Background
The place and the date of his birth are unknown. He is said to have been a Saxon of good family. His parents were Friedrich Priber, a linen merchant and beerhouse owner, and Anna Dorothea Bergmann.
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Christian Priber
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also known as
Pryber and Preber
Education
Priber studied law at Erfurt University.
Career
About 1734 he emigrated to South Carolina, but in 1736 he retired from Charlestown to the mountains to live among the Cherokee Indians, the "noble savages" of the generous tradition to which he subscribed. His attempt to found an ideal commonwealth among the southern Indians made that frontier for a few years the first frontier of eighteenth-century radicalism. His behaviour convinced the colonists that he was a French agent, some declared a Jesuit. It is true that he promoted a trade between these old friends of the English and the French at New Orleans, but he did so only to preserve their liberties until they could throw off the yoke of their European allies, of all nations.
He wanted to create his "red empire", ancient Cusawatee at the foot of the mountains was the chosen site. To this city of refuge, reported Oglethorpe, Priber expected a great resort for the benefit of the Asylum from the numbers of Debtors, Transport Felons, Servants, and negroe Slaves in the two Carolina's and Virginia. Liberty and equality were the foundation principles of the new "Paradise, " with such corollaries as community of goods and of women, and the rearing of children by the state.
It was Priber's misfortune that his scheme ran right athwart the imperial purposes of the English in America. When in 1739 a commission from South Carolina was sent to arrest him, he was shielded by the Cherokee. However, in the spring of 1743 the traders among the Upper Creeks incited those Indians to seize him; he was sent down, with his bundle of mysterious manuscripts, to Georgia to be treated by Oglethorpe and his officers as a political prisoner. A few years later he died in the fort at Frederica.
Achievements
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Christian Priber was the first who tried to build eighteenth-century "socialism", he labored to form all the southern Indians into a great independent confederation. Namely, he promoted a trade between Creeks, Choctaw, and the Mississippi River tribes, as well as the Cherokee. Thus, he sought to found a communistic "Town and Society" which might in time serve as a model for a republic to be set up in France, but he failed.
Views
He anticipated the axiom of the Saint-Simonists: that each would find what he needed for subsistence or for other needs and that each should contribute his share toward the good of society.
Quotations: "The law of nature should be established as the sole law. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Being a great Scholar, " one Carolina trader averred, "he soon made himself master of Cherokee Tongue, and by his insinuating manner indeavoured to gain their hearts, he trimmed his hair in the indian manner & painted as they did going generally almost naked".
Connections
Priber wed Christiane Dorothea Hoffmann, the daughter of a merchant, printer, and Senator, in November 1722; they would have five children.
