Episode Details

A generation after the Yamasee War nearly destroyed it, South Carolina has become something new on the American mainland: the first colony where the enslaved outnumber the free two to one — a Caribbean-style slave society grown rich on rice and living in permanent dread of its own people. And sixty miles south sits the one thing that can crack it open: Spanish Florida, where the King of Spain has promised freedom to any man who escapes an English plantation and takes up arms for the Spanish crown. This is the world James Oglethorpe sailed into in 1733, when he climbed a bluff above the Savannah River with a hundred and fourteen settlers and founded Georgia — not as a refuge alone, but as a wall: a colony with no slaves, no rum, and no lawyers, a line of armed poor men planted on the contested border with Spanish Florida. The opening of the contest that comes back bigger — the board as it stood, the powder and the spark in the same place, and the improbable buffer colony built to hold the line.