JAMES EDWARD OGLETHORPE

1696-1785

A Lecture given on 5th October 1996 in the Chapel of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in the presence of the Governor of Georgia, the Hon. Zell Miller, and the members of the Oglethorpe Tercentenary Commission, by the President of Corpus Christi College, Sir Keith Thomas PBA

May I welcome all our visitors to James Oglethorpe's College? At least one of you is now sitting on the very seat where he once sat. This Chapel dates from the foundation of the College in 1517 and the great brass lectern from which I am speaking was given us by the first President of Corpus, who died in 1537. So Oglethorpe would have heard lessons read from it. The Chapel was lengthened in 1676 and that is when the floor was paved, the roof painted and the stalls and panelling constructed. The altar painting came just after the end of the eighteenth century and the East window is modern. But essentially this is the chapel which Oglethorpe would have known.

We are here to celebrate his Oglethorpe's three-hundredth birthday, a little prematurely, for he was born on 22 December. I would like to set the scene for our celebrations by reminding you of what he did and what sort of person he was. More particularly, I would like to consider how far his achievement was shaped by what he learned at this College.

Oglethorpe was a remarkable man who had an exceptionally varied and colourful life. Dr Samuel Johnson remarked: `I know no man whose Life would be more interesting. If I were furnished with materials, I should be very glad to write it.' To that end, his friend, James Boswell, interviewed Oglethorpe on a number of occasions and his notes of those interviews survive at Yale. I shall be drawing on them and also on the work of modern American scholars, particularly scholars from Georgia.[Footnote 1]

James Edward Oglethorpe came from a very old Yorkshire family. His father, Sir Theophilus Oglethorpe, had been brigadier-general to King James II. He was well-rewarded and acquired the estate of Westbrook in Godalming, Surrey. Unfortunately for Sir Theophilus, the king to whom he had tied his fortunes was thrown out in the 1688 Revolution. For a time Sir Theophilus became a Jacobite and joined his old master in exile, but when James II insisted that his supporters should be Catholics, he returned home, took the oath of Allegiance to William III and became MP for his local borough of Haslemere. This became a family Parliamentary seat which James Oglethorpe himself would hold for thirty-two years. Today, under the title of Surrey, South West, it is held by Mrs Virginia Bottomley.

Sir Theophilus died in 1702, leaving Lady Oglethorpe to bring up seven children, of whom James, then aged six, was the youngest. She was an Irishwoman from Tipperary, who had been laundress to King Charles II, a well-paid office, which did not, I think, involve her in doing very much washing; and she was an indefatigable Jacobite plotter. She sent all her daughters to the exiled Stuart court in France; three of them married French aristocrats and the fourth became a Jacobite countess. Of James's two surviving elder brothers, one became Aide-de-Camp to the Duke of Marlborough and was killed in the wars of Queen Anne; the other secured a Jacobite peerage and went into exile. That left James heir to the family estate in Godalming and the only surviving member of the family who was, at least outwardly, loyal to the Hanoverians.

James grew up with every advantage. He was baptised by the Archbishop of Canterbury, went to Eton and, before leaving school, was commissioned in the Foot Guards. He seemed set for a military career. But his mother wanted him first to go to Oxford. In the early sixteenth century one of his ancestors had been President of Magdalen and Vice-Chancellor; and, more recently, his elder brother, Lewis, the one who was killed in the wars, had come up to Corpus in 1698 and spent four years here.

Why did the Oglethorpe family choose Corpus? The answer is simple. They were Jacobites and Corpus, under Thomas Turner, President 1688-1714, was the most Jacobite College in the University. Turner (whose memorial you can see on the south wall) was a key figure in the history of Corpus. He raised the money for repanelling the Hall, built the Fellows Building and paid for it himself, gave many books to the Library, and added the plinth to the Sundial in the front quad. He was the brother of Francis Turner, the deprived bishop of Ely, another Jacobite and one of the seven bishops whose portrait hangs on the stairs leading up to the Senior Common Room. So Corpus was the obvious College for a boy from a Jacobite family.

