Wright, Governor Sir James

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Wright, Governor Sir James

WRIGHT, GOVERNOR SIR JAMES. (1716–1785). Royal governor of Georgia. South Carolina-Georgia. Often confused with his son, Major Sir James Wright, the senior Wright was born in London on 8 May 1716, moving with his family to Charleston in 1730 when his father, Robert, became chief justice of South Carolina. Wright studied law and became South Carolina's attorney general in 1739. In 1757 he went to London as the province's agent. On 13 May 1760 he was appointed lieutenant governor of Georgia, becoming governor the following year.

Most of Wright's governorship was devoted to maintaining peace between the Indians and the people he called "Crackers," aggressive settlers who violated English laws and Indian property rights in their move westward. Though there were protests against the Stamp Act, Georgia was the only colony in which they were sold. On 2 January 1766 Wright led a detachment of mounted rangers to break up a crowd of two hundred men in the port who were threatening to seize and destroy the recently arrived stamps. On 4 February he defied a body of three hundred armed countrymen who came into Savannah to make him stop the issue of the stamps, and public opinion finally rallied to his defense of law and order.

Governor Wright performed his duties capably and without any further serious challenge to his authority. In 1773 he won a high degree of popularity in the province when he negotiated a new Indian treaty that opened up more lands to white settlement, effectively negating the Proclamation Line of 1763. His handling of the Creek War of 1773–1774 was brilliant, using trade sanctions rather than violence to bring the Creek to negotiate an end to the conflict. The crown rewarded Wright on 8 December 1772 by making him a baronet. News of Lexington and Concord changed the situation in Georgia. The Liberty Boys of Savannah, led by young Joseph Habersham, defied royal authority and, on 11 May, seized five hundred pounds of powder from the provincial magazine. On 2 June they spiked a battery in Savannah; three days later they erected the first liberty pole in the province and paraded with fixed bayonets. On 4 July the Provincial Congress met and took control of the province. Wright remained another six months, hoping for the armed assistance needed to restore his authority, but when two warships and a troop transport arrived in January 1776, the Patriots promptly arrested Wright to keep him from rallying the Loyalists around this nucleus of regulars. Held incommunicado for a month, he finally escaped and took refuge aboard a warship. He made an unsuccessful attempt to take Savannah by force but in February 1776 gave up hope of restoring control and sailed for Halifax; two months later he left Halifax for England.

In 1779, after the British had recaptured Savannah, Wright returned to his former post, arriving 14 June and convening a Loyalist assembly. Wright and General Augustine Prevost defended Savannah against a Franco-American siege in September-October 1779. Over the next year Georgia and South Carolina were restored to British authority. Wright opposed Cornwallis's policy of pushing north from South Carolina, leaving the two southern states exposed to attack. Lee took Augusta in June 1780, and Savannah was isolated until the British surrendered the city in July 1782, contrary to Wright's wishes. Losing eleven plantations and more than five hundred slaves to confiscation by the victorious Patriots, Wright headed the commission that awarded compensation for Loyalist losses during the Revolution. Wright received nothing from his commission, though he estimated his loss at thirty-three thousand pounds. However, the government gave him an annual pension of five hundred pounds. He died in Westminster on 20 November 1785.

Governor Wright's brother Jermyn commanded a Loyalist strongpoint on the St. Mary's River in East Florida that the Patriots attacked several times without success. The governor's son, Sir James Wright (d. 1816), inherited the title on the death of his father. Commissioned a major in 1779, he commanded the Georgia Loyalists at the defense of Savannah. In 1782 this unit became part of the King's (Carolina) Rangers.

SEE ALSO Hutchinson's Island, Georgia.