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233 chapter thirteen A Separate Peace in Georgia Because the name of Brother was taken from him [Reynier], he took his wife and left us. He finally ended his restless life in Savannah, Georgia. May God be merciful to him on Judgment Day.1 —The Ephrata Chronicle’s description of the final fate of Jean-François and Maria Barbara Reynier, 1786 The Reyniers lived their final years in Georgia, away from the limelight of revival and public debate between competing religious groups and publishers. Georgia had changed dramatically since Jean-François’s first sojourn in the colony, and the Reyniers fully accepted those changes, including theintroductionofslavery.Theirsearchfortruthandopportunitycontinuedin Georgia, and so did their struggle to accept one another. Near the ends of their lives, they witnessed important events in the American Revolution, a tremendous event that transformed America and began to unravel the Atlantic World as the Reyniers had experienced it during their thirty-five years of marriage. Jean-François had walked from Pennsylvania to Savannah in 1735, but it is unclear whether he and Maria Barbara traveled by land or by sea thirty years later. They had enough money to take the faster route by sea, which is probably what they did, but even this journey was over 700 miles and often difficult. When the Lutheran pastor Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg made the same trip in 1774 with his wife and daughter, they paid £5 8s sterling each for their fare. Sailing in late August and September, roughly the same time of year as the Reyniers, the Mühlenbergs’ ship navigated the narrow shipping lane between the coast and the Gulf Stream, which ran in the opposite direction, and reached Charleston in twelve days. As was often the case with travelers sailing from the north to Savannah, they had to wait a long time in Charleston before finding a ship and favorable winds to finish their voyage—in this case seven 234 Part Four weeks. Most would have walked or ridden the remainder of the way (only about a four- or five-day journey via Purrysburg), but the Mühlenbergs were ill and could not. When they finally sailed in late October, they only needed one day to reach Savannah, but even one day could turn into an adventure, as difficult winds and fog nearly caused the ship to run aground and break up. Thus, even a relatively short trip along the Atlantic rim could be an expensive, time-consuming, and frightening ordeal.2 In 1739, when Reynier left Georgia, he had left an embattled, experimental colony that had been set up to be an alternative to the plantation colony model in South Carolina and to help defend its more lucrative neighbor, but now things were much different. The population of Georgia had increased more than ten times, from about 1,400 to 17,700. The southern and western borders of the colony had expanded as well. Florida was now a part of the British Empire, no longer a threatening Spanish military base or a haven for runaway slaves. The Lower Creeks had been pushed far into the interior. Many of Savannah’s Jewish residents had departed and all of the Moravians had left.3 Two other important changes had occurred in Georgia by 1766. In 1750, the colonial government lifted the ban on slavery, and two years later the British crown took over the colony from the trustees. As a result, white colonists from South Carolina, other mainland colonies, and Europe stampeded into Georgia, and they brought many slaves with them. By 1766, about 7,900 of the colony’s 17,700 residents (45 percent) were black, and almost all of these were slaves. By the mid-1760s, Georgia had become a slave society, like other southern colonies, and with this change, it lost the unusual, idealistic qualities of its founding period. A small planter elite dominated political and economic developments, and a large body of slaves provided the labor needed to sustain the system. In between these groups were European immigrants and other white colonists who owned few or no slaves, yet many of these aspired to carve out a living in other ways in this growing economy. Thus, when the Reyniers arrived in 1766, they found a rapidly expanding royal colony in which much of the white population enjoyed significant prosperity, made possible by the rapidly growing enslaved population brought primarily from South Carolina, the West Indies, and West Africa. In many ways, Georgia...

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