In 1714, when James was seventeen, Lady Oglethorpe wrote to a Mr Perrott at Oxford, asking whether Corpus would accept him. Unfortunately, she didn't get a reply to her letter. This wasn't because admissions tutors were less efficient in those days, but because, as far as I can see, Mr Perrott was not at Corpus but at St John's and probably didn't get the letter. So she persuaded the Jacobite bishop, George Hickes, to write again, this time to President Turner, to recommend her son as `a very ingenious, understanding and well-bred youth'. This did the trick and James arrived here in 1714. In the opinion of another Jacobite, the antiquarian, Thomas Hearne, `he could not have pick'd out a better [college] in the whole University.'

Oglethorpe came to Corpus as a gentleman commoner. This was a privileged position reserved for children of the rich. Gentleman commoners paid high fees and were excused from many of the ordinary College rules. They lived in style. Twenty years later the College put up a special Gentleman Commoners building in which to house them; today it contains the Senior Common Room and some of the more comfort-loving Fellows. Gentleman-commoners did not work for the BA degree and some of them did not work for anything. But if they kept their names on the books for long enough they were given an Honorary MA, which is what Oglethorpe took in 1731. (It is sometimes suggested that he was given the MA by way of recognition for his philanthropy, but the truth is that he took it in a routine way.)

Oglethorpe didn't stay at Corpus very long. He was admitted in July 1714 and resided here on and off until the end of March 1716, but his Oxford career was interrupted by the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, when he disappeared for three months, doing we don't know what. He returned after the rising had been suppressed, but stayed for only one month more and then went abroad to a military academy in Paris. After that, he joined the army of the Holy Roman Emperor, serving as an Aide-de-Camp to Prince Eugene of Savoy, and seeing quite a lot of action in campaigns against the Turks, notably at the siege of Belgrade in 1717. He also paid his respects to James Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, then holding court at Urbino.

In 1719 he returned to England, re-entered his name on the books at Corpus and kept it there until 1727; though there is no evidence that he spent any more time in Oxford. But he stayed in touch with his old College and in 1772 would present us with a beautifully-illustrated early sixteenth-century French paraphrase of the Bible, which we shall show you in the Library. He thus resided at Corpus for only thirteen months in all, the equivalent in modern times of two academic years; and he had spent his early life oscillating between an exciting life as a soldier on the Continent and a more studious existence in Oxford. Yet though his time here was relatively brief, it would, as we shall see, be wrong to infer that Oxford was a superficial experience for him or that his education was irrelevant to his later career.

Oglethorpe entered Parliament in 1722 and became an active Tory MP. Tall, thin and with a shrill voice which could be heard in the lobby of the House when he was speaking, he was a prominent thorn in the flesh of Walpole's government. What turned him into a national figure was his emergence as a social reformer. In 1728 he published a pamphlet entitled The Sailors Advocate, which was an eloquent attack on the practice of forcibly recruiting men for the Royal Navy by means of the press gang. It also drew attention to the hardships which stemmed from the practice of paying sailors' wages in arrears and then by means of promissory notes which could only be redeemed at the London Pay Office. Oglethorpe's intervention led to an act of parliament which was the first attempt to put the payment of naval wages on to a modern footing. The press gang was less easily disposed of and Oglethorpe reissued his pamphlet fifty years later. The rights of sailors were a lifelong concern of his.

Next he became England's first serious prison reformer. His interest in this issue was aroused by the death in gaol [English spelling of "jail"] in 1728 of his friend Robert Castell, a writer who had been imprisoned for debt in the Fleet and had there been deliberately exposed to the smallpox by a sadistic and avaricious gaoler. Oglethorpe persuaded the House of Commons to launch a series of inquiries into conditions in the Fleet, the Marshalsea and the King's Bench prisons for debtors. He chaired the committees, interrogated prisoners and gaolers and dealt with corrupt attempts to tamper with the witnesses. He even enrolled at Gray's Inn to improve his knowledge of the law. The outcome was three memorable reports which exposed horrific conditions of overcrowding, brutality and extortion, all stemming from the practice of running gaols as private profit-making concerns. Our present Home Secretary would do well to read them.

