A portrait of James Wright by Andrea Soldi
The following is excerpted and adapted from From Empire to Republic: Sir James Wright and the Price of Loyalty in Georgia, by kind permission of the University of Georgia Press.
Like most affluent American colonists, James Wright was a true 18th-century conservative who believed government to be the purview of the independently wealthy and virtuous citizens. Moreover, he consistently aligned himself with the burgeoning planter class in Georgia, which he helped build. His obituary portrayed him as a faithful and obedient “servant of the king,” although when he ultimately sided with the Crown as colonial governor, he firmly believed that doing so was in the best interest of Georgians.
Colonial Georgia experienced its greatest era of economic and territorial expansion during Wright’s lengthy tenure. At the end of the 1760s, Wright saved Georgia from a backcountry movement similar to the “regulator movement” in North Carolina. To prevent unrest in Georgia’s backcountry, he advocated for the establishment of frontier courts and sought to purchase additional Native lands for settlement.
Utterly pragmatic, James Wright understood the 18th-century world in which he lived and focused his boundless energies on making the most of the opportunities presented him. His lifelong quest for familial redemption, private wealth and, perhaps most importantly, personal respect was grounded in a deep conservatism that left him ill-equipped to understand the moral passions driving the burgeoning rebellion and his rigid, distant, and aloof personality handicapped his ability to navigate the crisis and chaos that soon enveloped and ultimately destroyed him. Although Wright empathized with colonists who had become angry about Parliamentary encroachments, he thoroughly believed in the British system of governance and insisted that the system could only be challenged through proper legal channels and not riotous behavior. Such acts threatened to overturn the entire social, economic and political foundation on which his world was based. During the clamorous Tea Party days of 1773, Wright addressed the Georgia Assembly to explain the inherent contradiction of his position as a royal official and a citizen of Georgia. “I ever [always] meant to discharge my duty as a Faithful Servant of the Crown,” he insisted, “and can with the greatest truth declare I also meant at the same time to promote to the utmost of my power and abilities the true interest of the people.”
Two years later, as the imperial crisis reached a boiling point, the governor delivered an impassioned speech in which he reminisced about his nearly 15 years in the colony and expressed his affection for the people of Georgia. “I have a real and affectionate regard for the people,” he exclaimed, “and it grieves me that a province that I have been so long in … should, by imprudence and rashness of some inconsiderate people, be plunged into a state of distress and ruin.” Until the end of his life in 1785, he steadfastly maintained his allegiance to king, country and colony, believing that many of the colonists, his people, had been led astray by a fractious minority. And here was the crux for a man like Wright: How does one serve two separate entities with occasionally divergent goals, wants and needs?
The shedding of blood on Lexington Green in Massachusetts proved to be the fulcrum on which colonial Georgia’s future would pivot — and it swung toward civil war. It took several weeks for news of that event to reach Savannah via Charleston on May 10, but when it did, Georgia’s Liberty Boys [Georgia’s version of the Sons of Liberty] broke into the public powder magazine and “robbed … 600 pounds of gun powder.” The governor issued a proclamation offering a reward for information about the theft but did not “expect or suppose it will have any effect.” Georgia’s radicals further wasted no time in creating a propaganda war that Wright would never successfully counter.
Wright now realized the momentum had shifted yet again at the end of May and predicted “nothing but a prospect of a general rebellion throughout America.” This seemed especially likely following a rumor emanating from Charleston that the British planned “to liberate the slaves & encourage them to attack their masters.” One Georgia delegate to the Continental Congress fearfully predicted the British would be able to quickly reconquer Georgia and South Carolina once the enslaved flew joined them. Georgians’ fears were not merely hypothetical. In early December 1774, half a dozen escaped slaves killed at least four white colonists and wounded several others before being captured and killed. This event raised the anxieties of white Georgians and played no small role in Georgia’s revolutionary movement, although in reality, the British were quite reluctant to fully engage Blacks as weapons in their war against the Rebels.
These events compelled the Liberty Boys to further action, and Wright, fearful for his safety, complained to officials in London that Georgia’s loyalists believed the Crown had left them “to fall a sacrifice to the resentment of the people.” By the summer of 1775, the revolutionary fervor in Georgia had placed royal governance of the colony in deep peril. Discouraged, exasperated, yet painfully lucid and insightful, Governor Wright scrawled a lengthy epistle to the Secretary of State for the American colonies, William Legge, Second Earl of Dartmouth, which vividly illustrates the rebellious inclinations. In his extraordinary letter, Wright predicts America was on the path to independence if Parliament failed to concede that it did not possess the right to tax the colonists directly. He also understood America’s promise. It was growing at an incredible rate, and governing such a land would soon prove problematic, even under the best of circumstances.
Dejected and hopeless, Wright repeated his request to return to England. “I begin to think,” he wrote in July, that “a King’s governor has little or no business here.” The Governor’s Council unanimously protested to the ministry that the “powers of government are at present totally unhinged, … prosecutions [for any offenses] would be useless.” The royal government could no longer enforce the law—in the summer of 1775, a full year before the Declaration of Independence.
Rebel authorities arrested John Hume, newly appointed to the Governor’s Council, the next month, presumably to be “torn to pieces,” according to Wright. “However … as a matter of great humanity and tenderness, they condescended to order him out of the province.” Wright continued that loyalists were in great need of assistance, and if none was soon offered, he cried, “every officer …. must submit to a worse fate.”
