The first settlers on the banks of the James River, looking from beneath
their hands southward over plain land and a haze of endless forests,
called that unexplored country South Virginia. It stretched away to
those rivers and bays, to that island of Roanoke, whence had fled
Raleigh's settlers. Beyond that, said the James River men, was Florida.
Time passed, and the region of South Virginia was occasionally spoken of
as Carolina, though whether that name was drawn from Charles the First
of England, or whether those old unfortunate Huguenots in Florida had
used it with reference to Charles the Ninth of France, is not certainly
known.
South Virginia lay huge, unknown, unsettled. The only exception was the
country immediately below the southern banks of the lower James with the
promontory that partially closed in Chesapeake Bay. Virginia, growing
fast, at last sent her children into this region. In 1653 the Assembly
enacted: "Upon the petition of Roger Green, clarke, on the behalfe
of himselfe and inhabitants of Nansemund river, It is ordered by this
present Grand Assembly that tenn thousand acres of land be granted unto
one hundred such persons who shall first seate on Moratuck or Roanoke
river and the land lying upon the south side of Choan river and the
ranches thereof, Provided that such seaters settle advantageously for
security and be sufficiently furnished with amunition and strength...."
Green and his men, well furnished presumably with firelocks, bullets,
and powder-horns, went into this hinterland. At intervals there followed
other hardy folk. Quakers, subject to persecution in old Virginia,
fled into these wilds. The name Carolina grew to mean backwoods,
frontiersman's land. Here were forest and stream, Indian and bear and
wolf, blue waters of sound and sea, long outward lying reefs and shoals
and islets, fertile soil and a clime neither hot nor cold. Slowly the
people increased in number. Families left settled Virginia for the
wilderness; men without families came there for reasons good and bad.
Their cabins, their tiny hamlets were far apart; they practised a
hazardous agriculture; they hunted, fished, and traded with the Indians.
The isolation of these settlers bred or increased their personal
independence, while it robbed them of that smoothness to be gained where
the social particles rub together. This part of South Virginia was soon
to be called North Carolina.
Far down the coast was Cape Fear. In the year of the Restoration a
handful of New England men came here in a ship and made a settlement
which, not prospering, was ere long abandoned. But New Englanders traded
still in South Virginia as along other coasts. Seafarers, they entered
at this inlet and at that, crossed the wide blue sounds, and,
anchoring in mouths of rivers, purchased from the settlers their forest
commodities. Then over they ran to the West Indies, and got in exchange
sugar and rum and molasses, with which again they traded for tobacco in
Carolina, in Virginia, and in Maryland. These ships went often to New
Providence in the Bahamas and to Barbados. There began, through trade
and other circumstances, a special connection between the long coast
line and these islands that were peopled by the English. The restored
Kingdom of England had many adherents to reward. Land in America,
islands and main, formed the obvious Fortunatus's purse. As the second
Charles had divided Virginia for the benefit of Arlington and Culpeper,
so now, in 1663, to "our right trusty and right well-beloved cousins and
counsellors, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, our High Chancellor of England,
and George, Duke of Albemarle, Master of our Horse and CaptainGeneral of
all our Forces, our right trusty and well-beloved William, Lord Craven,
John, Lord Berkeley, our right trusty and well-beloved counsellor,
Anthony, Lord Ashley, Chancellor of our Exchequer, Sir George Carteret,
Knight and Baronet, Vice-Chamberlain of our Household, and our trusty and
well-beloved Sir William Berkeley, Knight, and Sir John Colleton, Knight
and Baronet," he gave South Virginia, henceforth called the Carolinas,
a region occupying five degrees of latitude, and stretching indefinitely
from the seacoast toward the setting sun.
This huge territory became, like Maryland, a province or palatinate. In
Maryland was one Proprietary; in Carolina there were eight, though
for distinction the senior of the eight was called the Palatine. As in
Maryland, the Proprietaries had princely rights. They owed allegiance to
England, and a small quit-rent went to the King. They were supposed
to govern, in the main, by English law and to uphold the religion of
England. They were to make laws at their discretion, with "the advice,
assent, and approbation of the freemen, or of their deputies, who were
to be assembled from time to time as seemed best."
John Locke, who wrote the "Essay Concerning Human Understanding",
wrote also, with Ashley at his side, "The Fundamental Constitutions of
Carolina, in number a Hundred and Twenty, agreed upon by the Palatine
and Lords Proprietors, to remain the sacred and unalterable form and
Rule of government of Carolina forever."
