Into the land of no-government

What happened

Georgia's first royal Assembly met in early 1755 over a fight Edmund Gray was losing. A Quaker from Virginia, Gray had been handing out public land around Augusta without waiting for permission, and he won his seat by speaking about liberty and economic opportunity. The Assembly threw out his allies and he, Charles Watson and six others walked out, which left the house without half its members. On 15 January they wrote the freeholders to come to Savannah. Governor John Reynolds answered with a proclamation against tumultuous assemblies and a counterrevolutionary armed association, and Gray and Watson fled Savannah. Rothbard says Gray then led several hundred followers south of the Altamaha, into country the Crown had left empty, where no long arm of government could reach them (CiL, p. 617). They settled Cumberland Island and New Hanover on the Satilla River. To Georgia's government their freedom was a standing reproach, and in 1758 the Crown ordered the settlements crushed. Gray was not finished. In 1761 he was back on Cumberland Island with more than seventy families. Rothbard compares the place to Rhode Island and North Carolina a century before, a haven for people discontented with governments.