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Reviews of Books
Land and Allegiance in Revolutionary Georgia. By
LESLIE HALL.
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Pp. xvi, 231. $45.00.)
Reviewed by Jeffrey Robert Young, Georgia Southern University
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Scholars such as Brendan McConville and Rachel Klein have emphasized the connection between ideology and property interests in showing eighteenth-century property owners' willingness to adopt radical political positions to protect their estates. By contrast, Leslie Hall argues that property owners in revolutionary Georgia routinely set ideology aside in favor of "pragmatic considerations" (p. xii) about land. With some residents switching sides as many as seven times during the war, adherence to abstract political ideals gave way before the overarching desire to protect property from encroachment and attack. |
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Hall traces the role played by poor settlers in Georgia from the colony's establishment in 1733. Whereas historians such as Mark Stewart have recently characterized the Trustees' reign in Georgia as an unremitting failure, Hall points to the more positive assessment by Johann Martin Boltzius, the leader of the Salzburgers who settled in New Ebenezer. Citing Boltzius's claim that the "industrious poor could prosper" because even servants "can get free land everywhere" (p. 5), Hall depicts colonial Georgia as an "unusually mobile" society in which the "ready availability of land allowed most men to advance into political office, if they so desired" (p. 9). When the Stamp Act threatened the very large portion of the colonial population who lacked ready access to specie, Georgia residents reluctantly and haltingly followed their counterparts in other colonies down the decade-long path toward revolution against England. During this process, contends Hall, "political ideology might have concerned them, but the retention of their land took precedence over the winds of political change" (p. 30). |
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Such self-interest partially shaped Georgia's initial experiment with rebel government. At first, lingering respect for the able royal governor James Wright led many residents to stake out a "temperate" (p. 31) stance in the escalating conflict. The mounting fear that the British military would emancipate slaves and employ them to subdue the white colonial population pushed many Georgians to embrace tactics of radical resistance. Yet Hall takes pains to illustrate that, even as the Revolution unfolded, a number of prominent Georgians sought to maximize their financial advantage—a course that left their exact political allegiances difficult to determine. By 1777, the state government of Georgia was attempting to shore up its position by appealing to the democratic sensibilities of poorer settlers. As elite loyalists complained that "everywhere the scum rose to the top" (p. 54), the new state constitution created a broadly representative unicameral assembly and extended the franchise to all white men except the indigent. In its quest for popular support, the state government seemed poised to confiscate and to redistribute land from wealthy tories. On this point, however, concern for the property rights of widows, children, and absentee landowners led the assembly to abandon the scheme. "The land-hungry legislators," writes Hall, "acknowledged the necessity of due process, if only at the last minute" (p. 58). |
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