734, led a group of Salzburger Lutherans to seek asylum in Georgia. Other German groups followed, including subsequent contingents of Salzburgers and Swiss Moravians, and Scotch Highlander Presbyterians came as well. The British government was cool toward Oglethorpe’s efforts to attract non-British emigrants, but Oglethorpe persisted. The colony needed people.

It also needed Oglethorpe’s attention. Rumors of insurrection drew Oglethorpe back to Georgia in 1735. He brought John and Charles Wesley and a new batch of settlers with him. The Wesleys soon fell into disputes with Oglethorpe and the settlers and returned to England. Oglethorpe did better with George Whitefield, who came later and established an orphanage that Oglethorpe supported. Oglethorpe found the Georgia government in disarray. Lines of authority were blurred and the trustees retained essential power in their hands, but Oglethorpe’s unwillingness to delegate authority hardly helped matters. Oglethorpe further fanned the colony’s troubles by his own intransigence. Vain and unbending, he insisted on enforcing the new restrictions he brought from London and honoring the trustees’ unpopular land policy. Traders from South Carolina resented the licensing system for the American Indian trade, farmers chafed at restrictions on establishing a plantation-style agriculture, and the Spanish complained about Oglethorpe’s southward movement, which included a new settlement at Frederica in 1736 and a fort on Cumberland Island soon after. In London, malcontents from Georgia told tales of incompetence and venality in Oglethorpe’s administration. Oglethorpe responded by going to London, where he pacified the trustees and answered all charges. He returned to Georgia in 1738 with a regiment of soldiers that he had raised at his own expense.

Military matters thereafter preoccupied Oglethorpe in Georgia. With war between Spain and England imminent, Oglethorpe repaired relations with the American Indians. He persuaded the Chickasaw and Lower Creeks not to join Britain’s enemies should war occur and even settled differences between the Creeks and Choctaw. He also put down a mutiny among his own men, personally grabbing the ringleaders as they shot at him. When Parliament declared war on Spain in 1739 (the War of Jenkins’s Ear), which eventually became part of the larger War of the Austrian Succession, Oglethorpe moved rapidly. He led a futile attack on St. Augustine in 1740, which failed partly from Oglethorpe’s indecision. Although personally brave, Oglethorpe had little experience commanding a military expedition. His inability to distinguish between the trivial and the significant—a trait that afflicted his civil administration as well—further embarrassed his campaign. Oglethorpe redeemed his military reputation in 1742 when, in a series of skirmishes known collectively as the Battle of Bloody Marsh, he and his men rebuffed a superior Spanish force invading St. Simon’s Island. The Spanish withdrew their army from Georgia, never again to threaten seriously the British presence in North America. In 1743, Oglethorpe made another unsuccessful feint against St. Augustine, but by then Georgia was safe and Oglethorpe’s American career was ending.

Civil discontent in the colony had distracted Oglethorpe while he fought to save the empire. Colonists ignored the trustees’ regulations, malcontents launched new campaigns against Oglethorpe and the trustees in England, and the Moravians left for Pennsylvania rather than bear arms in Georgia’s defense. Questions of finance especially nagged Oglethorpe. His own expenses became entangled with those of the colony, for he had borrowed against his English property to pay for Georgia’s defense—money for which he would be only partially reimbursed. To add to Oglethorpe’s problems, the colony storekeeper had kept poor accounts and made unwarranted expenditures. In 1740, the trustees limited Oglethorpe’s civil responsibilities so that he could concentrate on military matters.

In 1743, Oglethorpe went to England to respond to criticism and to answer charges brought by a subordinate to a court-martial. He was exonerated, but his colonizing days were over. He never returned to America. Georgia was going its own way already. Indicative of Oglethorpe’s declining influence in Georgia’s future was the trustees’ decision in 1750 to remove the restrictions on rum and slavery and to accept Georgia’s development along the lines of South Carolina as a slave-based plantation society.

Oglethorpe married Elizabeth Wright, heiress of Cranham Hall, Essex, in 1744. The match gave him a fortune and the country estate where he lived for the rest of his life. He fought against the Jacobites in 1745, but rumors of his family’s Jacobite associations trailed after him and led to charges of misconduct in not pursuing the retreating Jacobites vigorously enough at Lancashire. Oglethorpe was acquitted, but his military career was over. Using an assumed name, however, he did fight on the Continent against the French during the Seven Years’ War, and he did earn the friendship of William Pitt the Elder for his endeavors and promotions to general in 1765.

In Parliament, Oglethorpe became something of a liberal Whig freelance, distrusting the Hanoverian ministers, supporting civil rights for religious dissenters in the colonies, attacking arbitrary power, and associating with the antislavery movement in England. After he lost his seat in 1754, he retired from public life. He devoted attention to his estate and to literary and artistic circles, where he became friends with Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hannah More, and Edmund Burke, among others. He died in 1785.

Significance

From his earliest colonizing promotionals, James Edward Oglethorpe had recognized the place of Georgia in the larger British North American schema. Indeed, imperial considerations of defense and commerce, more than humanitarianism, made Georgia possible. Oglethorpe’s negotiations with powerful American Indian tribes marked the growing recognition among British administrators and settlers that European rivalries in southeastern North America dictated accommodations with the American Indian population that held the balance of power. However clumsy, Oglethorpe’s military moves underscored that in the eighteenth century England would have to fight for territory in North America. Parliament’s willingness to underwrite Georgia bespoke the growing strategic importance of the North American colonies in Great Britain’s imperial design. In the age of imperial rivalries, visionaries needed also to be soldiers. Oglethorpe’s legacy included frustrating the Spanish effort to push the British out of southeastern North America.

