GEORGIA VS. SOUTH CAROLINA
The Battle Over Slavery In the American South
by Fred Haight
Even many thoughtful people will tend to project the post factogeographical divisions of the Civil War, backwards, onto American Colonial history. They then fall victim to their own prejudice: that nothing both important, and good, could have
originated in the American South.
The history of the South is far more complex than most would believe, and is determined by the battle over ideas, not geography. The Anglo-Dutch financier oligarchy moved into the Carolinas to combat the republican tendencies in New
England, because the area south of Virginia was empty—at least of English colonies! James Edward Oglethorpe (1696-1785), the republican founder of Georgia, moved further south, to fight that oligarchy, to outflank them. Georgia was
the first colony to ban slavery, and the last to legalize it!
If Oglethorpe had succeeded, the South might have led the way in overthrowing slavery.
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