Contemporary Authors

• A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713 University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2009
• The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2015

1. The short life of free Georgia : class and slavery in the colonial South LCCN 2015003749 Type of material Book Personal name McIlvenna, Noeleen, 1963- author. Main title The short life of free Georgia : class and slavery in the colonial South / Noeleen McIlvenna. Published/Produced Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2015] Description xi, 143 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm ISBN 9781469624037 (pbk : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2016 130290 CALL NUMBER F289 .M44 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) CALL NUMBER F289 .M44 2015 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. A very mutinous people : the struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713 LCCN 2008047141 Type of material Book Personal name McIlvenna, Noeleen, 1963- Main title A very mutinous people : the struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713 / Noeleen McIlvenna. Published/Created Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c2009. Description x, 212 p. : maps ; 23 cm. ISBN 9780807832868 (cloth : alk. paper) 0807832863 (cloth : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER F257 .M39 2009 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER F257 .M39 2009 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Wright State University - http://people.wright.edu/noeleen.mcilvenna

  Dr. No, as Wright State students call her, is a history professor, specializing in Early American history. She grew up in Northern Ireland during the troubles, but has lived in the US for most of her adult life. Her PhD studies at Duke University (don’t be a hater) led to the publication of her 2009 book, A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713. In 2015, her second book, the Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South, a book on Georgia in the eighteenth century was published. Now she is working on another on political radicals in the Chesapeake Bay in the seventeenth century. She teaches a range of courses covering Colonial America, the American Revolution and American Indian History. History students have voted her the department’s Outstanding Faculty Member twice since 2008.
  Dr. No’s undergraduate degree was called History with Education, Northern Ireland’s equivalent of SSE. She served as a joint appointment with Wright State’s Department of Teacher Education, and although she is no longer a member of that department, her contacts and understanding of faculty and staff in CEHS can aid SSE majors navigate between the colleges and between their undergraduate and graduate work. She has observed SSE majors in the local schools as they completed their licensure work.

• Macmillan Website - http://www.macmillan.com

  Mutinous People

  Historians have often glorified eighteenth-century Virginia planters' philosophical debates about the meaning of American liberty. But according to Noeleen McIlvenna, the true exemplars of egalitarian political values had fled Virginia's plantation society late in the seventeenth century to create the first successful European colony in the Albemarle, in present-day North Carolina.

  Making their way through the Great Dismal Swamp, runaway servants from Virginia joined other renegades to establish a free society along the most inaccessible Atlantic coastline of North America. They created a new community on the banks of Albemarle Sound, maintaining peace with neighboring Native Americans, upholding the egalitarian values of the English Revolution, and ignoring the laws of the mother country.

  Tapping into previously unused documents, McIlvenna explains how North Carolina's first planters struggled to impose a plantation society upon the settlers and how those early small farmers, defending a wide franchise and religious toleration, steadfastly resisted. She contends that the story of the Albemarle colony is a microcosm of the greater process by which a conglomeration of <>. Highlighting the relationship between settlers and Native Americans, this study leads to a surprising new interpretation of the Tuscarora War.

  Free Georgia

  For twenty years in the eighteenth century, Georgia--the last British colony in what became the United States--enjoyed a brief period of free labor, where workers were not enslaved and were paid. The Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia created a "Georgia experiment" of philanthropic enterprise and moral reform for poor white workers, though rebellious settlers were more interested in shaking off the British social system of deference to the upper class. Only a few elites in the colony actually desired the slave system, but those men, backed by expansionist South Carolina planters, used the laborers' demands for high wages as examples of societal unrest. Through a campaign of disinformation in London, they argued for slavery, eventually convincing the Trustees to abandon their experiment.

  In The Short Life of Free Georgia, Noeleen McIlvenna chronicles the years between 1732 and 1752 and challenges the conventional view that Georgia's colonial purpose was based on unworkable assumptions and utopian ideals. Rather, Georgia largely succeeded in its goals--until self-interested parties convinced England that Georgia had failed, leading to the colony's transformation into a replica of slaveholding South Carolina.

