"A luxurious, lazy, idle, and effeminate people" : manhood, property, and race in Trustee Georgia, 1731-1752

This research paper was completed and submitted at Nipissing University, and is made freely accessible through the University of Toronto’s TSpace repositoryThis MRP seeks to understand how the Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia (1732-1751) crafted and enforced their vision of a slave-free society in a larger British-Atlantic world based on the profits of slave labour. The Trustees attempted to create their colony to redeem poor, unemployed white men and their families. They used rhetoric and tropes of manhood to create and gain support of their vision. They understood manhood through these tropes and used them as a way to protect their vision. The Georgia Corporation used a complex system of patronage to ensure that the colonists followed their ideal of an industrious, Protestant manhood. However, as much as the Trustees tried, they could not isolate the colonists from outside influences, most importantly from a planter-elite in South Carolina. To the Trustees, slave-owners represented an effeminate class, one that was idle, lazy, and luxurious. The Trustees attempted to promote a code of conduct based on industry and action through patronage and deference. However, discontented men who purchased their own property in Georgia, later dubbed the "Malcontents," saw no need for patronage and defence, as they became patrons themselves. These new property-owning men believed that in order to fulfill the Trustees' desires of transforming families and men into productive members of society, the colony needed slaves. At the very least the Malcontents utilized the very same rhetoric the Trustees employed to garner resentment and frustration towards the colony's creators