Various colonial charters and founding of colonies

On April 21, 1732, King George II granted a charter to James Oglethorpe and a board of trustees establishing the Province of Georgia. The Georgia charter gave the trustees authority for twenty-one years and defined the colony as both a refuge for England's deserving poor and a military buffer guarding South Carolina against Spanish Florida. Oglethorpe led the first colonists to Georgia in February 1733 and founded Savannah on a bluff above the Savannah River.

The Georgia charter addressed two political problems at once for the British Empire in the 1730s: the southern frontier needed defense against Spain, and London reformers wanted a colony that would not simply reproduce the plantation order of South Carolina. The trustees therefore barred slavery at first and capped land grants in an effort to build a disciplined, smallholding society under the charter's philanthropic and military design. The experiment revealed how directly a colonial charter could shape labor policy, landholding, and imperial defense in one founding document.

Georgia's strategic purpose was tested in July 1742 when Spanish forces attacked during the Battle of Bloody Marsh and Oglethorpe's defense preserved the colony. The trustees surrendered the charter in 1752, Georgia became a royal colony, and slavery spread afterward, showing how the colony moved away from the original terms written into the 1732 charter.