Episode Details

By 1738 the colony of Georgia is five years old and bleeding settlers across the river to South Carolina — because Georgia, alone in British America, forbids slavery, rum, lawyers, great estates, and gives its people no assembly and no vote at all. This episode is the story of that experiment under strain: the bicultural interpreter, Mary Musgrove, the one person the colony could not survive without; the German refugees at Ebenezer who buried their dead and made free labor pay where others failed; the settlers called the Malcontents who damned the whole design and demanded slaves and a voice; and the famous preacher who took their side against the founder who held the line. And it closes on the warning a band of Highland Scots put in writing — that a colony of the enslaved, sixty miles from a Spain that offered them freedom, was a danger waiting to go off. Sixty miles south, it was about to.