The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the
Colonial South
Julie Richter
Journal of Southern History.
82.4 (Nov. 2016): p903.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text: 
The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South. By Noeleen McIlvenna. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 143. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2403-7.)
In The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South, Noeleen McIlvenna focuses on the first twenty years of Georgia's
history in order to <>. McIlvenna tells a complex, multilayered story of Georgia's beginning in six chronological
chapters that include details from a wide range of primary sources.
The Short Life of Free Georgia begins in England in the early 1720s, a time when British philanthropists believed that the worthy poor could
improve themselves through hard work. Discussions among James Oglethorpe, John Viscount Perceval (the soon to be Earl of Egmont), and
others led to the establishment of Georgia in 1732. McIlvenna makes it clear that Georgia differed from Britain's other mainland colonies: its
Trustees approved regulations designed to support the goal of improving the lives of the worthy poor, including a prohibition on slavery and
limiting tracts of land to five hundred acres.
Once in Georgia, Oglethorpe and others who settled in the colony--English servants, German Pietists, Lowland and Highland Scots, and Irish
convicts--struggled to implement the colony's regulations. McIlvenna points to the "rough equality stemming from frontier conditions" as a
particular problem for settlers (p. 36). Elite colonists complained about laziness and the lack of deference shown to them. In 1735, soon after
Georgia's establishment, many Lowlanders, also known as the Malcontents, informed the Trustees that poorer settlers refused to work and that the
colony would be stronger if Georgia had enslaved laborers.
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In the eyes of the Malcontents, two dissenting ministers--John Wesley and George Whitefield--further weakened Georgia's social order in the late
1730s as they revitalized religious life in the colony. As the Malcontents continued to push the Trustees to allow slavery, external matters took on
a greater importance in the wake of the 1739 Stono Rebellion and the beginning of the War of Jenkins' Ear. Situated between South Carolina and
Spanish Florida, Georgia acted as a buffer, a role that moved to the forefront, and between 1739 and 1742 the "central purpose of the colony
became murky for the Trustees" (p. 58). Oglethorpe shifted his work from Georgia's philanthropic mission to the fight against Spain. Although
Oglethorpe failed in his attempt to seize St. Augustine, the 1742 battle of Bloody Marsh, in which Highland Scots, Chickasaws, and Creeks
defended St. Simon's Island against the Spanish, ended fighting in this region.
Once Britain and Spain accepted the St. Johns River as the boundary between Georgia and Spanish Florida, the colony's Trustees paid less
attention to Georgia. In addition, Oglethorpe's departure left Georgia without a strong advocate for free labor. James Habersham, Whitefield's
assistant, became Savannah's leading figure and pushed the colony toward trade and away from agriculture. When Habersham asked South
Carolinians for assistance, these planters <>. In August
1748 Georgia's Trustees decided to allow slavery "with some limitations by the following year" (p. 92).
McIlvenna reminds her readers that there are different ways to assess success when one thinks about Georgia's first twenty years. She
demonstrates that early Georgians succeeded in many areas: they created farms, raised crops, tended livestock, and protected their colony against
the Spanish. The true threat to the Trustees' plans came from the South Carolina planters who worked to shape Georgia's economy into one in
which enslaved men and women labored for the benefit of their elite owners. McIlvenna finds the failure rests with the Trustees who did not
realize that <> with an economy similar to that of Pennsylvania.
JULIE RICHTER
College of William and Mary
Richter, Julie
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Richter, Julie. "The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 4, 2016, p.
903+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470867666&it=r&asid=ca932c66c6cbf7abfe5872c30f450239. Accessed 8 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470867666