Out of Oglethorpe's preoccupation for the plight of debtors, particularly what you might call well-to-do debtors, stemmed the great project to settle Georgia. As it turned out, very few of the first settlers in Georgia were debtors, but Oglethorpe's original idea was that it should be a charitable colony, a refuge for the unfortunate, a new country where people who had come down in the world could settle in a physical environment so favourable that even the unskilled could make a living. Persecuted Protestants from Europe would also be invited. For strategic reasons, this colony was to be located south of the Savannah river, where it would constitute a buffer state to protect the Carolinas from attack by the Spaniards, who were based in Florida, and the French, in Louisiana.

The idea of such a colony was not new in itself, but previous schemes had come to nothing. This time the venture was set in motion by the Georgia Trustees, a group of philanthropists who raised the money from private and public sources and in 1732 secured a royal charter entitling them to administer the province for twenty-one years, after which it would revert to the Crown.

Oglethorpe was only one of the original twenty-one Trustees, but he is fully entitled to be regarded as the founder of Georgia because, without his dynamism, his energy and his moral commitment, the colony might never have come into existence and certainly would not have survived. He handled the publicity and did a great deal to raise the money. He also did most to formulate the very distinctive conception of the colony as a semi-utopian settlement, where there would be religious toleration, no black slavery, no rum or spirits, and an agrarian law limiting the size of the landholdings.

Above all, he was the only Trustee who actually went there. Still unmarried and without ties, for his mother had died in June 1732, he amazed his colleagues by announcing that he would accompany the first lot of colonists on their voyage out. In November 1732 they set sail from Gravesend. Once on board, Oglethorpe, without any formal authority, assumed the leadership and, on arrival, took command of everything: allocating land, erecting forts, building roads and bridges, laying out the town of Savannah, arbitrating disputes, training the colonists in arms, establishing good relations with the Indians, maintaining links with South Carolina, caring for the sick, encouraging the faint-hearted and in every way acting as a paternal, if authoritarian, governor.

He had three successive stays in the new colony: the first between 1733 and 1734 to establish it and to bring back some of the native Americans, whom he paraded around fashionable London; the second in 1736, when he was accompanied by the Methodists, John and Charles Wesley, who wished to preach to the heathen: a venture which turned out unfortunately, as neither of the Wesleys much liked being used by Oglethorpe as a private secretary to write his endless correspondence and each in turn became in different ways disastrously involved with local women. Oglethorpe's third visit, between 1738 and 1743, was the longest; and was almost entirely given over to military action against the Spaniards.

Before he left on this last trip, Oglethorpe had a long battle to persuade the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, to give him the necessary resources to defend Georgia against the Spaniards, who were increasingly incensed by Oglethorpe's encroachment on their territory in Florida. Oglethorpe was at his bluntest in his dealings with Walpole, assuring him that, if he did not give his support, Spain would occupy Georgia, leaving France to attack the Carolinas and Virginia. The Prime Minister said that he was not used to having such things said to him. Oglethorpe replied, `Yes, he was, when he was plain Mr Walpole, but now he was Sir Robert and Chief Minister, he was surrounded by sycophants and flatterers', who would not tell him the truth. If Walpole wouldn't support him, he would give up the project, despite having twice visited the colony, ventured his life and health and spent £3000 of his own money. Georgia, he continued, `was a national affair and he did not pretend to be Don Quixote for it' and continue without public support. Was the Prime Minister prepared to abandon 3,000 souls in Georgia `to be destroyed by the Spaniard'? Needless, to say, Walpole capitulated.

