SAVANNAH, Ga. — Michael Thurmond thought he was reading familiar history at the burial site of Georgia’s colonial founder. Then a single sentence on a marble plaque praising the achievements of James Edward Oglethorpe left him stunned and speechless.
In a lengthy tribute to the Englishman who died in 1785, the inscription read: “He was the friend of the oppressed negro.”
Oglethorpe led the expedition that made Georgia the last of Britain’s thirteen American colonies in February 1733. Thurmond, a history buff and the only black member of a Georgian delegation that visited the founder’s grave outside London, knew that Oglethorpe had tried in vain to keep slaves out. the colony. Historians generally agree that he was concerned about the safety and self-sufficiency of white settlers and not the suffering of enslaved Africans.
Could Georgia’s white founder possibly have been an ally of the black population at a time when the British Empire forced thousands of people into slavery?
“It was breathtaking,” Thurmond remembers. “At first I was consumed with disbelief. I didn’t believe it was true.”
Thurmond would struggle with the questions raised by that visit for the next 27 years, and was forced to take a closer look at Oglethorpe. Now he has written a book with a provocative title: “James Oglethorpe, Father Of Georgia – A Founder’s Journey From Slave Trader to Abolitionist.”
Thurmond’s book, published this month by the University of Georgia Press, makes the case that Oglethorpe evolved to revile slavery and, unlike most white Europeans of his day, saw humanity in enslaved Africans. And although Oglethorpe’s efforts to outlaw slavery in Georgia ultimately failed, Thurmond claims he left a lasting—and largely uncredited—legacy by influencing early English abolitionists.
“He puts a spotlight on the part of Oglethorpe’s life that most people thought was just peripheral,” said Stan Deaton, senior historian at the Georgia Historical Society. ‘I think he has thought deeply about this. And let’s face it, there haven’t been many African Americans who have written about colonial Georgia, especially Oglethorpe.”
Although this is Thurmond’s third book on Georgia history, he is not an academic. The son of a sharecropper and great-grandson of a Georgia slave, Thurmond became a lawyer and served in state and local government for decades. Thurmond’s 1998 election as state labor commissioner made him the first black candidate to win statewide office in Georgia without first being appointed. He is now the CEO-elect of DeKalb County, which includes parts of Atlanta.
His book details Oglethorpe’s origins as a wealthy Englishman who held a seat in parliament and was deputy governor of the slave-trading Royal African Company before leaving for America. Thurmond argues that seeing the brutality of slavery firsthand changed Oglethorpe, who returned to England and shared his views with activists who would become Britain’s first abolitionists.
“What I tried to do is follow the arc of his life, his evolution and development, and weigh all his achievements, failures and shortcomings,” Thurmond said. “Once you do that, you discover he had a uniquely important life. He helped revive the movement that ultimately destroyed slavery.”
In its early years, Georgia stood alone as Britain’s only American colony in which slavery was illegal. The ban came as the population of enslaved Africans in colonial America approached 150,000. Black prisoners were sold in New York and Boston, and in South Carolina there were already more white settlers.
Historians generally agree that Oglethorpe and his fellow trustees of Georgia did not ban slavery because it was cruel to black people. They saw slaves as a security risk because Georgia was on the doorstep of Spanish Florida, which wanted to free escaped slaves and use them to help fight the British. They also feared that slave labor would breed laziness among the Georgian settlers, who were expected to maintain their own modest farms.
It did not take long. The slave ban was widely ignored when Oglethorpe left Georgia for good in 1743, and its enforcement waned in his absence. By the time American colonists declared independence in 1776, slavery had been legal in Georgia for 25 years. When the Civil War began nearly a century later, Georgia’s enslaved population was more than 462,000, more than any U.S. state except Virginia.
“At best you could say Oglethorpe was naive,” says Gerald Horne, professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Houston and author of the book “The Counter-Revolution of 1776.” “Almost inevitably, slavery began to spread in Georgia, like kudzu in the summer.”
Like other historians, Horne is highly skeptical that Oglethorpe is a forefather of the abolitionist movement. He says the Georgia colony ultimately protected slavery in its sister colonies by serving as a “white equivalent of the Berlin Wall” between South Carolina and Spanish Florida.
Oglethorpe used slave labor to help build houses, streets, and public squares in Savannah, the colony’s first city. Escaped slaves captured in Oglethorpe’s Georgia were returned to slave owners. Some colonists, angry about the slave ban, made unproven accusations that Oglethorpe had allowed slaves to work a plantation in South Carolina.
Thurmond’s book openly embraces such evidence that Oglethorpe’s history of slavery was at times contradictory and unflattering. That makes his case for Oglethorpe’s evolution even stronger, says James F. Brooks, a history professor at the University of Georgia, who wrote the book’s foreword.
“He has engaged in historiography in a way that is clearly the equivalent of a professional historian,” Brooks said. “This is good stuff. He has read everything and thought about it. I don’t see any weakness in it.”
Thurmond’s evidence includes a letter Oglethorpe wrote in 1739 arguing that opening Georgia to slavery would “cause the misery of thousands in Africa.” Thurmond describes how Oglethorpe helped two formerly enslaved black men—Ayuba Suleiman Diallo and Olaudah Equiano—whose journeys to England helped stoke anti-slavery sentiment among white Europeans.
Oglethorpe befriended white activists who became key figures in the English abolitionist movement. In a 1776 letter to Granville Sharp, a lawyer who fought to help former slaves retain their freedom, Oglethorpe exclaimed that “Africa had produced a race of heroes” in its kings and military leaders. He also spent time with author Hannah More, whose writings called for the abolition of slavery.
In 1787, two years after Oglethorpe’s death, Sharp and More were among the founders of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Thurmond argues that Oglethorpe deserves credit for inspiring the nascent movement.
“He founded slave-free Georgia in 1733 and a hundred years later England abolished slavery,” followed by the U.S. in 1865, Thurmond said. “He was a man way past his time.”