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6. Oglethorpe‘s Contest for the Backcountry, 1733–1749
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94 Phinizy Spalding Georgia's "first founders, patrons and guardians." But to deny the de... mands would bring about the colony's ruin, the petitioners warned, and cause the ruin of the Trustees' collective reputations as well, henceforth to be known as the originators of Georgia's "misfortunes and calami.. ties." 40 This closely argued representation, brief and to the point, stated the crisis in which Georgia found itself. Should the colony continue on its strange, unchartered course under the guise of the Trustees, or be permitted to evolve the way other southern continental colonies had? Oglethorpe denounced the entire representation and its authors, particularly Robert Williams, whose role in its writing he obviously thought seminal. He had used anger and intimidation to get the sig.. natures, Oglethorpe said, and was particularly effective among those citizens of Savannah who were indebted to him. Oglethorpe called the assertion that white men could not work effectively in Georgia abso.. lutely in error and added that he could refute such charges "by hundreds of Witnesses," including the Salzburgers, the Scots at Darien, and many in Frederica and even Savannah. It was only the idle, he said, who asked for black labor. Accede to this element, Oglethorpe warned, and "the Province is ruined"; Tailfer and Williams would buy up most of the lands in and around Savannah; and the settlers would flee to other provinces, their places being taken by Negroes.41 On the other hand, Stephens appears to have been generally in favor of what the petitioners asked, although denouncing those individuals he considered most responsible. Having presided over a deteriorating situation before, such as the one he headed during the York Buildings Company's ill...fated speculative enterprises in Scotland, Stephens was armed with firsthand knowledge that might have been valuable to the Trust. But by 1739 it was obvious that the Trustees did not really want to hear the plain language and sound advice their secretary had to offer. He hinted in his writings that some of the malcontents' demands were not unreasonable, but he obviously could not add his name to the list of signers without completely jeopardizing his credibility in the eyes of the Georgia Office. And he needed the salary desperately in order to support both himself and his beleaguered and separated family. So Stephens tempered his judgments on the situation with the stark realities he had to face. The representation signaled the start of a general campaign on the part of the opposition to bring about the changes deemed most desir... Oglethorpe and William Stephens 95 able. The December petition was followed soon after by Hugh Ander... son's two able letters, one to Oglethorpe and the other to Egmont.42 Then came more petitions and, finally, pamphlets in which the op... position's demands, along with the language, became more strident. Nothing in Georgia or, for that matter, in the Georgia Office was ever quite the same after December 1738. Stephens, who had already been rendered uncomfortable because of the tie made in the representation between land tenure and slavery, feared that should he seem too receptive to the opposition's ideas he would lose the support not just of the Trustees but of Oglethorpe as well. Although the administrative style and the fiscal policies of the latter had, by 1739, been repudiated by the Trustees, Oglethorpe was still the person to be reckoned with in Georgia. And he bitterly resented the December 1738 petition, denounced its originators, and began to associate Savannah with disloyalty to him and to the Trust. As was so often the case with Oglethorpe, he took criticism leveled at the colony as a personal slight. He encouraged his allies in Frederica, Darien, and Ebenezer to start counterpetitions aimed at diluting any impact the December 1738 representation might have in London.43 It is worth noting that he sought no outward support at this time from Savannah. Not long after the first of the year, when the Trustees' store in Sa... vannah ran out of meat and was desperately low on other provisions, it was rumored on Yamacraw Bluff that Oglethorpe intended to starve upstart Savannah into submitting to his will. Stephens could give little credence to such a bizarre story, but he must have thought that Ogle... thorpe only added fuel to the flames by not coming to Savannah to give the lie to such rumors. And when he finally did come, in March 1739, Oglethorpe went out of his way...