By this time, however, the Georgia Trustees had become worried by Oglethorpe's impetuous and authoritarian style. He had failed to keep them fully in touch with what was happening in Georgia and he had aroused a lot of local opposition. Before he left in 1738, the Trustees reduced his authority, telling him that henceforth `he must look after the military affairs and the Trustees would look after the civil.' In 1740 Oglethorpe's attempt to take the Spanish base of San Agustín was a failure, but he made up for it two years later by repelling an attempted Spanish invasion, which, as he pointed out afterwards, would, if successful, have meant the loss not just of Georgia, but of the two Carolinas as well. Having secured the colony, but despairing of government aid and faced by a torrent of calumny and accusation, Oglethorpe left Georgia for the last time in July 1743. He continued to take some interest in the affairs of the Georgia Trustees. But the colony was rapidly departing from its original utopian character and in 1752, in accordance with the terms of its original charter, it reverted to the Crown.

Just when Oglethorpe's influence was waning in Georgia, he also lost his political credibility in England. The second Jacobite Rising broke out in 1745 and Oglethorpe, now a Major-General, was put in charge of troops to repel the invading Scots. But with all his family open Jacobites, there were bound to be suspicions about his loyalty; and these seemed to be confirmed when his half-hearted pursuit allowed Bonnie Prince Charlie's retreating army to escape near Penrith. Court-martialled afterwards, Oglethorpe was acquitted, but his reputation had suffered irreparably. Although promoted to Lieutenant-General in 1747 and full General in 1765, he was never again allowed to serve on the active list. In the early 1750s he supported a Jacobite newspaper, The True Briton, and, many years later, when a very old man, he was in conversation with Dr Johnson, who rather uncharacteristically remarked that `what we did at the Revolution [of 1688] was necessary'. Oglethorpe replied: `Um, my father did not think it necessary.' So perhaps he always was a Jacobite at heart. This would, I fear, not have worried his old College: in 1754 there was still a portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie hanging over the fireplace in the Corpus B.A.s' Common Room.

Oglethorpe's later years were frustratingly inactive. He had made a late marriage to an heiress, so he was able to add her country seat at Cranham Hall in Essex to his at Westbrook in Godalming. But in 1752 he lost his parliamentary seat at Haslemere; and after that he conspicuously suffered from having nothing to do. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, being allegedly `well versed in Natural History, mathematics and all branches of polite literature' (not bad after only two years at Corpus), but he was expelled for not paying his subscription. He helped to found the British Museum in 1753, but he was not made a Trustee.

When the Seven Years War broke out in 1756, the government predictably refused to give him any military command. Oglethorpe then took one of the more extraordinary steps of his career by going off incognito to join the forces of Britain's ally, Frederick the Great of Prussia. He was able to do this because of his acquaintance with the Jacobite soldier of fortune, James Keith, whom he had met as a young man at the Paris academy and who had ended up a Field-Marshal in the Prussian army. Oglethorpe served under various false names and was apparently known to Frederick the Great as `Jacques Rosbif'. At the battle of Hochkirch in 1758, it was into Oglethorpe's arms that Field-Marshal Keith fell, when shot dead off his horse.

`Jacques Rosbif' returned to England in 1761. Still trying to get back into politics, Oglethorpe vainly courted the Prime Minister, the Earl of Bute, and wrote obsequious letters to William Pitt. But to no avail. In 1768 he made a last and unsuccessful attempt to regain his Parliamentary seat at Haslemere. He kept up some of his humanitarian interests and, like other frustrated people in retirement, spent a good deal of time writing letters to the newspapers.

When the American War of Independence broke out, he expressed strong sympathy with the colonists and supported a peace plan which would have kept the Americans in the Empire but given them full rights as Englishmen. In 1785 he would take great pleasure in calling to pay his respects to John Adams, the first minister from the United States to the Court of St James.

