3. ~Character of these Colonies.~ The planting colonies are those
Southern settlements whose climate and character destined them to be the
chief theatre of North American slavery. The early attitude of these
communities toward the slave-trade is therefore of peculiar interest;
for their action was of necessity largely decisive for the future of the
trade and for the institution in North America. Theirs was the only
soil, climate, and society suited to slavery; in the other colonies,
with few exceptions, the institution was by these same factors doomed
from the beginning. Hence, only strong moral and political motives could
in the planting colonies overthrow or check a traffic so favored by the
mother country.


4. ~Restrictions in Georgia.~ In Georgia we have an example of a
community whose philanthropic founders sought to impose upon it a code
of morals higher than the colonists wished. The settlers of Georgia were
of even worse moral fibre than their slave-trading and whiskey-using
neighbors in Carolina and Virginia; yet Oglethorpe and the London
proprietors prohibited from the beginning both the rum and the slave
traffic, refusing to "suffer slavery (which is against the Gospel as
well as the fundamental law of England) to be authorised under our
authority."[1] The trustees sought to win the colonists over to their
belief by telling them that money could be better expended in
transporting white men than Negroes; that slaves would be a source of
weakness to the colony; and that the "Produces designed to be raised in
the Colony would not require such Labour as to make Negroes necessary
for carrying them on."[2]