Oglethorpe’s Monster
How a liberal do-gooder created a colony of crackers who’d go on to ruin America
When James Oglethorpe founded the Georgia Colony on the banks of the Savannah River, his plans sounded like what a lot of today’s Georgians would call pie-in-the-sky, liberal wish-wash. The 1732 Charter of Georgia almost reads like a Bernie Sanders campaign speech written in old-timey legalese:
Whereas we are credibly informed, that many of our poor subjects are, through misfortunes and want of employment, reduced to great necessity, insomuch as by their labor they are not able to provide a maintenance for themselves and families; and if they had means to defray their charges of passage, and other expences, incident to new settlements, they would be glad to settle in any of our provinces in America where by cultivating the lands, at present waste and desolate, they might not only gain a comfortable subsistence for themselves and families, but also strengthen our colonies and increase the trade, navigation and wealth of these our realms.
Oglethorpe envisioned a Utopian society in the New World free of the social ills of Europe. The end result was a uniquely American miscreation, a new class of reactionaries known as “crackers.”
O glethorpe had little in common with the people he championed. A born aristocrat, he grew up on a country estate, went to prep school, and wore powdered wigs. Like many sensitive rich kids, he had a guilt complex over his inherited privilege. He was elected to Parliament at 26 years old and quickly earned a reputation as a passionate humanitarian. After a friend’s death from smallpox while in a debtor’s prison, he made prison reform his primary cause. His efforts led to the release of hundreds of imprisoned debtors. Unfortunately, most of them had nowhere to go and ended up on the streets. Undeterred by such setbacks, Oglethorpe devised a plan for a colony in the Americas dedicated to giving the paupers a second chance. An ad for the project claimed:
There are many poor unfortunate persons in this country who would willingly labour for their bread if they could get bread for the labouring for; such persons may now be provided for by being sent to a country where there are vast tracts of fertile land lying uninhabited and uncultivated.
But Oglethorpe knew that King George II wasn’t much of a bleeding heart, so he had to make a more pragmatic case to get his support. His argument was two-pronged:
(A) The colonies were a dumping ground for religious freaks, foreign refugees, and convicts. Why not hobos and burnouts, too? Didn’t they fall into the same category of people you didn’t want hanging around public parks?
(B) The British Carolina colonies were in constant danger of attack from the Spanish menace in Florida. A colony of expendable indigents could serve as a buffer against the rival empire.
The King liked the idea of shipping urban tramps off to form a human shield against Spanish marauders. In 1732, he signed a charter to establish the Province of Georgia between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers.
Oglethorpe was made an unofficial “governor” of Georgia. Legal authority over the colony belonged to the Board of Trustees, a group of stuffy noblemen in London whose administration style ranged from overbearing to indifferent. Oglethorpe would have to make some painful compromises with these less enlightened superiors over the course of his tenure.
In 1733, Oglethorpe set sail for America with 114 men, women, and children. They were, as the Trustees called them, “the Middling Sort of People.” To Oglethorpe, they were Britain’s “worthy poor.” They came from the lowest rungs of English society, considered unemployable and useless by their fellow countrymen. Even the colony’s one doctor, William Cox, proved to be a quack. He wrote shortly after landing that “the greatest health hazard” in the new village of Savannah was “alligators in the streets.” He died fifty-nine days later from the arguably more dire threat of tuberculosis.
Like most parts of the “New World,” the land on which Oglethorpe decided to build his settlement wasn’t a vacant lot. The future site of Savannah was occupied by a small village of Creek Indians known as the Yamacraw who were already well-versed in dealing with Europeans. Their nonagenarian chieftain Tomochichi had spent much of his life trading and fighting with the British and Spanish, and had come to the uncomfortable conclusion that it was in the best interest of his people to try to live peacefully alongside the whites. Oglethorpe struck up an immediate friendship with Tomochichi and made it clear to him that he intended to deal fairly with the Indians. He guaranteed that he would only take what land was freely given by its original inhabitants. In turn, Tomochichi granted him permission to settle on a bluff overlooking the south bank of the Savannah River.
Savannah, Georgia was, according to Oglethorpe, “a lush, Edinic paradise, capable of producing almost every thing in wonderful qualities… always serene, pleasant, temperate, never subject to excessive heat or cold nor to sudden changes; the winter is regular and short, and the summers cool’d with refreshing breezes.” This rosy picture seems at odds with the fact that Savannah was built on a subtropical swamp crawling with insects and diseases. By 1752, roughly a third of the settlers had died from typhoid and malaria.
