Information pertaining to each settler consists, generally, of name, age, occupation, place of origin, names of spouse, children and other family members, dates of embarkation and arrival, place of settlement, and date of death. In addition, some of the more notorious aspects of the settlers' lives are recounted in brief, telltale sketches.
As Sweet focuses on negotiations between James Oglethorpe, the English leader, and Tomochichi, the Lower Creek representative, over issues of trade, land, and military support, she also looks at other individuals and groups who played a role in British-Creek interactions during this period: British traders; missionaries, including John Wesley and George Whitefield; the Salzburgers of Ebenezer; interpreters such as Mary Musgrove; the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees; British colonists from South Carolina; and Spanish and French forces who vied with the Georgia settlers for land, trading rights, and Indian support.
This work is a history book of the original Thirteen Colonies of the United States. They were originally a group of British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America, who fought the American Revolutionary War and formed the United States of America by declaring full independence. Just prior to declaring independence, the Thirteen Colonies in their traditional groupings were: New England (New Hampshire; Massachusetts; Rhode Island; Connecticut); Middle (New York; New Jersey; Pennsylvania; Delaware); Southern (Maryland; Virginia; North Carolina; South Carolina; and Georgia).
This is the first comprehensive history of the German-speaking settlers who emigrated to the Georgia colony from Germany, Alsace, Switzerland, Austria, and adjacent regions. Known collectively as the Georgia Dutch, they were the colony's most enterprising early settlers, and they played a vital role in gaining Britain's toehold in a territory also coveted by Spain and France. The main body of the book is a chronological account of the Georgia Dutch from their earliest arrival in 1733 to their dispersal and absorption into what was, by 1783, an Anglo-American populace. Underscoring the harsh daily life of the common settler, George Fenwick Jones also highlights noteworthy individuals and events. He traces recurrent themes, including tensions between the realities of the settlers' lives and the aspirations and motivations of the colony's trustees and supporters; the web of relations between German- and English-speaking whites, African Americans, and Native Americans; and early signs of the genesis of a distinctly new and American sensibility. Three summary chapters conclude The Georgia Dutch. Merging new material with information from previous chapters, Jones offers the most complete depiction to date of Georgia Dutch culture and society. Included are discussions of religion; health and medicine; education; welfare and charity; industry, agriculture, trade, and commerce; Native-American affairs; slavery; domestic life and customs; the arts; and military and legal concerns. Based on twenty-five years of research with primary documents in Europe and the United States, The Georgia Dutch is a welcome reappraisal of an ethnic group whose role in colonial history has, over time, been unfairly minimized.