Frustrated he may have been, but in many ways Oglethorpe's declining years show him at his most attractive: a lively and knowledgeable, if distinctly opinionated conversationalist. He had been a patron of Samuel Johnson since 1738, when he subscribed to his poem on London; and in 1768 he startled the young James Boswell by calling unannounced to say how much he admired his recently-published Account of Corsica: `My name, Sir, is Oglethorpe, and I wish to be acquainted with you.' Since Oglethorpe was now aged 70 and the senior general in the British army, this was quite a day for the 28-year old Boswell. Oglethorpe regularly had Boswell, Johnson and the writer Oliver Goldsmith, to dinner, producing Sicilian wine or Tokay sent him by a friend in Germany. On one occasion Goldsmith sang them Tony Lumpkin's song `Three Jolly Pigeons' from his new play She Stoops to Conquer. In return Oglethorpe harangued the author of The Deserted Village on the evils of enclosure and depopulation. Perhaps it was to Oglethorpe that Goldsmith owed the extraordinary passage in that poem in which he portrays Georgia as a terrifying land, scorched by a blazing sun and infested by bats, scorpions, rattlesnakes and even tigers. In this company Oglethorpe met David Garrick, the actor, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, who later painted his portrait. Boswell greatly admired Oglethorpe's `vivacity of mind': `In his society I never failed to enjoy learned and animated conversation.'

In the 1780s the aged General was a familiar figure on the London literary scene, a great fount of anecdotage about the past, and a big hit with the ladies, who liked the old-world gallantry of someone who had been an ensign in the reign of Queen Anne. In his house at Westbrook he lived surrounded by furniture unchanged since the days of Charles II. Edmund Burke, with whom Oglethorpe frequently talked politics, thought him the most extraordinary man, `for that he founded the province of Georgia; had absolutely called it into existence, and had lived to see it severed from the empire which created it, and become an independent state'.

By the time he died in 1785 at the age of 88, Oglethorpe had grown to enjoy the veneration which inevitably comes to any relic of the past who is fortunate enough to retain his faculties. He was exceptionally spry in his old age, perhaps because it was his habit as soon as he got out of bed in the morning to throw himself on the floor and exercise his limbs for some time. Horace Walpole described him as `alert, upright, [with his] eyes, ears, and memory fresh.' In the Senior Common Room you can see a copy of Samuel Ireland's print of him at the sale of Johnson's library. He has no teeth, but at 88 he is ostentatiously reading a book without glasses. He had a great zest for life; and only a month before he died he wrote excitedly to Boswell to say that he had just received two tickets for the ascent by Lunardi, the Italian balloonist.

Oglethorpe had always been physically resilient. When he was a little boy, his mother, presumably following John Locke's well-known advice on the subject, had holes cut in his shoes so that they would let the water in and toughen him up. It seems to have worked, for he grew up to be a man of rude health, phenomenal energy and the capacity to endure great physical hardship. At Savannah he continued to sleep in a tent when the other settlers had houses.

He was hyperactive and hot-tempered. His brother had been a duellist and his father had killed a man in a brawl. Oglethorpe did the same in April 1722, when, `overcome with wine', he killed a linkman at 6 o'clock in the morning in `a night-house of evil repute'. Somehow he got away with this. A month earlier, he had drawn his sword and wounded two of his electoral opponents in a scuffle on the streets of Haslemere. When he was serving with Prince Eugene, a Prince of Württemberg deliberately flipped some wine from his glass into Oglethorpe's face, to which Oglethorpe with a disarming smile replied: `That's a good joke, but we do it much better in England' and flung the entire contents of his glass into the Prince's face. On the first voyage out to Georgia, when someone created a disturbance, Oglethorpe, we are told,`came behind him and gave him a good kick in the arse'.

This peppery fellow was a strong believer in aristocratic honour. `An untarnished reputation is dearer to every honest man than life,' he wrote in 1722; and fifty years later, discussing with Johnson and Goldsmith the ethics of duelling, he stoutly maintained that `a man had a right to defend his honour': it was an `ancient and honourable' mode of settling disputes. At the age of 86 he challenged a neighbouring gentleman for trespassing on his land. His friend Lord Egmont remarked on `his vanity and quarrelsomeness'.