Oglethorpe attempted to enforce unpopular laws that would put the once down-and-out settlers on the right track. Early signs of resistance flared when he tried to ban liquor. Apparently, the settlers had no interest in whatever 18th century twelve-step program Oglethorpe was pushing. To nurture self-reliance, Oglethorpe also banned slavery. This law was doomed to fail, thanks largely to Georgia’s neighbors to the north. South Carolina was home to one of history’s most brutal — and prosperous — slave societies. When the lethargic Georgians realized that they could get rich by forcing others to work for them they demanded that Oglethorpe allow them to participate in the “peculiar institution.” One settler argued:
As indeed the extraordinary Heats here, the extraordinary Expences in maintaining, hiring, and procuring White Servants, the extraordinary Difficulty and Danger there is in clearing the Lands, attending and Manufacturing the Crops… make it indisputably impossible for White Men alone to carry on Planting to any good purpose… The Poor People of Georgia, may as well think of becoming Negroes themselves (from whose Condition at Present they seem not too far removed) as of hoping to be ever able to live without them.
Oglethorpe tried in vain to quell the pro-slavery movement in the colony by banishing its most vocal agitators to South Carolina. Unfortunately, a seed had been planted in the settlers’ minds, and there was little the principled governor could do to stop it from growing.
Along with slavery and alcohol, there was another major point of contention between Oglethorpe and the settlers: property. To create a classless society, Oglethorpe outlawed land ownership and issued 50-acre plots to single families to work as tenants. Like his anti-slavery stance, kibbutz living soon lost its appeal to the settlers once they saw the luxurious plantation lifestyle of their fellow Brits in the Carolinas.
Oglethorpe soon realized that Georgia wouldn’t be the socialist utopia he’d envisioned. Still, he refused to give in to the settlers’ demands for rum, slaves, and land. His stubbornness led the settlers to label him a “perpetual dictator.”
As Oglethorpe’s plans in Georgia unraveled, the Spanish continued to increase their military presence in Florida, an unwelcome reminder to Oglethorpe of the real reason the King had granted him the colony in the first place. When the “War of Jenkins Ear” broke out in 1739, Oglethorpe found himself on the front line of combat. He assembled a militia of Englishmen and Indians and led an ambitious siege on St. Augustine, the Spanish base of operations in Florida. His campaign crumbled after a vicious counterattack by the Spanish wiped out an entire British garrison. Oglethorpe and his demoralized troops were forced to withdraw from Florida. They left behind 122 dead, 16 captured, and an entire artillery arsenal in the hands of the Spanish to use against them in the inevitable retaliation.
Oglethorpe spent the next two years cooped up on St. Simons Island in Georgia with his remaining troops, nervously anticipating a Spanish invasion. British resources were stretched thin across multiple theaters in the war, so the Georgians were on their own. Oglethorpe’s prospects looked grim when the Spanish landed with an army of approximately 5,000 professional soldiers to combat Oglethorpe’s ragtag militia of roughly 900 settlers and Indians.
Desperation inspired genius in Oglethorpe. To cloak his small numbers, he sent his drummers to all corners of the island, creating the illusion of a much larger army hiding in the forests. The trick worked and the Spanish retreated. The British spread exaggerated accounts of a violent clash that left countless enemy corpses strewn across the landscape (the Spanish reported only 50 casualties). The British public ate up their own propaganda and dubbed the encounter “The Battle of Bloody Marsh.” Oglethorpe, the merciful humanitarian, had become an unlikely war hero.
Unfortunately, the victory came too late for Oglethorpe to save his job. The Trustees and settlers were fed up with him and his moralizing. The Trustees pounced on an opportunity to oust Oglethorpe after a disgruntled officer made flimsy allegations of misconduct against him. The savior of Georgia was called back to London for a court martial and replaced as “governor.”
