In the twenty-first century, the history of evangelical politics in Georgia is increasingly important to a widening audience. Rising interest in the high Protestant idealism of the British Empire between 1688 and the 1750s has also brought new focus on the colony of Georgia. Professor John Thomas Scott of Mercer University offers a much needed, deeply researched, intricately comprehensive, narrative-based study of the entangled political and religious beginnings of Georgia that includes extensive up-to-date footnotes on recent scholarship along with a final chapter offering a bibliographical history of the subject. Scott's book will be foundational to future work on the subject.
Although the Wesleys are prominent in the title, Scott does not allow the story of the brothers Wesley to dominate the narrative. Scott is as interested in Benjamin Ingham, another missionary, as in the Wesleys. Ingham worked alongside Moravians among the Creek Indians, and together they built the school they named “Irene.” He also does not let Charles Delamotte, the fourth missionary, disappear from the narrative even though not as much is known about him. Scott also keeps an eye on correspondence with the Trustees in England, the political leadership in Savannah and Frederica, and the issues of weak episcopal oversight and problematic landownership.
Scott pays due respect to Baylor Professor Julie Anne Sweet's many recent studies of the Anglican mission among the Indians, but his goal is not analysis. He pays due respect to Geordan Hammond's recent John Wesley in America: Restoring Primitive Christianity (Oxford, 2014), but his goal is not interrogation of motivations. He appreciates Richard Heitzenrater's work on “Wesley in America” (Proceedings of the Western Historical Society 84 [2003]: 65–114) but notes that Heitzenrater is mostly interested in Wesleyan influence. Unlike other histories of the subject, Scott describes his book as an attempt “to examine the Anglican Mission to Georgia for its own sake rather than to situate it into a larger story, connect it to distant earlier or later developments, make moral judgments about its participants, or assess it as a success or failure” (326).
Scott's narrow purpose for this study gives it its importance. He offers a month-by-month study of who is doing what where during the crucial years 1735–1738. He correlates the primary sources and does not privilege one over the other. He notes when there are gaps in the diaries and when the traditional story relies on memories written years later. He does not try to make the book exciting. He writes a masterwork of careful chronological scholarship.
On the other hand, the first chapter does an excellent job of putting the whole of the rest of the book in the context of Imperial Idealism. Reaching back to Elizabethan times and emphasizing the renewed Protestantism after 1688, Scott writes broadly about the philanthropic vigor of the Hanoverian British Empire. He tells of the wide influence of Thomas Bray and “Bray's Associates,” the support work of Henry Newman in the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), and the joint work of the Society for the Promotion of the Gospel (SPG) and the Georgia Trustees in the creation of an Anglican Mission.
The Wesleys and the Anglican Mission to Georgia is an excellent work of diligent scholarship. It gathers, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, what will be needed for the next century's analysis of colonial Georgia's importance in history.
