The Americans: The Colonial Experience. Part 3: Victims of Philanthropy: The Settlers of Georgia

Chapter 12.  The altruism of an unheroic age

• what cosmopolitanism and self-purity did to Pennsylvania, paternalism and philanthropy did to Georgia
• mid-18th century
• distinctly unheroic
• more concerned about living with spiritual and intellectual means than with seeking unfamiliar horizons
• philanthropy
• directed toward the removal of poverty and vice
• attempt to eliminate eyesores to gentlemen walking the streets of London
• proposal in 1730 to establish colony in Georgia
• made a welcome impression on the English mind
• such a thoroughly altruistic enterprise became the subject of much poetry and self-congratulation
• leaders free or sordid moties
• planned to the most detailed (petty) specifications
• General James Oglethorpe
•  man of action
• clear and specific in his purpose
• arbitrary and impatient
• unbending with the doctrinaire rigidity of the completely practical  man
• Lord John Percival
• co-leader of project
• wealthy aristocrat
• crucial mistake was making specific plans too far in advance and too far from the scene of the experiement
• new colonists chosen from needy applicants
• background and moral character investigated
• those who showed promise of becoming sturdy colonists

 Chapter 13: London Blueprint for Georgia Utopia

•  Sir Robert Montgomery proposed a geometric scheme of settlement
• the mapping of the geography of a pipedream
• basic errors
• rigidity of rules for ownership, use, sale and inheritance of land
• by preventing free accumulation, exchange, and exploration of the land, the planners stultified the life of the colony
• acted as if they knew the facts
• imposed their ignorance on the settlers
• Negro was perceived as a menace to the scheme
• settlers were to do their own labor
• prohibition of slavery was integral to plan
• grandiose plans for Georgia's place in England's economy
• an envisioned silk trade
• ad the plan succeeded, Georgia would have been a tidy, antiseptic, efficient, and thoroughly dull place
• major flaw was that this scheme had to be carried out by real people in a real world

Chapter 14.  A Charity Colony

• London philanthropists
• trying to make Georgia a European dream
• less interested in what was possible in America than in what had been impossible in Europe
• 18th century English society
• nothing more valued than security and independence
• acceptance of his own place by each party (e.g., squire and peasant)
• America provided a man caught in the lower class a chance to escape, to accept a new life
• Georgia settlers were at a disadvantage being in the hand of their benefactors
• Trustees of the colony
• held a destructively paternalistic attitude
• their arrogance and condescension bred dependence and discontent
• settlers made their complaints and looked for aid to their benefactors in distant London
• Sponsors found themselves becoming increasingly involved in the affairs of the settlement
• plight of colonists
• their new home allowed them to become neither prosperous nor hopeful
• lack of special skills as backwoodsmen

Chapter 15:  Death of a Welfare Project

•  colonists cursed by universal ills of bureaucracy
• pettiness
• arbitrariness
• corruption
• most disastrous of trustees' plans concerned the land
• rigid provisions removed incentive to increased productivity
• trustees discovered they had assumed a responsibility they could neither fulfill nor abandon
• disgruntled colonists found themselves shackled to unfertile plots of land
• laws prevented adding to, seeling, or exchanging parcels of land
• alternative was flight
• attempt at prohibition, an unenforceable act
• silk industry
• last project to bite the dust
• story of futile bickerings and unfulfilled hopes
• sponsors became victims of their own propaganda
• in 1742, when half the silkworms in Savannah died, the fact that Georgia's climate was not suited to raising silkworms was brutally confirmed
• trustees gave up their charter in 1752
• had burdened themselves with powers no one could wisely execute from London
• less than half the original population remained
• at the time of the Revolution, Georgia was least prosperous and least populous of colonies

Chapter 16:  Perils of Altruism

• tried to incorporate too much of a plan
• frame of mind which stifled the spontaneity and experimental spirit which were real spiritual wealth of America

The book has received mostly positive reviews at Amazon.

I chuckled over this comment from a 2-star review.

This is not a coherent history, but a series of disjointed stories, all related to the original settlements in the US. There is virtually no analysis, only poorly documented anecdotes. 

The book includes a 47-page section of Bibliographic Notes, which I used to bulk up my reading list in 1976.  The content is thoroughly documented.

The author does not present his research in a straightforward, chronological manner; he's not writing a textbook.  And the book is full of thoughtful analysis, which the reader may not always agree with.

Related posts:
The Americans: The Colonial Experience by Daniel Boorstin,  Part 1.  A City Upon a Hill:  The Puritans of Massachusetts.  (12/8/2014)
The Americans: The Colonial Experience. Part 2. The Inward Plantation: The Quakers of Pennsylvania.  (12/10/2014)