8 - Conversion and Its Discontents on the Southern Colonial Frontier: The Pietist Encounter with Non-Christians in Colonial Georgia

Summary

From his arrival in Georgia in 1734 to his death in 1765, the Pietist pastor Johann Martin Boltzius spent more than thirty years on the southernmost frontier of Britain’s North American empire. There he served as leader of Ebenezer, a small community of Protestant refugees from the Catholic territory of Salzburg driven from their homeland on account of their beliefs. In sponsoring Boltzius’s enterprise, his Pietist superiors in Germany had also assigned him missionary duties aimed at Christianizing Georgia’s indigenous population. Conversion of the Native population was only one part of a broader Pietist vision, a global program of spiritual renewal designed to evangelize the world and bring forth the Kingdom of God. Accordingly, Boltzius’s missionary efforts in Georgia also targeted other non-Christian peoples he encountered during his time in the colony. This contribution examines three in particular: (1) the small contingent of German-speaking Jews who had migrated to Georgia in 1733; (2) the colony’s Yuchi people; and (3) the growing population of enslaved Africans who began arriving after 1750 when the colony’s initial ban on the importation of slaves was formally repealed.