“1st.  Its expense:  which the poor emigrant would be entirely unable to sustain, either in the first cost of a negro, or his subsequent keeping. 2d.  Because it would induce idleness and render labour degrading. 3d.  Because the settlers, being freeholders of only fifty-acre lots, requiring but one or two extra hands for their cultivation, the German servants would be a third more profitable than the blacks.  Upon the last original design I have mentioned, in planting this colony, they also based an argument against their admission, viz., that the cultivation of silk and wine, demanding skill and nicety, rather than strength and endurance of fatigue, the whites were better calculated for such labour than the negroes.  These were the prominent arguments, drawn from the various considerations of internal and external policy, which influenced the Trustees in making this prohibition.  Many of them, however, had but a temporary bearing, none stood the test of experience."[516]

It is clear, then, that the founders of the colony of Georgia were not moved by the noblest impulses to prohibit slavery within their jurisdiction.  In the chapter on South Carolina, attention was called to the influence of the Spanish troops in Florida on the recalcitrant Negroes in the Carolinas, the Negro regiment with subalterns from their own class, and the work of Spanish emissaries among the slaves.  The home government thought it wise to build up Georgia out of white men, who could develop its resources, and bear arms in defence of British possessions along an extensive border exposed to a pestiferous foe.  But the Board of Trade soon found this an impracticable scheme, and the colonists themselves began to clamor “for the use of negroes."[517] The first petition for the introduction and use of Negro slaves was offered to the trustees in 1735.  This prayer was promptly and positively denied, and for fifteen years they refused to grant all requests for the use of Negroes.  They adhered to their prohibition in letter and spirit.  Whenever and wherever Negroes were found in the colony, they were sold back into Carolina.  In the month of December, 1738, a petition, addressed to the trustees, including nearly all the names of the foremost colonists, set forth the distressing condition into which affairs had drifted under the enforcement of the prohibition, and declared that “the use of negroes, with proper limitations, which, if granted, would both occasion great numbers of white people to come here, and also to render us capable to subsist ourselves, by raising provisions upon our lands, until we could make some produce fit for export, in some measure to balance our importations.”  But instead of securing a favorable hearing, the petition drew the fire of the friends of the prohibition against the use of Negroes.  On the 3d of January, 1739, a petition to the trustees combating the arguments of the above-mentioned petition, and urging them to remain firm, was issued at Darien.  This was followed by another one, issued from Ebenezer on the 13th of March, in favor of the position occupied by the trustees.  A great many Scotch and German people had settled in the colony; and, familiar with the arts of husbandry, they became the ardent supporters of the trustees.  James Habersham, the “dear fellow-traveller,” of Whitefield, exclaimed,—­