"By Land and Water:" Fleeing Forced Labor in Coastal Colonial Georgia

This thesis considers the circumstances of African and European individuals escaping slavery and servitude in Colonial Georgia and asserts the significance of the colony’s maritime environment. These issues are placed in the context of political conflict within the British colony over whether to allow slavery, cultural and economic influences from across the Atlantic and Caribbean, ongoing negotiations between Native and British Authorities, and the Georgia lowcountry’s coastal landscapes. Crossing these landscapes with watercraft was a defining sensory experience in early Georgia, even if it was so common as to escape mention, and controlling waterways was vital to economic and military power, and thus to attaining or abridging freedom. As settlers attempted to import first indentured servitude and later slavery into a landscape under the sway of native nations, enslaved and indentured individuals took advantage of that tenuous coastal landscape to subvert the oppressive systems forced upon them.