Dr. Thomas Bray and the Charitable Colony Project, 1730

IN a conversation in the House of Commons, February I3, I730, with Viscount Percival, afterwards Earl of Egmont-a colleague on the Gaols Committee of the last session-James Edward Oglethorpe described his first modest conception of a charitable colony in America for the relief of the poor. The scheme, he said, was procure a quantity of acres either from the Government or by gift or purchase in the West Indies [i.e., America], and to plant thereon a hundred miserable wretches who being let out of gaol by the last year's Act, are now starving about the town for want of employment, to be settled all together by way of colony. In time he expected that they with their families would increase so fast as to become a security and defence of our possessions against the French and Indians of those parts, and produce hemp and flax for the manufacturers of England and Ireland. Thus philanthropy would serve other public ends as well, of mercantilism and imperial strategy. Percival's record of this conversation is the earliest narrative extant of the genesis of the Georgia enterprise.' It is defective in one important respect: the omission of any reference to collaboration between Oglethorpe and the pious Anglican philanthropist, Dr. Thomas Bray. Hence doubts have been raised concerning the role in launching the colony charity later claimed for Bray by two of his great friends. Even so, the narrative brings into focus the unique feature of the colony's origin: philanthropy supplied the first impulse, and philanthropy set the institutional pattern. Before the grant of the charter in I732 the nidus of the Georgia Trust was a composite charitable society (still in existence within the Church of England), the Associates of Dr. Bray as reorganized in I730. Oglethorpe in his talk with Percival went on to discuss such a reorganization in some

Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics