Trustees.

Georgia was the last colony founded by the British in what would be the United States. By the 1730s authorities in England had a fairly good idea of what it meant to create settlements even though in many ways Georgia would be an experiment. Unlike the earliest colonies, which were either underwritten by joint stock companies (Virginia, Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, New Netherland, and New Sweden) or were held as the semiprivate property of proprietors (Pennsylvania, Maryland, the Jerseys, New York, and the Carolinas), Georgia was entrusted to twenty-one trustees. Its 1733 charter, to run for twenty-one years, prohibited the trustees from making any profit or taking any salary. Money for the colony was raised in England, initially through the churches and schoolchildren-since the idea being promoted was that Georgia would be a place where the deserving poor could find a second chance. (Most of these...