Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier by James Van Horn Melton (review)

In Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, James Van Horn Melton brings his expertise in Pietism and early modern European history to colonial Georgia. His transatlantic study follows the Salzburgers, a group of exiled Protestants, from the Alps to America, where they founded the town of Ebenezer, Georgia. Within colonial American history, the Salzburgers are known as the authors of one of the first antislavery petitions in the American South. For European historians, the history of the Salzburg expulsion has been focused on the migration from the Alps to Prussia, where the vast majority of exiled Protestants resettled. Melton’s contribution is twofold: for early Americanists, he describes the European experiences of the Salzburgers in fascinating detail, demonstrating how they developed their distrust of slavery and their comparatively successful and insular frontier community. For Europeanists, Melton’s study serves as a reminder of the transatlantic dimensions of the Salzburg exile.

Melton’s study is divided into two parts: “From Europe to America” and “Ebenezer.” Part 1 explores the lives of the Salzburgers in their alpine home-land and their subsequent exile. Melton focuses on Thomas Geschwandel, a miner from Bad Gastein who immigrated to Georgia with his family. While Protestants and Catholics had coexisted in Salzburg for centuries, the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in 1728 destabilized the delicate balance of assimilation and dissent that characterized crypto-Protestantism in the area. The missionaries hardened confessional boundaries, leading to mass exodus. In the summer of 1733 Thomas Geschwandel was one of thousands who migrated after expulsion. While the vast majority of exiles traveled to Prussia, Geschwandel chose a different route. In 1733, just as he and his family were leaving Salzburg, the British Parliament agreed to fund the costs for resettling Salzburg exiles in the newly founded colony of Georgia. The expulsion had become a cause célèbre for Pietist and Anglican philanthropists, and the Trustees of Georgia viewed the Salzburgers as ideal migrants. The Salzburgers bolstered the philanthropic credentials of the Georgia colony, which was intended to support poor and persecuted Protestants. Georgia was also an important military buffer between South Carolina and Spanish Florida. For this reason, among others, the Trustees of Georgia forbade the importation of slaves into the colony.

Led by their Pietist pastor Johann Martin Boltzius, the Salzburgers arrived in Charles Town in 1734. There, Boltzius noted that the reliance on slave labor was a “great danger” (p. 136). In Ebenezer, the Salzburgers continued to oppose the introduction of slavery. They countered the arguments of the proslavery Malcontents by insisting that white people were capable of cultivating rice in the Georgia heat. However, as Melton emphasizes, the Salzburgers did not oppose slavery for religious or moral reasons. Instead, they viewed slaves as an economic and physical threat to their community. Melton suggests that the Salzburgers’ antislavery position was based on their insularity as well as their economic success. Unlike English settlers, the Salzburgers had a diverse skill set that included both agricultural and skilled labor, providing them with more flexibility on the frontier.

Despite their antislavery position, the Salzburgers eventually adapted to slavery after the ban on slave labor was lifted in 1750. Melton observes that Boltzius’s stance on Africans actually became markedly more positive after the introduction of slavery. Inspired by George Whitefield, Boltzius began to view slaves as potential converts, and he regularly baptized enslaved children. Still, this optimism eventually faded, and by 1763, two years before his death, Boltzius regretted his acceptance of slavery, viewing it as a “metaphor for how Ebenezer, once chosen and thus exceptional in God’s eyes, had succumbed to worldly temptation” (p. 268).

Melton’s study should appeal to Europeanists and early Americanists alike. It is a model of transatlantic scholarship with its careful attention to culture, religion, and politics in both Salzburg...