With Oglethorpe gone, the settlers were finally granted permission to own land, liquor, and slaves. Georgia began to look less like an egalitarian commune and more like the decadent plantation society of Charleston. By the time of the American Revolution, slaves made up almost half of Georgia’s population. But no matter how hard the Georgians tried to emulate the aristocratic planters of South Carolina, they could never quite shed their old, seedy ways. A new culture had taken root in Georgia that combined the coarse manners of England’s urban poor with the leisurely pace of life practiced in the Southern Colonies. This new people came to be known as “crackers,” as in “to crack a whip” — their main method of prodding and punishing their livestock and slaves.
Oglethorpe was exonerated at his court martial, but never returned to Georgia. He resigned from the Board of Trustees and tried to put his failed social experiment behind him. He married a wealthy heiress named Elizabeth Wright with whom he partook in a very active social life. The couple hosted fashionable salons and earned the admiration of famous men such as Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke. Oglethorpe, the once-embarrassed nobleman and liberal crusader, whose motto had been Non sibi sed aliis (“Not for self, but for others”), gave in to the self-indulgent joys of high society living.
Meanwhile in Georgia, the crackers became reluctant participants in a bloody rebellion against their British rulers. Though most Georgians remained loyal to the King throughout the revolution, by the war’s end they were no longer his subjects. Instead, they were members of a loose confederation of states bound by the radical principle of republican democracy. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” read the new nation’s founding document . This was not a sentiment shared by most crackers. However, they may have found comfort in the fact that these words were penned by one of the country’s largest slave owners.
Oglethorpe died on June 30, 1785. Just weeks before his death, he met the recently appointed American ambassador to Great Britain, John Adams, at the Court of St. James’s. According to Adams, the 88-year-old former colonial founder was “very polite and complimentary” and “expressed a great esteem and regard for America, much regret at the misunderstanding between the two countries, and was very happy to have lived to see the termination of it.”
In 1814, an American general named Andrew Jackson won a short but bloody war against Oglethorpe’s old friends, the Creeks. As a result, the Creeks were forced to cede over 21 million acres of land in Georgia and Alabama. The crackers spread over the land like boll weevil, some as legal residents and others as illegal squatters. They called the land “the Black Belt” because of its dark, rich soil, which was perfect for planting large quantities of cotton. Over the next half century the name took on a double meaning as over one million blacks were forced to work the land as slaves.
Once the vote was expanded to all white males, the crackers rewarded Jackson by electing him President of the United States. On the day of his inauguration, he showed his gratitude by throwing a giant keg party in the White House where all poor whites were welcome. In Jackson the crackers found their anti-Oglethorpe, a leader with grit, the common touch, and a total willingness to pander to their desires. He shared none of Oglethorpe’s qualms about property, slaves, and alcohol. He didn’t intend to reform the crackers or moralize to them. Instead, he venerated them. They built this country and made it great. It was the arrogant urban elites — the bankers, lawyers, and merchants in New York, New England, and Philadelphia — who needed to be reformed.
From Jackson onward, the crackers remained loyal Democrats until the 1960s when the party embraced civil rights. George Wallace, the former Democratic governor of Alabama and a staunch segregationist, ran as a third party candidate for president in 1968. “I want to tell these national parties this,” he told cracker voters, “they’re going to find out there are a lot of rednecks in this country.” Richard Nixon adopted a toned-down version of Wallace’s message to woo the displaced crackers over to the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan doubled down on Nixon’s “southern strategy” during his 1980 presidential campaign and made the crackers an invaluable part of the GOP’s base. “I believe in states’ rights,” he declared at a county fair outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town made famous by the murders of three civil rights activists in 1964.
Lee Atwater, the former RNC chairman and political adviser to Reagan and George H.W. Bush, revealed his techniques for winning the cracker vote in an anonymous interview from 1981:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
In 2016, the crackers found their voice in a race-baiting, billionaire real estate mogul — the embodiment of everything Oglethorpe would have despised. Donald Trump won them over by railing against modern-day Oglethorpes like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. His campaign slogan, “Make America great again,” held a special meaning to his followers: return America to cracker rule.
Almost three centuries since Oglethorpe’s “worthy poor” made their home on Yamacraw Bluff, their descendants have become the most powerful voting bloc in American history. The “Middling Sort of People” have evolved into the “silent majority,” the “forgotten man and woman,” and the “real Americans.” Just like in the days of Oglethorpe, the crackers continue to be a perpetual roadblock to progress. For that, they’ve earned a new title from their fellow countrymen: “the reason we can’t have nice things.”
