African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee

Lowcountry Georgia and the Early Modern Atlantic World, 1733–ca. 1820

Philip Morgan LowcountryGeorgiaandtheEarlyModern AtlanticWorld,1733–ca.1820 arly Georgia does not bulk large in popular and scholarly consciousness . The “runt of the mainland American colonies,” a “fledgling province,” the youngest of the thirteen original states, it seems marginal. A utopian experiment in its initial guise, it was exceptional, sui generis. The first and only British colony to reject slavery, it also became the only place where colonists formally claimed that the institution was indispensable, “the one thing needful” to ensure progress. Lying between Spanish Florida and British South Carolina, with French Louisiana to the west and the polyglot Caribbean to the southeast—and surrounded by major Native American nations—it was meant to be, and long remained, a buffer zone. Indeed, it seems a place subject to much buffeting, more acted upon than actor in some ways. Georgia was somewhat laggard during the American Revolution, halfhearted in its commitment to nonimportation, the only colony of the thirteen not to send delegates to the First Continental Congress, and the first place the British invaded when they adopted their southern strategy in 1778. Georgia, the British thought, represented the softest underbelly of the Patriot movement. For some time thereafter, Georgia remained out of step with most of the other thirteen states that became the United States. Until recently, it was thought to be the place wherethelastslaveshipreachedtheSouth.Inmanyrespects,then,Georgia E 14  philip morgan can be portrayed as something of an isolated backwater, on the fringes, a peripheral place.1 Precisely because of its unusualness, however, Georgia occupies something of a center ground. It straddles a number of shared historiographies. An exemplar, Georgia is a microcosm of broader forces at work in the Atlantic world. The first set of larger forces worth exploring—befitting Georgia’s beginnings—are those associated with antislavery. In some ways, Georgia is not quite the anomaly it appears, from a wide-ranging, pan-Atlantic, antislavery perspective, although its trajectory might be said to reverse the usual pattern. A second, special vantage point is Georgia’s borderlands status. It truly was on the margins, and is therefore the perfect place to explore a marchland, a contested border region, a place of entangled histories. It was also a zone of imperial rivalry, in which profound international influences were at play. Thus, there is no better site than lowcountry Georgia to tell significant stories about multiracial and multiethnic encounters. A third narrative that Georgia can illumine is that of a greater plantation world, whether more specifically a greater lowcountry or an extended Caribbean. Georgia’s story can be profitably told with larger reference to developments elsewhere in the plantation orbit. Fourth, Africa contributed significantly to early Georgia, so considerations of a larger African diaspora must be taken into account to comprehend fully its development. Finally, while in the discussion of these four themes I take the story into the Revolutionary era, I want to touch on Georgia from the perspective of the Revolutionary Atlantic, because of the many contradictions that bedeviled the region during that period. In these ways, and in what can be only a quick and impressionistic sketch, early Georgia offers a special perspective on at least five larger Atlantic stories.2 An Atlantic approach should broaden horizons, by calling attention to wider perspectives and transnational comparisons. The aim is to look across national boundaries and language areas, and put specialized work within a larger framework of a loosely connected but increasingly cohesive Atlantic world. As people, commodities, and cultural values moved around the Atlantic basin, profound transformations in all spheres of life occurred on the lands bordering on or connected to the ocean. Events in one place had repercussions in others. The great virtue of thinking in Atlantic terms is that it encourages broad perspectives, transnational orientations, and expanded horizons at the same time that it offers a chance for overcom- lowcountry georgia & the early modern atlantic  15 ing national and other parochialisms. Connections and contrasts can help overcome myopia and myriad details. Antislavery Genuine antislavery principles are usually thought to have been confined to the late eighteenth century. The extent of that moral revolution is captured in David Brion Davis’s words that, for thousands of years, people “thought of sin as a kind of slavery,” but then in the late eighteenth century, they began “to think of slavery as sin.” Increasingly, however, scholars have uncovered antislavery impulses that had an older lineage than previously imagined...