So Oglethorpe had his faults. He was vain, hot-tempered and violent. But he was also benevolent, generous and compassionate, with a genuine sympathy for those less fortunate than himself. Moreover, he was a highly educated man with a distinctive view of the world, which he had derived from his own reading, particularly in classical literature; and this is where we come to the influence of Corpus.

Let us go back to 1714, when he came up to Oxford. Corpus then was already nearly two hundred years old. It was a tiny place. The founder, Bishop Fox, had intended it for twenty fellows and twenty scholars. In 1714 there were in residence about fifteen Fellows and seven BAs, but only nine undergraduates: six scholars and three gentleman-commoners, of whom Oglethorpe was one. These undergraduates studied logic, mathematics and philosophy, but their main concentration was on classical literature. Oglethorpe's contemporaries in this select and intimate society included the third Lord Coleraine, who had come up two years earlier as a gentleman commoner and would later bequeath the College a magnificent collection of books and prints on Italian art and antiquities; Theophilus Leigh, one of the BAs, who would become Master of Balliol for nearly sixty years as well as being the great-uncle of Jane Austen; and, most important, John Burton, then a scholar and later a Fellow, notable for introducing Locke's philosophy into the Oxford curriculum, but important to us because he, with Oglethorpe, would become one of the Georgia Trustees; and it was he who introduced Oglethorpe to the Wesley brothers. In the Library we have a copy of the sermon Burton preached to the Trustees in 1733 in which he describes Georgia as `a charitable colony' of a wholly new kind, a place where the colonists would `seem in a literal sense to begin the world again'. So the Corpus connection is important for the history of Georgia.

Old President Turner died in 1714, just before Oglethorpe came up and, after an embarrassing interval, during which the Senior Fellow was first elected President and then changed his mind, the next President of Corpus was Basil Kennett, author of a highly successful textbook on The Antiquities of Rome and of studies of the lives of the Greek and Latin poets. Many years later, Oglethorpe told Boswell that Basil Kennett had been his tutor and that he had advised him that no would-be scholar should ever keep a common-place book, as it was bad for the memory.

We don't know what else Oglethorpe was taught at Corpus, though he once remarked to Boswell that he had thought of revenging himself on someone by `playing him some of the pranks he had learned at school and college'. He was obviously an able student, because in his first term he was selected, along with sundry heads of houses, to contribute a Latin poem in Sapphics to the University's official volume marking the death of Queen Anne and the accession of George I. (Our Latin Tutor Dr Stephen Harrison assures me that, as an imitation of Horace, Oglethorpe's piece is not at all bad.) For the rest of his life Oglethorpe retained a genuine interest in classical literature. He could converse in Latin and in his eighties his talk was interlarded with quotations from the Roman poets. His friend Robert Castell, the one whose death in a debtor's gaol had triggered off Oglethorpe's interest in prison reform, had been a student of classical architecture who ruined himself by privately publishing a lavishly-produced work on The Villas of the Ancients (1728), the first attempt to reconstruct the ancient Roman villas from the descriptions of classical authors. Oglethorpe subscribed to two copies of this book and Corpus to one.

Oglethorpe was a very good linguist, a book-collector and a voracious reader in his leisure moments. He spent a year and half of his life sailing to and fro across the Atlantic and, as he once told Boswell, `at sea, if you do not drink, you must read'. He accumulated a huge library of history, geography, classics, dictionaries, maps and voyages; and he went on buying books until the end. He used to say that reading the old romances was `the only way to acquire noble sentiments'; and he was a particular admirer of Sir Walter Raleigh, whose Discovery of Guiana he took with him on his first trip to Georgia. In 1783, aged eighty-five, he was `busy reading the writers of the Middle Age[s]'. He also was something of a Biblical scholar who once impressed Boswell by `shortly stating the authenticity of the Pentateuch'. But classics had been the centre of his studies at Eton and Corpus and it is with allusions to classical literature and history that his published works abound.

