The New Georgia Encyclopedia is supported by funding from A More Perfect Union, a special initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
James Oglethorpe, along with a twenty-one-member Board of Trustees, founded the colony of Georgia in 1733 and directed its development for nearly a decade. Although the board appointed Anglican clergy to the new colony, Oglethorpe welcomed settlers of a variety of religious persuasions.
Courtesy of Oglethorpe University
Christ Church of Savannah, the first Anglican church to be established in the Georgia colony, was founded by Henry Herbert in 1733. The current church building, the third to be constructed on the site since 1744, was completed in 1838.
Image from Roman Eugeniusz
John Wesley, appointed an Anglican rector for the Georgia colony in 1735, served at Christ Church in Savannah. Influenced by his interactions with Moravians during his time in Georgia, Wesley founded Methodism after his return to England in 1737.
Photograph from Wellcome Trust, Wikimedia
An engraving of Anglican minister George Whitefield, created in 1774, depicts him preaching at a church in New York. A popular figure of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening in America, Whitefield founded the Bethesda orphanage near Savannah in 1740.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Charles Bird King's portrait of William McIntosh (ca. 1825). In 1825 McIntosh negotiated and signed the Treaty of Indian Springs, signing away all Creek lands in Georgia and thereby defying most of the reforms that he had encouraged and the laws that he had helped write.
Image from Archives and Rare Books Library, University of Cincinnati Libraries, McKenney and Hall: History of the Indian Tribes Collection.
As a principal mediator between the native Creek (Muscogee) and English settlers during the first years of Georgia's settlement, Tomochichi (left) contributed to the establishment of peaceful relations between the two groups. His nephew, Toonahowi, is seated on the right in this engraving, circa 1734-35, by John Faber Jr.
Rare daguerreotype of an enslaved woman in Watkinsville, photographed in 1853. A placard with the date "1853," which reads correctly for the camera, is visible. The use of a book as a prop is unusual for an image of an enslaved person.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
clr210-92.
Enslaved women played an integral part in Georgia's colonial and antebellum history. Scholars are beginning to pay more attention to issues of gender in their study of slavery and are finding that enslaved women faced additional burdens and even more challenges than did some enslaved men.
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Robert E. Williams Photographic Collection.
Antebellum planters kept meticulous records of the people they enslaved, identifying several traditionally female occupations, including washerwomen.
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Robert E. Williams Photographic Collection.
Enslavers clothed both male and female enslaved children in smocks and assigned them such duties as carrying water to the fields. As the children neared the age of ten, slaveholders began making distinctions between the genders.
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Robert E. Williams Photographic Collection.
The daughter of an African American woman and her white enslaver, Ellen looked white and was able to escape slavery by disguising herself as a southern slaveholder.
From The Underground Rail Road, by W. Still
An English actress, Kemble married Pierce Mease Butler and was upset to learn of the family's slave labor operations. She eventually published an account of her impressions of slavery, after divorcing Butler and losing custody of their two children.
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Georgia Photo File.
