By Peter Longley
Many of us enjoyed the excellent tour of John Wesley’s London home and chapel on City Road on Wednesday, October 16. Most of you probably barely noticed the print in the dining room of Charles Wesley supposedly preaching to the native people of the Province of Georgia in the American colonies. It piqued an interest for me, however, as for 33 years I lived on St. Simons Island, Georgia.
When I arrived there in 1967, the island had a primitive beauty. Most of the low-lying land was covered in sub-tropical palmettos, turpentine pines, and evergreen live oaks festooned in what we called Spanish moss—a grey air plant. There were many areas of swamp with brackish salt water from which the bulbous eyes of alligators peered, and cottonmouth moccasin snakes freely swam. Most the island was surrounded by vast tidal marshes or sandy beaches and a plethora of birds. Today, it is still a beautiful place, but has become an exclusive community of wealthy homes and golf courses.
Visitors to the primitive version of St. Simons I knew in 1967 became aware very quickly that this same primitive island was the home of John and Charles Wesley in 1735-1736. The two young Anglican clergymen had come out to the debtors’ colony of Georgia as chaplain and secretary to the English colonial governor, General James Oglethorpe. At that time, the island was even more primitive in its mysterious beauty than in 1967 and was mostly populated by native Americans. By the nineteenth century, the islands had become an area of prosperous rice plantations on which was grown the first long staple Egyptian cotton in the South, still known to us today as Sea Island cotton. At that time, much of the land was cleared for the plantations, and most of the population were slaves. With the decimation of plantation life in the American Civil War—always in Georgia, the War between the States—the island returned to its primitive look.
In 1735, the debtors’ colony was a buffer area between the Carolinas and Spanish Florida, and Savannah was its only city. Spanish forces were constantly invading the area, and General Oglethorpe established Fort Frederica, a garrison town on the barrier Island of St. Simons. Some of the native Americans acted as spies against the Spaniards for Oglethorpes’ British soldiers. Supposedly, it was to these native Americans that Charles Wesley preached under a live oak tree just outside the ditch rampart around the little town. In the print at Wesley’s London house, the landscape shown is not really the palmetto landscape of the island, which is why it is regarded as a little suspect. However, John and Charles Wesley built the first wooden Anglican church on St Simons near that old live oak tree. It survived until it was burned in the Civil War as the planters’ church. In the 1880s, a new, more beautiful wooden church was built on the same site. As a postulant for Holy orders in the Anglican (Episcopal) Diocese of Georgia in the 1980s, I preached there many times. The parish still claims direct descent from the Wesley brothers, and today on another part of the island there is a large Methodist Conference centre that is appropriately called Epworth-by-the Sea, Epworth being the Wesley brothers’ father’s parish in their childhood in England. St. Simons Island is revered by American Methodists.
On our tour of the London complex on City Road, we did not hear much about the Wesleys in Georgia, and probably for good reason. After two years, Charles Wesley fell out with James Oglethorpe and left the colony, and John Wesley became involved in a serious scandal leaving America in disgrace a few months later. This failure in Georgia might in some way, through penitence and guilt, have led to the brothers’ profound spiritual conversions (the Aldersgate experience) in May of 1738, of which we did hear quite a bit.
In Savannah, John Wesley’s strict discipline as rector of Christ Church—today the Cathedral of the Anglican Diocese of Georgia—irritated many of his parishioners. But when John Wesley fell in love with Sophia Hopkey, the niece of Georgia’s chief magistrate, and she turned from him to marry another man, Wesley banned her from Holy Communion in a jealous rage, damaging her reputation in the community. His successful romantic rival sued him, but Wesley refused to recognize the authority of the court.
Five years after the Wesleys left Georgia, General James Oglethorpe fought a major battle with the Spanish in the marshes of St. Simons Island—the battle of Bloody Marsh. The rout of the Spaniards at Bloody Marsh firmly established the boundaries of the fluid Province of Georgia and determined that the area would be a British American colony and not a part of Spanish Florida.