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A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina,
1660-1713
Alan D. Watson
Journal of Southern History.
76.4 (Nov. 2010): p962.
COPYRIGHT 2010 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text: 
A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713. By Noeleen McIlvenna. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
c. 2009. Pp. [xii], 212. $32.50, ISBN 978-0-8078-3286-8.)
In painstaking detail Noeleen McIlvenna presents the first sustained, modern account of the settlement of early North Carolina, specifically the
northeastern corner of the colony, or the Albemarle region, and its southern extension, Bath County. Divided into two sections, A Very Mutinous
People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713 first considers the origin of the Albemarle colony during the proprietary years, Culpeper's
Rebellion, and the overthrow of governor/proprietor Seth Sothell. The second section describes the attempt to establish the Church of England,
Native American resistance at the turn of the eighteenth century, Cary's Rebellion, and the Tuscarora War. In the process McIlvenna offers a
comprehensive, if not convincing, narrative that depicts the turbulent history of a refractory people in an isolated corner of the English world.
According to McIlvenna, North Carolina's early settlers, reflecting the Leveller principles and Quaker sentiments of the Cromwellian era that
many brought to Albemarle via Virginia, were "[i]mbued with notions of equality and deferential to none" and created "the most free society in
the European purview" (pp. 14, 5). Initially, the desire for autonomy and religious tolerance among the runaway servants, Quakers, and other
outcasts who peopled North Carolina thwarted efforts by the lords proprietors in England and their representatives in the colony to impose an
imperious government on the Albemarle region. The lower orders successfully manifested their opposition by a combination of rebellious activity
and deft diplomacy, while Quaker pacifism and the "honest and peaceful dealings" of the early settlers maintained amicable relations with Native
Americans (p. 112).
Although the Carolinians, including "'Indians, Negros and women,'" "continued to wage the English Revolution against the king, lords, and
church" in the backwaters of Albemarle Sound, an aristocratic planter elite eventually undermined this noble experiment in egalitarianism and
secularism (pp. 56, 14). Seeking to emulate the polity and society in neighboring Virginia and South Carolina by engrossing land and introducing
large-scale African slavery, the planters fulfilled their ambitions by defeating Thomas Cary, establishing the Church of England, and crushing the
Tuscarora Indians. "Thus finally ended North Carolina's Quaker-Leveller republic," McIlvenna concludes (p. 158).
Replete with supposition, speculation, and inaccuracy, A Very Mutinous People sorely disappoints. McIlvenna attempts <> that imposes a class/gender/race paradigm on the historical landscape of the Albemarle region. This leads to countless
unfounded statements, <>, and the dismissal of more compelling scholarship that inconveniently fails to conform to the
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class/gender/race model. Moreover, <> mar the volume, which in turn suffers from a decided lack of editorial attention,
reflected in incongruous paragraphs, non sequiturs, and awkward, sometimes inappropriate, phraseology.
<>, but A Very Mutinous People--polemical, biased, errorprone,
and poorly written, in this reviewer's opinion--is not the one.
ALAN D. WATSON
University of North Carolina at Wilmington
Watson, Alan D.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Watson, Alan D. "A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713." Journal of Southern History, vol. 76, no. 4, 2010, p.
962+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA242380093&it=r&asid=cdb045b7c621f07296550d2e0d509959. Accessed 8 July
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A242380093

Richter, Julie. "The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 4, 2016, p. 903+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470867666&it=r. Accessed 8 July 2017. Watson, Alan D. "A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713." Journal of Southern History, vol. 76, no. 4, 2010, p. 962+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA242380093&it=r. Accessed 8 July 2017.

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  Fritz on McIlvenna, 'The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South'

  Author:
  Noeleen McIlvenna
  Reviewer:
  Timothy Fritz

  Noeleen McIlvenna. The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 158 pp. $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-2403-7.

  Reviewed by Timothy Fritz (Mount St. Mary's University)
  Published on H-Slavery (March, 2017)
  Commissioned by David M. Prior

  Literate residents of eighteenth-century England who read the novel Moll Flanders (1722) were presented with both a cautionary tale and a travel inspiration. Moll Flanders was born in Newgate Prison, but eventually leads a life of slave-attended luxury in the American colonies. Author Daniel Defoe created Moll Flanders after his own three-year incarceration in Newgate Prison. Her story resembles that of “the worthy poor” for whom James Oglethorpe and Sir John Perceval founded a new colony in 1732. Called Georgia, this thirteenth and final British colony in continental North America was of a different character than its colonial counterparts. Intended as a haven where former convicts and debtors could gain worth through noble enterprise, Georgia was unique in its initial approach to settlement, labor structure, and the prohibition of slavery. In The Short Life of Free Georgia, rather than recounting the familiar story of Oglethorpe’s failure to permanently ban slavery, Noeleen McIlvenna provides a view of Georgia’s class struggles from the political perspective of white colonists. McIlvenna presents a history of Georgia’s Trustee era that deviates from a standard focus on the increasingly racial justification slavery by addressing the impact of that racism on class conceptions at a historical moment when a free-labor economy was possible.

  The Short Life of Free Georgia departs from other recent traditional and ethnohistorical approaches to the region by illuminating <> by early Georgia’s elites. After living without slavery from 1733 to 1750, the free white people in Georgia, “fooled by a relentless and ruthless propaganda that claimed the mistreatment of others would bring enrichment” (p. 113), acquiesced to a South Carolinian model of African slavery. McIlvenna argues that although Georgia successfully served its purpose as a buffer against the Spanish at St. Augustine, the real threat to Oglethorpe’s philanthropic mission was the machinations of expansionist-driven Carolinians, who lusted after Georgia’s rice-ready marshes. Throughout the Trustee Era, the Malcontents, as Georgia’s proslavery contingent of colonists were known, failed in their attempts to expel a white working class of expanding autonomy and dwindling deference. Malcontent leaders Patrick Tailfer and Thomas Stephens eventually found South Carolinian allies in their quest for the slave labor and quick profits they believed were owed them by their social status because, as Defoe observed, “Servitude and hard Labour were things gentlemen could never stoop to” (p. 36).

