The Short Life of Free Georgia

For twenty years in the eighteenth century, Georgia — the last British colony in what became the United States — enjoyed a brief period of free labor, where workers were not enslaved and were paid. The Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia created a “Georgia experiment” of philanthropic enterprise and moral reform for poor white workers, though rebellious settlers were more interested in shaking off the British social system of deference to the upper class. Only a few elites in