Slavery in Antebellum Georgia

When the Georgia Trustees first envisioned their colonial experiment in the early 1730s, they banned slavery in order to avoid the slave-based plantation economy that had developed in other colonies in the American South. The allure of profits from slavery, however, proved to be too powerful for white Georgia settlers to resist. By the era of the American Revolution (1775-83), slavery was legal and African slaves constituted nearly half of Georgia’s population.