  McIlvenna’s chronological approach connects seemingly disparate events like the Stono Rebellion, the War of Jenkins’ Ear, and the Great Awakening to the ensuing labor shift and the effects of political debates over slavery and land tenure. Originally, Georgia was to be managed by employees of the Trustees in lieu of a governor. Land was free for the laboring poor, and ownership reverted to the trust should the settler leave the colony. Prohibitions on alcohol, in conjunction with a five-hundred-acre cap on land ownership and a system of land tenure that prohibited women from inheriting land so their families could not amass large acreages through marriage, were ideas that were both admirable and infuriating. This blueprint for the salvation of the poor was also the foundation of discontent across classes, but dissatisfaction was expressed in a multitude of ways. While Savannah's working poor were content to smuggle rum, McIlvenna notes that “the breach of the societal hierarchy provoked the better sort into protests of a different nature” (p. 38). The Malcontents were born of this frustration, but their efforts to rid themselves of the charity colonists and replace them with African slaves were impeded by the “death of deference” inspired by the evangelical Great Awakening in Georgia (p. 41).

  McIlvenna argues that the proslavery mission of the Malcontents intensified in the late 1730s. Unable to conquer the spirit of equality encouraged by the evangelist George Whitefield and other Oxford Holy Club alumni, Tailfer combined the concerns of the poor over land tenure and the Malcontents’ desire for slavery into one “Representation” to be circulated in London in 1738. The Trustees modified land tenure in response, but stood firm on the prohibition of slavery, a decision that the poor were initially indifferent to but were later thankful for after the bloody Stono Rebellion the following year. The ensuing War of Jenkins’ Ear caused many Trustees to focus on military defense instead of the philanthropic mission, while still others “took affront to the lack of deference shown them by those on the ground in Georgia” (p. 58). This perception was intensified by the Malcontents’ rumors that the colony had been abandoned by all but Oglethorpe's soldiers and that Oglethorpe was not an efficient administrator. In fact, the marshes south of Savannah were only temporarily abandoned due to the war, and many of the laboring poor received good wages from military-related work or constructing Whitefield’s orphanage in Savannah.

  Such circumstances left fewer white workers available to the Georgia elites and those who remained expected higher pay, leading the Malcontents to leave for South Carolina. In 1740, Georgia was indeed a colony “where people of all ranks could achieve a competency, supporting a family with a degree of financial security unavailable in England and the potential for greater rewards for those prepared to take risks” (p. 70). Regardless of the rumor or the reality surrounding labor, however, “the imperial security argument lost its power to persuade policy makers in London of the need to keep slavery illegal in Georgia” (p. 76). By 1748, a convoluted system of power-through-debt created by Whitefield’s former assistant, James Habersham, that favored South Carolinian planters resulted in “a substitution of hierarchical systems: race surpassed class as the binding identity, cutting off ambition for some while justifying another’s success at the expense of a ‘lesser’ person” (p. 93).

  One valuable contribution of this monograph is the exploration of an alternative to Oglethorpe’s original plan. McIlvenna points to the Malcontents’ argument that slavery promised dramatically increased profits, but the Purrysburg settlement across the Savannah River in South Carolina, also founded in the 1730s as an outlet for the poor, suggests the opposite. Slavery was legal in that iteration of the laboring poor experiment, but small farmers still made their way to Savannah to earn better wages after being unable to afford good land in the area, as the best locations for rice production in were quickly purchased and consolidated among elite absentee planters from South Carolina's lowcountry. Additionally, the Georgia colony remained on royal financial support following the introduction of slavery. Thus, McIlvenna concludes, slavery was neither responsible for Georgia’s continued existence under royal oversight nor an inevitable pillar of eventual success.

  The author’s concise prose throughout this monograph makes it a valuable tool for undergraduates, providing <> as well as for the development of class and race conceptions in the American colonies. The use of excerpts from Moll Flanders throughout the text firmly grounds McIlvenna’s argument in the debates of the time. The Short Life of Free Georgia is a meticulously researched and essential contribution to the study of slavery and society in the colonial South.

  Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=47256

  Citation: Timothy Fritz. Review of McIlvenna, Noeleen, The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South. H-Slavery, H-Net Reviews. March, 2017.
  URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=47256

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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