Oglethorpe was the last of the great proprietary colonizers in British North America. Like William Penn, he was a visionary imbued with a strong sense of mission. Oglethorpe’s promotion of Georgia captured anew the prospect of America’s destiny, and like Penn’s plan, it included recruitment of non-British settlers to promise a New World Elysium out of religious and cultural diversity. Unlike Penn, Oglethorpe did not temper his social vision sufficiently with practicality. Although a gentle and even generous man, Oglethorpe bridled at criticism and was egotistic and self-righteous. He never fully adapted to the democratizing tendencies of colonial life, preferring to impose rules on his charges rather than take them into his confidence. Where Penn acceded to local demands for greater self-governance, Oglethorpe insisted on compliance with all regulations. A country Whig in temperament and politics in England, Oglethorpe unwittingly played the autocrat in America. His life in Georgia demonstrated how much the British colonial establishment in the late seventeenth through the early eighteenth centuries rested on the energy and enthusiasm of powerful individuals. It also served to show the limits of Old World authority in the New World.

Oglethorpe had founded Georgia, protected it, and given it purpose, but he could not control the social, economic, and political impulses of diverse peoples in a setting that demanded popular participation and promised individual wealth. To have done so would have defeated the idea of America that inspired Oglethorpe to believe in the Georgia experiment and the people to risk it.

Removed from the hurly burly of Georgia, Oglethorpe seems to have understood that fact himself. He championed America’s Sons of Liberty during the American Revolution, and before his death in 1785 he called on John Adams, the United States minister to England, acknowledging America’s promise as England’s, indeed Europe’s, own redemption. By his continued hope for America, the old soldier did not die.

Bibliography

Baine, Rodney M., ed. The Publications of James Edward Oglethorpe. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. A collection of tracts, committee reports, letters to the press, and other documents that Oglethorpe wrote or edited for publication. Includes introductions to each document as well as textual and explanatory notes.

Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans: The Colonial Experience. New York: Random House, 1958. Boorstin’s influential treatment of Oglethorpe and colonial Georgia criticizes the Georgia trustees for their inability to adapt to the American environment. Boorstin finds in Oglethorpe’s and the trustees’ failed vision of Georgia a clue to the success of other forms of community in America. By comparing the Georgia experiment with those of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, Boorstin places Oglethorpe’s thought and actions in the context of American utopianism.

Church, Leslie Frederic. Oglethorpe: A Study of Philanthropy in England and Georgia. London: Epworth Press, 1932. This study remains valuable for its detail on Oglethorpe’s philanthropic interests, his ties to religious figures, especially the Wesleys, and his social and political connections in England.

Coleman, Kenneth. Colonial Georgia: A History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976. A valuable synthesis of Georgia history. Coleman’s account offers an excellent brief introduction to Oglethorpe’s ideas and actions and explains how a multiethnic, multireligious colony developed from his policies.

Ettinger, Amos Aschbach. James Edward Oglethorpe: Imperial Idealist. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1936. Ettinger’s lively and sympathetic account is the fullest and best biography of Oglethorpe. Ettinger approached Oglethorpe in the tradition of George Macauley Trevelyan, who believed the eighteenth century was the age of the individual. As such, Ettinger found Oglethorpe’s personality and interest formed from his family traditions of loyalty to the Crown, military service, and parliamentary responsibility.

Inscoe, John C., ed. James Oglethorpe: New Perspectives on His Life and Legacy. Savannah: Georgia Historical Society, 1997. A reexamination of Oglethorpe’s life and multifaceted career.

Lane, Mills, ed. General Oglethorpe’s Georgia. Savannah, Ga.: Beehive Press, 1975. Lane includes in this collection a good sampling of Oglethorpe’s letters relating to the Georgia years and provides a useful introduction to Oglethorpe and Georgia, including accounts of colonial discontent.

Spalding, Phinizy. Oglethorpe in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Spalding reassesses Oglethorpe’s life in the light of the many new materials available since Ettinger completed his research. In a balanced account, Spalding weighs Oglethorpe’s ideas against his actions. He argues that Oglethorpe was not blind to American realities and that his ideas regarding a yeoman society were not necessarily doomed by the American environment.

Spalding, Phinizy, and Harvey H. Jackson, eds. Oglethorpe in Perspective: Georgia’s Founder After Two Hundred Years. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989. A collection of essays, including discussions of Oglethorpe’s role in the Anglican Church in Georgia, his attitudes about race, and his experiences in Europe.

Ver Steeg, Clarence L. Origins of a Southern Mosaic: Studies of Early Carolina and Georgia. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975. In his important and provocative examination of the origins of Georgia, Ver Steeg discards most previous interpretations and argues that, although strategic considerations loomed largest in shaping policies toward Georgia, each trustee had his own motives regarding the colony’s settlement and development. In the absence of any grand design, Oglethorpe had to contend with the contradictions among both trustees and settlers about Georgia’s purpose.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Eighteenth Century

Great Events from History: The Eighteenth Century, 1701-1800: September 6, 1715-February 4, 1716: Jacobite Rising in Scotland; June 20, 1732: Settlement of Georgia; 1739-1741: War of Jenkins’s Ear; September 9, 1739: Stono Rebellion; December 16, 1740-November 7, 1748: War of the Austrian Succession; August 19, 1745-September 20, 1746: Jacobite Rebellion; January, 1756-February 15, 1763: Seven Years’ War.