A401 - The coast, rivers and inlets of the Province of Georgia

J.F.W. Des Barres

h28" x w34"

L

The edition presented here is taken from a 'pull' (print) made by the British Admiralty in about 1947 from Des Barres' original copper plates, before the plates were presented to the US government. The result of the pull was that we are presented with an authentic view of what the charts of the Atlantic Neptune would have looked like when they were originally made. The heavy hatchuring included on this edition is typical of later editions prints made by Des Barres'.

 

The British interest in this region intensified in 1778 as it became clear that support for the Colonial cause and Independence had gained strength to the point that the New England states were virtually lost.

 

By the time this chart was drawn the British had already decided that the largely loyalist middle and southern states might still be retained as part of the Empire, and under the new command of General Henry Clinton they started to implement their 'Southern Strategy' as follows: By occupying the key town of Savannah (along with that of Charleston in South Carolina) and by mobilizing and arming the loyalist population, including the slaves, they hoped to split these states from the rest.

 

The more loyalists that could be assimilated into the army, the more British troops could be concentrated elsewhere. By controlling the the rivers, harbors and waterways of the eastern seaboard vital supplies of munitions and other essentials needed by the Colonial army to stay in the war might be denied and a strangulation invoked.

 

American links to the Caribbean and France were strong at this time. In addition Georgia and other southern states produced the commodities upon which the economics of Empire was built - tobacco, rice, indigo and so on, and the British government planned to link these states along with their holdings in east Florida, the Bahamas and Bermuda as a new colonial grouping. As such the war effort in the South was, for the British, as much about defending economic ties as it was about defeating the Continental Army.

 

In the December of 1778 the British captured Savannah with an expeditionary corps, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Archibald Campbell, as the opening play of this plan. Later, in 1779 the Americans, along with their new French allies, besieged the town between September 16th and October 19th in an unsuccessful attempt to regain control. The town remained in British hands until the near the end of the War for Independence in 1782. By this time, Georgia was economically devastated by the loss of plantations, which had been burned, and the collapse of the slave economy.

 

In 1775 the population of Georgia and South Carolina had been approximately 200,000, of which about half were slaves. By the end of the war many of the slaves had been lost to the war, to the British army, or had absconded. The area was not helped in its recovery in the aftermath of the war by the significant emigration from the area of loyalist supporters (see also Heritage Charts A205, A304 and A306).

The coast, rivers and inlets of the Province of Georgia