INTRODUCTION

Volumes XXIX, XXX, and XXXI consist of the Letter Books of the Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia in America. These letters, mainly to officials and people in Georgia, make clear that the Trustees first and foremost wanted to know everything that happened in the colony. They asked about people (individually and collectively), land (how much had been surveyed, granted, cultivated, and abandoned), officials (loyalty to the Trustees was the main criteria for approval or promotion), silk worms and production, the Trustees’ Garden at Savannah, agriculture, colony accounts, descriptions of conditions in Georgia, and anything else they knew was happening in Georgia.

Originally the Trustees asked James Oglethorpe to give them the information they wanted. But they soon found that Oglethrope was too busy and not inclined to write in the detail the Trustees desired. When he left for England in May of 1734, Thomas Causton was left in charge and the Trustees looked to him for frequent letters. They were again disappointed, and Causton was frequently admonished for not writing more often. Finally in 1737, William Stephens was appointed “Secretary for the Affairs of the Trust within the Province of Georgia.” He began to keep a journal for the Trustees on October 20, 1737, the day he arrived in Charles Town on his way to Georgia. The Trustees soon found that Stephens was the answer to their prayers so far as a correspondent was concerned. Harman Verelst wrote Stephens on Aug. 4, 1738 (p. 293 below). “The particular and intelligent manner of your Journals, fully answer the Trustees Expectations, and prove very satisfactory to them.”

The Trustees’ correspondence makes it clear that they wanted very much to impose their image of what Georgia should be upon the colony, especially by urging agriculture and silk production on the colonists as their best way to make a living. Money, or rather the lack of it, was a recurrent problem of the Trustees made clear in their letters urging economy in Georgia. The special place of the Salzburgers in the Trustees eyes is also clear. The Trustees frequently blamed Oglethorpe’s military activities for many of their financial problems and repeatedly told him that they could not pay for defense affairs. Instead they urged the British Government to defend Georgia more fully.

We know a great deal more about Trustee Georgia because of the Trustees’ insistence that they be told everything and because of Stephens’ attempts to satisfy them. We should thank the Trustees for their curiosity.

The letters of these volumes were written by Benjamin Martyn, the Secretary to the Trustees, and Harman Verelst, Accountant to the Trustees, apparently the only office force the Trustees ever had. Initially, general matters were handled by Martyn and fiscal ones by Verelst. However Verelst came to handle more and more--almost all Trustee business at times. It is not known if Martyn was out of the office during these periods, or busy otherwise.

Martyn wrote clearer and better composed letters. His knowledge of other languages besides English was better than Verelst’s, and his spelling--not nearly so standardized in the eighteenth century as in the twentieth--was much better and easier to understand. Verelst was frequently concerned with the minutia of accounting and how officials in Georgia did not do what they had been instructed to do. Thomas Causton, as the early record keeper and storekeeper in Georgia, must have been frustrated frequently by Verelst’s letters.

Little is known about Martyn and Verelst. There is a brief sketch of Martyn in the Dictionary of National Biography, XII, 1199-1200. Trevor R. Reese wrote “Benjamin Martyn, Secretary to the Trustees of Georgia,” Ga. Hist. Quarterly, XXXVIII, 142-147, and “Harman Verelst, Accountant to the Trustees,” ibid., XXXIX, 348-352.

Vol. XXIX (October 1732 to August 1738) with its many questions about happenings and conditions in Georgia make it clear that the Trustees long-range government in London was hardly adequate for the new colony. In fact the ignorance and confusion in London makes one wonder how Georgia succeeded and excuses many of the failures in the colony. When Oglethorpe was absent from the colony, there were few people there who would make the needed decisions without consulting the Trustees in London. The letters from Georgia (Vols. XX and XXI of this series) tell what was happening in the colony. A comparison of these volumes with this one gives a good picture of what the Trustees wanted and what was actually happening--often vastly different.

Editorial Guidelines

The volume divisions created by Allen D. Candler and Lucian Lamar Knight, the original compilers of this series, have been retained. This will facilitate references in works already published which used these volumes in manuscript.

Original spellings are retained unless the meaning is not clear. (Note. The Old English thorn “th” was usually written and printed as “y” in the early eighteenth century. This has been kept throughout this text. Thus “ye” is “the,” “yt” is “that,” and “ym” is “them.”) All raised letters have been lowered, abbreviations that are not clear have been expanded, and slips of the pen have been corrected silently. A single word may be explained in brackets immediately after its appearance in the text. More lengthy explanations will be given in footnotes. Punctuation, often absent in eighteenth century manuscripts, has been supplied for the sake of clarity, though many sentences are long by modern standards. No attempt at uniform spelling, even of proper names, has been attempted; rather the original text has been followed. For proper names, a single most common spelling has been used in the index.

In the manuscript there is no consistency in the system of money notation. Thus £.1.7.10 might be written that way, 5.1:7:10, or 1..7..10. Colons, fairly frequent, have been left as written, but the .. has been changed to a single period. When the pound sign is given after the figure it is often written as a lower case 1 with a line through it (1). These have been changed to £ for the sake of clarity.

Many, probably a majority, of the enclosures referred to in these letters are not filed with the letters. Some of them have been located, but many have not.

When letters, petitions, etc. from Georgia are acknowledged in the Trustee letters, an effort has been made to locate these. Most of them are in their correct chronological place in the letters from Georgia published in Vols. XX-XXVI of this series, and no editorial notation is made. If the letters have been located elsewhere or not located, this fact is noted in the footnotes.

Each document is given a short introduction which consists of the name of the writer and recipient, date written, place written, Public Record Office location, topic or topics treated, and method of transmission (vessel, captain, etc.) where given.