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The BOT promoted Barnwell's frontier forts as emergency solution
Source: The Southern Frontier #86
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Accordingly, on August 30, 1720, the Board submitted to the Privy Council, along with Nicholson's instructions, an emergency report upon the two border colonies. 85 [Note 85 C.O. 5 :400, p. 31-40. All quotations in this paragraph are from that document.] Four battalions of foot should be sent to each, and in the South the Barnwell plan of frontier forts should be put into immediate execution. The Board, indeed, recognized the utility of the scheme for the whole continental frontier. The French had realized that 'a continued Possession in an uninhabited Country was a better Title than a Charter without Possession; and for the same reason no doubt it would behove us to extend ourselves as far as may be by building Forts in convenient Places to mark our Possessions likewise on the frontiers of our several Colonies on the Continent of America.' The location of most of the Carolina posts might be left to Nicholson's discretion, but there was a special urgency in securing the river Altamaha. The failure of the French to retain possession of Pensacola in the Treaty of Madrid, and the difficulties which they had encountered in the navigation of the mouth of the Mississippi made it more than ever probable that they would seek to intrude into the region between St. Augustine and the Carolina border, whereby 'the British Interest in America wou'd receive a more fatal Blow... than from any other Possession the French have hitherto acquired on the continent of America.' In this first item only of the new western policy was the Board able to carry the Privy Council with it. To the program as a whole, as propounded from Whitehall in 1720 and again in 1721, there were formidable objections. The expense would be considerable; and in any case such a conception of territorial 'imperialism' on a continental scale was alien to the temper of Whig colonial administration. Even so, the discussions of 1720-1721 mark a significant stage in the development of British 'imperialism' and especially of British western policy in face of French encirclement. The provincial origins of that policy were indubitable.
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