You are my prisoner

Rothbard’s account

From Conceived in Liberty, chapter 18, pp. 1201–1202 (2011 edition). Every sentence here comes from Rothbard’s text; the words in quotation marks are his.

Georgia, Rothbard writes, “had been the colony least enthusiastic for the opposition to Great Britain,” and there armed Tory resistance was at first avoided by “the very mildness of the Whig response” (p. 1201). Only the rebel enclave of St. John’s sent a delegate to the Second Continental Congress. The opening of hostilities at Lexington and Concord, he writes, “coupled with the angry boycott of Georgia by the other colonies, could only push Georgian opinion into a more active course” (p. 1201). On hearing the news the Liberty Boys broke into the public powder magazine. Realizing that Governor Wright’s power “could only be nullified and eliminated by force,” Rothbard writes, the Liberty Boys organized an effective “Savannah Mob,” “headed by young Joseph Habersham, son of the president of the Georgia Council” (p. 1202). This spearhead of the liberty militants was “a cross section of the town’s activists: aristocrats, laborers, and town rowdies alike” (p. 1202). “The blows of the mob soon wrecked the authority and morale of the royal government,” and Wright “soon saw that his cause was lost” (p. 1202). Rothbard says the campaign was capped in early July 1775 by Habersham and others “openly and boldly carrying off the government’s store of munitions” (p. 1202).

On June 13 several hundred Liberty Boys at Savannah put up a Liberty Tree and called a provincial congress, which became the de facto legislature and soon took over the militia and the courts.

In mid-January British warships appeared at the mouth of the Savannah River to aid Wright, “who had been shorn of all authority by the rebel provincial congress” (p. 1202). The Council of Safety “promptly decided to seize Wright and other officials to prevent them from rallying the Georgia Tories” (p. 1202). Rothbard writes simply: “He was arrested by Habersham, but a few weeks later he escaped to flee to a British warship” (p. 1202). “Georgia Toryism, like its counterparts in the other southern provinces, had been outmaneuvered and effectively suppressed” (p. 1202).