Episode Details

It started with a pickled ear in a jar, held up before the House of Commons — and it ended by quietly destroying the one colony built to be different. When England went to war with Spain in 1739, General James Oglethorpe marched south to take St. Augustine and shut the door that had been pulling enslaved people out of the English colonies for fifty years. He failed — broken at dawn outside Fort Mose by the free black militia he had come to crush, turned back by a wall of soft stone that swallowed his cannonballs whole. Two years later the Spanish came for Georgia, and were stopped in the marsh grass of St. Simons Island in a battle whose legend dwarfs its seven dead. But the real cost of the war was hidden. Oglethorpe’s victory removed the Spanish threat — and with it, the last argument keeping slavery out of Georgia. This is the story of the war that fixed a border by moving it nowhere, and doomed an experiment by winning. With a young Virginian named Lawrence Washington, and the brother who listened to his stories.