"Forever" is a long word with ofttimes a short history. The Lords
Proprietors have left their names upon the maps of North and South
Carolina. There are Albemarle Sound and the Ashley and Cooper rivers,
Clarendon, Hyde, Carteret, Craven, and Colleton Counties. But their
Fundamental Constitutions, "in number a hundred and twenty," written
by Locke in 1669, are almost all as dead as the leaves of the Carolina
forest falling in the autumn of that year.
The grant included that territory settled by Roger Green and his men.
Among the Proprietors sat Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia,
the only lord of Carolina actually upon American ground. Following
instructions from his seven fellows Berkeley now declared this region
separated from Virginia and attached to Carolina. He christened it
Albemarle. Strangely enough, he sent as Governor that Scotchman, William
Drummond, whom some years later he would hang. Drummond should have
a Council of six and an Assembly of freemen that might inaugurate
legislation having to do with local matters but must submit its acts
to the Proprietaries for veto or approval. This was the settlement in
Carolina of Albemarle, back country to Virginia, gatherer thence of many
that were hardy and sound, many that were unfortunate, and many that
were shiftless and untamed. An uncouth nurse of a turbulent democracy
was Albemarle.
Cape Fear, far down the deeply frayed coast, seemed a proper place to
which to send a colony. The intrusive Massachusetts men were gone. But
"gentlemen and merchants" of Barbados were interested. It is a far
cry from Barbados to the Carolina shore, but so is it a far cry from
England. Many royalists had fled to Barbados during the old troubles, so
that its English population was considerable. A number may have welcomed
the chance to leave their small island for the immense continent; and an
English trading port as far south as Cape Fear must have had a general
appeal. So, in 1665, came Englishmen from Barbados and made, up the Cape
Fear River, a settlement which they named Clarendon, with John Yeamans
of Barbados as Governor. But the colony did not prosper. There arose the
typical colonial troubles--sickness, dissensions, improvidence, quarrels
with the aborigines. Nor was the site the best obtainable. The settlers
finally abandoned the place and scattered to various points along the
northern coast.
In 1669 the Lords Proprietaries sent out from England three ships,
the Carolina, the Port Royal, and the Albemarle, with about a hundred
colonists aboard. Taking the old sea road, they came at last to
Barbados, and here the Albemarle, seized by a storm, was wrecked. The
two other ships, with a Barbados sloop, sailed on anal were approaching
the Bahamas when another hurricane destroyed the Port Royal. The
Carolina, however, pushed on with the sloop, reached Bermuda, and rested
there; then, together with a small ship purchased in these islands, she
turned west by south and came in March of 1670 to the good harbor of
Port Royal, South Carolina.
Southward from the harbor where the ships rode, stretched old Florida,
held by the Spaniards. There was the Spanish town, St. Augustine. Thence
Spanish ships might put forth and descend upon the English newcomers.
The colonists after debate concluded to set some further space between
them and lands of Spain. The ships put again to sea, beat northward a
few leagues, and at last entered a harbor into which emptied two rivers,
presently to be called the Ashley and the Cooper. Up the Ashley they
went a little way, anchored, and the colonists going ashore began to
build upon the west bank of the river a town which for the King they
named Charles Town. Ten years later this place was abandoned in favor of
the more convenient point of land between the two rivers. Here then was
builded the second and more enduring Charles Town--Charleston, as we
call it now, in South Carolina.
Colonists came fast to this Carolina lying south. Barbados sent many;
England, Scotland, and Ireland contributed a share; there came Huguenots
from France, and a certain number of Germans. In ten years after
the first settling the population numbered twelve hundred, and this
presently doubled and went on to increase. The early times were taken up
with the wrestle with the forest, with the Indians, with Spanish alarms,
with incompetent governors, with the Lords Proprietaries' Fundamental
Constitutions, and with the restrictions which English Navigation Laws
imposed upon English colonies. What grains and vegetables and tobacco
they could grow, what cattle and swine they could breed and export,
preoccupied the minds of these pioneer farmers. There were struggling
for growth a rough agriculture and a hampered trade with Barbados,
Virginia, and New England--trade likewise with the buccaneers who
swarmed in the West Indian waters.
