There already exists voluminous material on the Wesleys’ mission to Georgia, so one must ask what John Thomas Scott's scholarly work contributes to the corpus. The author gives us the answer in his preface to this detailed and meticulously researched study. Whereas, understandably, many historians have sought to emphasise the significance of the Georgia episode in the light of the subsequent history of Methodism – for example, in what John Wesley took from his experience which he later applied to future Methodist institutions and practices – Scott is concerned rather to ‘understand the Anglican mission on its own terms and not the terms that history has imposed on it’ (p. xiii). And so we find space being given to the other participants in the venture, such as Charles Delamotte and Benjamin Ingham, as well as Oglethorpe, of course.
The bulk of John Scott's study of ‘the great experiment’ takes the form of a chronological narrative, with the author being at pains to set the founding of the colony in a wider colonial and religious perspective, which helps the reader to appreciate some of the apparently anomalous developments which took place there over the years, and why, for example, Georgia was so very different from the settlements at Roanoke or in Pennsylvania. But this was an age in which volumes of sermons were best-sellers, and – an interesting facet which the author explores in his narrative – a context in which class and gender were more important factors than race in shaping the nature of the early Georgian communities. Incidentally, unlike other writers, John Scott reminds us that there were two, not one, German communities in Georgia, though little attention seems to have been given to the Salzburgers compared with the Moravians – presumably because the latter had such close contacts with the Wesley brothers.
Scott narrates the actual events of 1735–8 with great skill, and the reader who imagines that it will resemble an extended soap opera and thinks it wiser simply to dip into sections of the text will be well advised not to do so. However, it is indeed a fascinating account, in which are interweaved not only the stories of individuals (such as Sophia (Sophy) Hopkey, Anne Welch, Causton, Oglethorpe, Tomochichi and the Wesleys themselves), but also the wider aspects, such as the challenges presented by the land settlements, the building of churches – areas of interest and importance not always covered by ‘Methodist’ histories. That said, readers who are particularly interested in the Wesleys will find Scott's treatment of their period in Georgia, and especially John's tempestuous relationship with Sophia Hopkey, a fair and balanced one.
Inevitably, however, historians will be drawn to the author's overall assessment of the enterprise in chapter xi, which has a helpful historiographical structure. This prevents the analysis being over-concentrated on the Wesleys. Here, one has to question John Scott's view of Wesley's own reflections, particularly those penned in the famous entry in his journal in January 1738, when he admitted ‘that I who went to America to convert others, was never myself converted to God’ (p. 296). The important footnotes that Wesley added later are surprisingly ignored, since they give a rather different and more subtle perspective on Wesley's own summary of the effect that the Georgia episode had on his spiritual journey. This is a pity, because the later amendments reveal a great deal about the workings of the older Wesley's mind, and also the way in which early Methodism was to develop.
Whilst both the Wesleys themselves were fairly equivocal about these years, we are not surprised to find that their contemporaries were more critical, basically on two grounds: John's involvement with Sophia Hopkey, and the way in which he ‘expounded the divine truth … too legalistically than evangelically’. Interestingly, John and Charles's Anglican contemporaries were, on the whole, kinder in their judgement, but Scott makes the interesting point that the pieces written during the eighteenth century almost invariably focused on the Wesleys, with very little attention being given to George Whitefield's work in Georgia during the same period.
In the nineteenth century, the well-known assessment of John Whitehead was understandably rather uncritical, but the author shows that the oft-repeated accusation that later Methodist historians wrote hagiography is patently untrue. Southey's widely read biography of John Wesley, for example, included the memorable (and oft quoted) conclusion that he ‘drenched’ the people of Savannah ‘with the physic of an intolerant discipline’. Thomas Jackson, who published much of Charles Wesley's writings and wrote his biography in 1844, said that the younger Wesley preached a ‘rigid and repulsive’ religion to the people. Scott also reminds us that Luke Tyerman, the most noted historian of Methodism in the nineteenth century, referred to John Wesley's actions in Georgia as ‘arrogant, foolish, offensive and intolerant’. Writing a little later, Thomas Telford was kinder in his assessment of the brothers and, whilst his and the perspective of later ‘Methodist’ historians was more balanced, Scott makes some important observations concerning more recent studies which have approached the Georgia episode from a wider perspective. The twentieth-century commentaries are more satisfying in this respect, and one cannot help but agree with Frank Baker's remark that ‘the influence of Wesley on Georgia was of less importance than the influence of Georgia on Wesley’ (p. 320).
One could have wished, perhaps, for the author to have set out his own conclusions more boldly in the latter part of his book, but its overall excellence does not suffer too much from this. In essence, The Wesleys and the Anglican mission to Georgia is an accurate and carefully researched study of an episode in the eighteenth century that is important, not just for Methodism, but for the wider Church, in that it gives us a well-balanced perspective on a well-known episode in the history of both Methodism and Georgia itself.