Oglethorpe saw the world through classical eyes. In France as a young man he had `walked over Caesar's progress in Gaul and traced it with the Commentaries in hand'. He admired Frederick the Great because he was `like the Roman Varro' and because his wit gave to his conversation `what the Ancients call Attick salt'. When he objected to property qualifications for MPs, on the grounds that ability and education were more important than wealth, he cited the example of Athenian democracy; and one of his hopes for America was that the thirteen colonies would make English as widely spoken as Greek had once been.

Colonisation in Georgia he justified by invoking the example of the Romans, who, in his view, had `reduced the establishing of colonies into an art' and made them the basis of their empire. A contemporary remarked that it was `in the spirit of an old Roman' that he offered himself to the Trustees to lead the settlement of Georgia, the Romulus who would found a new state. He chose the location of Savannah on principles derived from the Roman architect Vitruvius, whom he quoted extensively in a translation by his unfortunate friend Robert Castell. In Georgia he observed that the Indian women anointed themselves with oil, `as the ancient Grecians did', and that the men wrapped their mantles round their bodies `as the Romans did their toga'. His close and affectionate relations with the native Americans sprang from his perception of them as a noble and handsome people, who embodied the ancient virtue of the Roman republic, being neither `pressed by poverty nor clogged by luxury'. They had no manufactures; they despised those who worked for wages; and they prevented the inheritance of property by burning all the goods of the dead. They were also an eloquent people, masters of metaphor and simile: Oglethorpe declared that, `making allowances for what they suffer thro' badness of interpreters, many of their speeches are equal to those which we admire most in the Greek and Roman writings.' He famously confessed: `I am a red man, an Indian in my heart, that is why I love them.'

Nothing was more remarkable about Georgia in its early years than its categorical prohibition of black slavery, a hundred and thirty years before its abolition in the USA. For this prohibition, Oglethorpe was responsible. Some of his reasons were based on expediency. He believed that black slaves were a security risk because, if there was a war, they would assist the Spaniards. He also believed that, if white colonists had blacks to do the work, they would grow idle and soft. But he was primarily against slavery on moral grounds, denouncing it as an `abominable and destructive custom', and one which was against both the Gospel and the fundamental law of England. In 1732 he had intervened to rescue an educated slave who had escaped from Maryland and personally paid for him to be returned to Gambia. He told the Trustees that to allow slavery would `occasion the misery of thousands in Africa.' `If we allow slaves, we act against the very principles by which we associated together, which was to relieve the distressed.'

Here too his views were grounded on a study of ancient history. He once wrote to the anti-slavery crusader, Granvill Sharp, tracing the history of slavery through Greece, Rome, Persia, Africa, Spain and Portugal: it was a story, he said, of `horrors' and `abominable abuses'. The ruins of Babylon, Memphis and Tyre showed the retribution which inexorably overtook those who owed their luxuries to the labour of wretched slaves. Had not Lisbon been struck by an earthquake and was not London punished by an `unnatural' war with America? As for David Hume's suggestion that the Africans were incapable of liberty or government, `What a historian!' Had he never heard of the great rulers of Egypt or Carthage or Ethiopia? Had he never read Herodotus's account of the mighty Pyramids? Or the sixteenth-century writer, Leo Africanus, who told how Africa had produced a race of heroes? There is a curiously modern ring to Oglethorpe's appeal to black Africa's heroic past; and his passionate opposition to slavery at such an early period is truly remarkable.