Five hundred good reasons allowed, and had long allowed, free bootery to
flourish in American seas. Gross governmental faults, Navigation
Acts, and a hundred petty and great oppressions, general poverty,
adventurousness, lawlessness, and sympathy of mishandled folk with
lawlessness, all combined to keep Brother of the Coast, Buccaneer, and
Filibuster alive, and their ships upon all seas. Many were no worse than
smugglers; others were robbers with violence; and a few had a dash of
the fiend. All nations had sons in the business. England to the south in
America had just the ragged coast line, with its off-lying islands and
islets, liked by all this gentry, whether smuggler or pirate outright.
Through much of the seventeenth century the settlers on these shores
never violently disapproved of the pirate. He was often a "good fellow."
He brought in needed articles without dues, and had Spanish gold in his
pouch. He was shrugged over and traded with.
He came ashore to Charles Town, and they traded with him there. At one
time Charles Town got the name of "Rogue's Harbor." But that was not
forever, nor indeed, as years are counted, for long. Better and better
emigrants arrived, to add to the good already there. The better type
prevailed, and gave its tone to the place. There set in, on the Ashley
and Cooper rivers, a fair urban life that yet persists.
South Carolina was trying tobacco and wheat. But in the last years of
the seventeenth century a ship touching at Charleston left there a bag
of Madagascar rice. Planted, it gave increase that was planted again.
Suddenly it was found that this was the crop for low-lying Carolina.
Rice became her staple, as was tobacco of Virginia.
For the rice-fields South Carolina soon wanted African slaves, and they
were consequently brought in numbers, in English ships. There began, in
this part of the world, even more than in Virginia, the system of large
plantations and the accompanying aristocratic structure of society. But
in Virginia the planter families lived broadcast over the land, each
upon its own plantation. In South Carolina, to escape heat and sickness,
the planters of rice and indigo gave over to employees the care of
their great holdings and lived themselves in pleasant Charleston. These
plantations, with their great gangs of slaves under overseers, differed
at many points from the more kindly, semi-patriarchal life of the
Virginian plantation. To South Carolina came also the indentured white
laborer, but the black was imported in increasing numbers.
From the first in the Carolinas there had been promised fair freedom
for the unorthodox. The charters provided, says an early Governor, "an
overplus power to grant liberty of conscience, although at home was a
hot persecuting time." Huguenots, Independents, Quakers, dissenters of
many kinds, found on the whole refuge and harbor. In every colony soon
began the struggle by the dominant color and caste toward political
liberty. King, Company, Lords Proprietaries, might strive to rule from
over the seas. But the new land fast bred a practical rough freedom. The
English settlers came out from a land where political change was in the
air. The stream was set toward the crumbling of feudalism, the rise of
democracy. In the New World, circumstances favoring, the stream became
a tidal river. Governors, councils, assemblies, might use a misleading
phraseology of a quaint servility toward the constituted powers in
England. Tory parties might at times seem to color the land their own
hue. But there always ran, though often roughly and with turbulence, a
set of the stream against autocracy.
In Carolina, South and North, by the Ashley and Cooper rivers, and in
that region called Albemarle, just back of Virginia, there arose and
went on, through the remainder of the seventeenth century and in the
eighteenth, struggles with the Lords Proprietaries and the Governors
that these named, and behind this a more covert struggle with the Crown.
The details differed, but the issues involved were much the same in
North and South Carolina. The struggle lasted for the threescore and
odd years of the proprietary government and renewed itself upon occasion
after 1729 when the Carolinas became royal colonies. Later, it was
swept, a strong affluent, into the great general stream of colonial
revolt, culminating in the Revolution.
Into North Carolina, beside the border population entering through
Virginia and containing much of a backwoods and derelict nature, came
many Huguenots, the best of folk, and industrious Swiss, and Germans
from the Rhine. Then the Scotch began to come in numbers, and families
of Scotch descent from the north of Ireland. The tone of society
consequently changed from that of the early days. The ruffian and the
shiftless sank to the bottom. There grew up in North Carolina a
people, agricultural but without great plantations, hardworking and
freedom-loving.
South Carolina, on the other hand, had great plantations, a town
society, suave and polished, a learned clergy, an aristocratic cast to
life. For long, both North and South clung to the sea-line and to the
lower stretches of rivers where the ships could come in. Only by degrees
did English colonial life push back into the forests away from the sea,
to the hills, and finally across the mountains.