Oglethorpe's Experiment, The Colony That Was Not Supposed to Have Slaves

February twelve, seventeen thirty-three. James Edward Oglethorpe stood on a bluff above the Savannah River with more than a hundred colonists fresh off the ship Ann and began laying out a city in a way that had never been tried. The streets would be arranged around open squares, trust lots, tything lots, garden lots, a geometry meant to prevent the concentration of wealth and the growth of great estates. Georgia was to be unlike South Carolina. It was chartered as a buffer colony and as something stranger: a place where England's poor could be redeemed through labor, where debtors and the unfortunate could earn their way to a new life.

For a time, Georgia was the only British colony in North America where slavery was formally prohibited. Oglethorpe himself argued against it, believing slavery corrupted the moral character of the colony and undermined the small-farmer ideal. The Trustees held the ban until seventeen fifty. Then the planters won. They had been watching the rice fortunes accumulating just across the border in South Carolina. They wanted that. Within a generation Georgia had become one of the largest slaveholding colonies in the continent, and Oglethorpe's squares were surrounded by a merchant class growing rich on enslaved labor.

The colony's founding paradox never fully resolved. Georgia was imagined as a refuge and became an engine of bondage. But the geometry of those squares, still intact in Savannah, twenty-two of the original twenty-four, outlasted every contradiction, a grid drawn for equality that survived the inequality that swallowed it whole.