At the end of June 1775, Wright mailed several letters to British officials advising them of the deplorable situation in Georgia, but South Carolina’s Rebels intercepted them and replaced them with very different missives. The original note urged Gage to send “five times” the troops Wright had previously requested, because too few would “only inflame the whole province” and suggested that colonial governors be relocated to England, lest they be left “naked and exposed to the resentment of an enraged people.” The Rebels replaced this petition with one that asserted “Georgia [has] not suffered,” and that “no danger is to be apprehended from” the Rebels, nor are troops needed there or in South Carolina. Moreover, the forged letter sought to offset correspondence from other sources that described the true situation, hand-waving away how recently arrived South Carolina Governor William Campbell was “inexperienced in affairs of government” and may “express apprehensions.” How did Gage, who had corresponded with Wright for years and was familiar his constant harping for more soldiers, interpret this letter as genuine? Even if he had caught the deception, he was preoccupied in Boston and may not have been able to send relief in any event. On the same day, Governor Wright also penned a letter to Admiral Graves. He inquired about the whereabouts of the vessel Graves was supposed to have sent to Georgia and stated that there were then “four or five boats from [South Carolina], full of armed men” off the coast of Savannah. These men, according to Wright, have blocked the port and “have it in their power to plunder any thing that arrives here, and do just what they please.” Therefore, he maintained, we need “immediate assistance.” Unfortunately for the governor, this letter was also intercepted and a new one forged; the counterfeit instead stated that Wright had no “occasion for any vessel of war.” So, as far as the British military command in America knew, Georgia and South Carolina remained reasonably peaceful, especially regarding the dangerous situation in Massachusetts.
The next six months proved increasingly miserable for Wright and his fellow loyalists, who daily faced insults from the Liberty Boys. Failure to sign the Rebel oath could result in banishment or worse. River pilot John Hopkins was tarred and feathered in July 1775, which Wright described as the “most horrid spectacle I ever saw.” Even Wright’s minister at Christ Church, the Reverend Haddon Smith, had been forced to “flee from the violence of the people ... [after having] been continually persecuted.”
In early August, Georgia’s Rebel congress penned a letter to the governor suggesting unity “in times like present,” which Wright and his Council wisely understood as an attempt to “wrest the command of the militia out of the hands of the [Royal] government.” Later in the fall, Wright grieved that his “government [has been] totally annihilated;” the tyranny, oppression and insults he faced so dreadful that rumors circulated throughout the British Atlantic world that he had been “made prisoner by the people.” Not yet.
The second half of 1775 proved painfully confused and contingent. Both loyalists and Rebels often believed themselves to be losing ground in the battle for hearts and minds. Part of this was a result of ever-shifting alliances. In December, Wright learned that the King had finally approved his request for leave. The governor informed William Legge, Lord Dartmouth, that “all the King’s officers and friends to government write for my continuance amongst them [and] I am well informed and have [even] been told by several of the Liberty people that they [also] express great concern and uneasiness at my intention of leaving the province at present.” But fate intervened the following month.
A special Rebel Council of Safety session convened in Savannah on the chilly evening of January 18, 1776. Their meeting at Peter Tondee’s Tavern at the northwest corner of Broughton and Whitaker Streets focused on the recent arrival of two British men-of-war at Tybee Island. At this moment, Georgia’s Rebel Council of Safety resolved to plunge Britain’s youngest colony deep into the maelstrom of rebellion by ordering the arrest of Wright and three members of his Council — Josiah Tattnall, John Mulryne and Anthony Stokes.
Major Joseph Habersham, the son of Wright’s best friend, volunteered to execute the orders from this extralegal assembly. Simultaneously and mere blocks away, the governor greeted dinner guests at Government House on St. James’s Square. But this was no ordinary dinner party. It was a meeting of the highest-ranking provincial officials, and the discussion focused on the town’s ever-growing mobocracy. While seated at Wright’s mahogany dining table under the reassuring gaze from a portrait of King George II, a scuffle at the front door startled the dinner guests.
Amid the cacophony of voices and boots scuffling on the hardwood floors, Major Habersham entered the dining room and, with apparent grace and dignity, bowed to the assembled guests and marched to the head of the table. Placing his left arm on the governor’s right shoulder, he stated: “Sir James, you are my prisoner.” The Council of Safety reconvened a few hours later. It resolved that each of those arrested be permitted to return “to their respective homes upon their parole assuring that they will attend his Excellency the Governor’s house” the following morning. Wright’s personal parole had come upon the additional promise that the “peace of the town shall not be disturbed by any persons from the ships of war.”
But the promised safety of parole seemed more dubious with each passing day. On more than one occasion, shots were fired into the governor’s home. Three weeks later, and fearing for his life, James Wright secured his safety in the pre-dawn hours of February 11. In a letter to Lord George Germain, the Secretary of State for the American Department, he wrote: “[I]n order to avoid the rage and violence of the Rebels …, [I] was reduced to the necessity of leaving the town of Savannah in the night.” Thus it was for Georgia’s most popular and successful colonial governor, whose efforts doubled the colony’s territory and enriched many a parvenu. Patriotism to King and Crown had a steep price tag indeed. If only, as Wright had written time and time again, Georgia’s loyalists “could have got any support or assistance [we] should have kept [Georgia] out of the rebellion.” Right or wrong, he clung to this position for the remainder of his life.
