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CHAPTER XIII THE PHILANTHROPISTS AND THE GENESIS OF GEORGIA By 1730 a forward movement of settlement upon the southern frontier was clearly impending. English occupation of the Savannah-Altamaha region, so long advocated from South Carolina, had been proclaimed in instructions to Governor Johnson . But this decision of the colonial authorities, though important , was not of itself sufficient to supply the needed colonists or to win national support. The failure of all earlier projects for southern colonization since 1670 had been due, in part, to specific weaknesses: they were visionary Edens, or mere speculators' 'bubbles,' or they were cast in the discredited mold of proprietary provinces. But in addition there had hitherto lacked any such effective impulse towards transplanting colonists as the religious and political controversies of an earlier time had furnished. Now,- at last, such an impulse was provided by the organized forces of piety and philanthropy so characteristic of this epoch. To the 'imperialism ' of the Carolinians and the Board of Trade, antiSpanish , but even more aggressively anti-French, there were added the strong currents of English social reform and of that 'ecclesiastical imperialism' of which Dr. Thomas Bray had been for many years the indefatigable leader.1 Strategy dictated that the next English seaboard colony should be planted on the exposed southern border. But it was the force of English piety and practical benevolence that furnished colonists from the unemployed of England and from the foreign Protestants, and prescribed the social character and even the organization of the new march colony, with its otherwise inexplicable reversion to the out-moded proprietorship. Institutionally, as well as in its spirit of charity, Georgia was the product of the religious -philanthropic movements of the early eighteenth century. One of the main channels through which the rising tide of English humanitarianism was flowing consisted of the numer1 E. B. Greene, 'The Anglican Outlook on the American Colonies,' AHR, XX. 65. [303 ] 304 THE SOUTHERN FRONTIER ous religious or quasi-religious societies which came into existence at the end of the seventeenth and at the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. These were formed for a variety of purposes , from the reformation of manners to the founding of charity schools.2 If certain of their activities represented merely the resurgence of the old negative Puritan morality, others gave evidence of a more humane temper and a new social earnestness in England. To a remarkable degree the movement drew its inspiration from a clergyman of the Church of England famous neither for learning nor for high preferment, the Reverend Dr. Thomas Bray, rector of St. Botolph Without, Aldgate. A contemporary eulogist declared: 'His Memory shou'd be ever reverenced in the Religious Societies of this Place of whatever Denomination, of which he was either a Founder or principal Improver.'s After particular mention of his labors as a founder of the societies for the reformation of manners, for setting up charity schools, and for the relief of poor proselytes, his official biographer went on to assert that 'most of the Religious Societies in London owe . . . grateful acknowledgements to his memory and are in great measure formed on the plans he projected .'4 The chief monuments to the zeal and organizing genius of Dr. Bray were, of course, the two great propagandist bodies tin the Anglican Church, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Another smaller church society, also created by Bray, became, shortly after his death in 1730, the parent organization of the Georgia Trust.5 Though Bray's colonial interests antedated his brief visit to America in 1700, they were no doubt greatly stimulated by his service in Maryland as commissary of the Bishop of London. ~ B. K. Gray, A History of English Philanthropy, 1905, especially chapters iv-ix; G. V. Portus, Caritas Anglicana, 1912; J. H. Overton, Life in the English Church, 1660-1714, 1885, chapter v, et passim; C. F. Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the ,S.P.G., 1901. a John Burton, Sermon preach'd befQre the Trustees ... March 15, 1732, London, 1733, p. 31. '[Samuel Smith], 'A Short Historical Account,' Maryland Historical Society, Fund Publication" no. 37 (1901), pp. 11-50, especially p. 48. On the authorship of this me~oir, and of Publick Spirit, illustrated in the Life and Designs of Thomas Bray, London, 1746, see my short article in AHR, XXVII. 63 note 3. 6 I have discussed this subject briefly in 'The Philanthropists and the...

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