Masters Theses

Date of Award

5-1989

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

History

Major Professor

Arthur G. Haas

Committee Members

Cathy Matson, Bruce Wheeler

Abstract

The Salzburger immigrants to colonial Georgia have been the focus of several historians and genealogists who found the exiles to have been industrious, honest and pious, but isolated from the mainstream of events in Savannah and the colony. Descriptions of their community of Ebenezer are filled with admiration and praise for the orderliness and prosperity of the German settlers, yet for all practical purposes the town failed to survive beyond the American Revolution, despite the fact that descendants of the original immigrants continued to live and work in the county. The question of why Ebenezer did not survive the colonial era has been frequently asked, but never answered satisfactorily.

While this thesis does not deny the validity of earlier disintegration theories that have been proposed to explain the demise of the community, it can be shown that each theory explained only a single aspect of the problem faced by the Salzburgers and did not reveal the cause, namely, the failure of the community to establish leadership from within and free itself from economic and spiritual dependency on its benefactors in Europe. In order to understand the sources of the problems and trace them through the life of the community, this thesis will explore the expulsion of the Salzburgers from the Archbishopric of Salzburg in 1731, the creation of the community by English and German benefactors, the relationship between the colony of Georgia and the community of Ebenezer, and the disintegration of the community. Previously-held assumptions about the expulsion and the nature of the Ebenezer community are questioned, with the presumption of prosperity rejected in favor of a theory that the appearance of orderliness and piety masked the poverty and dependency of the community.

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