hest of the trustees to relax. First the
exclusion of rum was repealed, then the introduction of slaves on lease
was winked at, then in 1749 and 1750 the overt importation of slaves was
authorized and all restrictions on land tenure were canceled. Finally the
stoppage of the parliamentary subvention in 1751 forced the trustees in the
following year to resign their charter.

Slaveholders had already crossed the Savannah River in appreciable
numbers to erect plantations on favorable tracts. The lapse of a few
more transition years brought Georgia to the status on the one hand of a
self-governing royal province and on the other of a plantation community
prospering, modestly for the time being, in the production of rice and
indigo. Her peculiarities under the trustee regime were gone but not
forgotten. The rigidity of paternalism, well meant though it had been, was
a lesson against future submission to outward control in any form; and
their failure as a peasantry in competition with planters across the river
persuaded the Georgians and their neighbors that slave labor was essential
for prosperity.

It is curious, by the way, that the tender-hearted, philanthropic
Oglethorpe at the very time of his founding Georgia was the manager of the
great slave-trading corporation, the Royal African Company. The conflict of
the two functions cannot be relieved except by one of the greatest of all
reconciling considerations, the spirit of the time. Whatever else the
radicals of that period might wish to reform or abolish, the slave trade
was held either as a matter of course or as a positive benefit to the
people who constituted its merchandise.

The narrow limits of the rice and indigo regime in the two colonies
made the plantation system the more dominant in its own area. Detailed
statistics are lacking until the first federal census, when indigo was
rapidly giving place to sea-island cotton; but the requirements of the new
staple differed so little from those of the old that the plantations near
the end of the century were without doubt on much the same scale as before
the Revolution. In the four South Carolina parishes of St. Andrew's, St.
John's Colleton, St. Paul's and St. Stephen's the census-takers of 1790
found 393 slaveholders with an average of 33.7 slaves each, as compared
with a total of 28 non-slaveholding families. In these and seven more
parishes, comprising together the rural portion of the area known
politically as th