It was, however, only part of his very distinctive vision for the new colony. Georgia was to be composed of small self-sufficient freeholders. An agrarian law limited holdings to 50 acres, with a reluctant exception for those settlers who paid their own way and brought white servants with them: the gentleman-commoners, if you like. The inheritance laws were designed to prevent the accumulation of property and to maintain the pattern of small independent cultivators. Land was not allowed to be sold because that, in Oglethorpe's words, would `bring in the stock-jobbing temper, the Devil take the hindmost'. There would be no manufactures or industry; no financial speculators; and, of course, no lawyers. In such a world, slavery had no place. The inhabitants of such a society would be hardworking and frugal citizens, capable of defending themselves without a mercenary army in time of war and likely to display civic spirit in time of peace. No Catholics were allowed, but there would be religious toleration for everybody else - Salzburgers, Scots, Palatines, Moravians - and Jews, whom Oglethorpe let in, despite the opposition of the Georgia Trustees.

Where did this utopian conception come from? Once again, from the classics, though filtered down through the writings of the 16th-century Italian, Niccoló Machiavelli, and the 17th-century English author, James Harrington. Both these writers are well represented in Oglethorpe's library. The hatred of so-called `luxury', by which was meant the spread of consumer goods and sophisticated tastes; the dislike of the `corruption' embodied by stock-jobbers, lawyers and financiers; and the belief in the superior virtue of the independent freeholder: these were the clichés of the country-party opposition to Walpole. In Oglethorpe's scheme for Georgia they reached their apotheosis. The colony was a unique attempt to construct an alternative to the burgeoning commercial society of Hanoverian England. It reflected the influence of classical notions of republican virtue, but without any representative institutions - a very significant omission - and it also embodied that philanthropic concern for the distressed which was a strong motif in eighteenth-century piety.

The experiment was, of course, short-lived. The example of South Carolina was too insidious; in 1750 the law against slavery was repealed and Georgia soon turned into a colony of slave-owning large planters. Oglethorpe himself lived on into the age of Adam Smith, whose defence of consumption as the purpose of economic life made diatribes against `luxury' seem absurdly old-fashioned. But Oglethorpe continued to believe that trade was `a thing low in its nature' and, though `necessary, now that wars are carried on by money as well as men', inferior to the profession of arms. The heroes of the past whom he admired were soldiers not traders; and so were the great men he idolised in his lifetime: Prince Eugene and Frederick the Great. Throughout his life, Oglethorpe declaimed against financiers, contractors, paper money, French cooks and all the other signs of `luxury' and `corruption'. He told William Pitt that `the treatment I met with made me retire from a world that did not want men who preferred the public to their private interest'.

Increasingly anachronistic it may have been, but this language of what historians nowadays call civic humanism embodied the values which Oglethorpe learned at Corpus; and they were sustained by his reading of the ancient historians he had studied with President Basil Kennett. If we want to understand the roots of Oglethorpe's distinctive political ideas, of his Christian philanthropy and his hostility to slavery, then it is to his education that we must turn. It was here at Corpus, in this tiny, pious Jacobite college, that Oglethorpe imbibed the ideas which would animate his later career; and it was here that he made some of the friends with whose assistance he would found the colony of Georgia and become one of the most celebrated figures of his age.

Let us take leave of the old man as he entertains Johnson, Boswell and Goldsmith to dinner on 10 April 1772. In a scene which could have come from Tristram Shandy, `Dr Johnson said, "Pray General, give us an account of the siege of Belgrade." Upon which, the General, pouring a little wine upon the table, described everything with a wet finger: "Here were we, here were the Turks" &c. &c. Johnson listened with the closest attention.'

FOOTNOTES

1. I should particularly like to thank Ms Ellen Cordes of the Public Services Dept. of the Beinecke Library, Yale University, for sending me a photocopy of Boswell's notes on his interviews with Oglethorpe (Boswell Papers, M 208), and Professor Rodney M. Baine, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Georgia and editor of The Publications of James Edward Oglethorpe (University of Georgia Press, 1994), for very kindly lending me his photocopy of the sale catalogue of Oglethorpe's library.

© 1996 by Sir Keith Thomas PBA