THE CAROLINA FRONTIER.
[Sidenote: The Spanish frontier.]
[Sidenote: The wilderness frontier.]
“St. Augustine, a Spanish garrison, being planted to the southward
of us about a hundred leagues, makes Carolina a frontier to all
the English settlements on the Main.” These memorable words, from
the report of the governor and council at Charleston to the lords
proprietors of Carolina in London, in the year 1708, have a deeper
historic significance than was realized by the men who wrote them.
In a twofold sense Carolina was a frontier country. It was not only
the border region where English and Spanish America marched upon each
other, but it served for some time as a kind of backwoods for Virginia.
Until recently one of the most important factors in American history
has been the existence of a perpetually advancing frontier, where
new territory has often had to be won by hard fighting against its
barbarian occupants, where the life has been at once more romantic
and more sordid than on the civilized seaboard, and where democracy
has assumed its most distinctively American features. The cessation
of these circumstances will probably be one of the foremost among
the causes which are going to make America in the twentieth century
different from America in the nineteenth. Now for the full development
of this peculiar frontier life two conditions were requisite,--first,
the struggle with the wilderness; secondly, isolation from the currents
of European thought with which the commercial seaboard was kept in
contact. These conditions were first realized in North Carolina, and
there was originated the type of backwoods life which a century later
prevailed among the settlers of Tennessee and Kentucky. That was the
one point where the backwoods may be said to have started at the
coast; and in this light we shall have to consider it. On the other
hand, South Carolina, with the Georgia colony for its buffer, is to
be considered more in the light of a frontier against the Spaniard.
We shall have furthermore to contemplate the whole Carolina coast as
preeminently the frontier upon which were wrecked the last remnants
of the piracy and buccaneering that had grown out of the mighty
Elizabethan world-struggle between England and Spain. Without some
mention of all these points, our outline sketch of the complicated
drama begun by Drake and Raleigh would be incomplete.
[Sidenote: The grant of Carolina.]
The region long vaguely known as Carolina, or at least a portion of
it, had formed part of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Virginia; the Spaniards
had never ceased to regard it as part of Florida. In defiance of their
claims, Jean Ribaut planted his first ill-fated Huguenot colony at
Port Royal in 1562, and built a fort which he called Charlesfort,
after Charles IX. of France. Whether the name “Carolina” was applied
to the territory at that early time is doubtful,[254] but we find
it used in England, in the time of Charles I., when the first Lord
Baltimore was entertaining a plan for a new colony south of Virginia.
The name finally served to commemorate Charles II., who in 1663
granted the territory to eight “lords proprietors,” gentlemen who had
done him inestimable services. To the most eminent, George Monk, Duke
of Albemarle, he owed his restoration to the throne; the support of
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, had been invaluable; the others were
Anthony Ashley Cooper, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury, Lord Craven,
Lord Berkeley, and his brother, Sir William Berkeley, governor of
Virginia, Sir George Carteret, and Sir John Colleton. All these names
appear to-day on the map,--Albemarle Sound, Hyde, Craven, and Carteret
counties in North Carolina; Clarendon and Colleton counties, Berkeley
parish, and the Ashley and Cooper rivers in South Carolina, while in
Charleston we have the name of the king.
[Sidenote: Shaftesbury and Locke.]
These gentlemen contemplated founding a colony which should emulate the
success of Virginia. The most actively engaged in the enterprise was
the one whom we know best by his title of Shaftesbury, and it was thus
that the founding of Carolina became connected for a moment with one
of the greatest names in the history of England. A charming story is
that of the residence of John Locke in the Ashley family, as physician,
private tutor, and general adviser and guardian angel; how he once
saved his lordship’s life by most daring and skilful surgery, how he
taught Greek to the young Ashley, how he took the boy at the age of
seventeen to Haddon Hall and made a happy match for him with pretty
Lady Dorothy Manners aged twenty, how he afterward assisted at the
birth of the grandson destined to become even more famous in literature
than the grandfather in political history,--all this is pleasantly told
by the grandson. “My father was too young and inexperienced to choose a
wife for himself, and my grandfather too much in business to choose one
for him. The affair was nice; for, though my grandfather required not a
great fortune, he insisted on good blood, good person and constitution,
and, above all, good education and a character as remote as possible
from that of court or town-bred lady. All this was thrown upon Mr.
Locke, who being ... so good a judge of men, my grandfather doubted not
of his equal judgment in women. He departed from him, entrusted and
sworn, as Abraham’s head servant that ruled over all that he had, and
went into a far country (the north of England) to seek for his son a
wife, whom he as successfully found.”[255]
[Sidenote: The Fundamental Constitutions.]
In the summer of 1669, while the great philosopher was engaged upon
this match-making expedition, he varied the proceedings by drawing
up a constitution for Carolina, the original draft of which, a small
neatly written volume of 75 pages bound in vellum, is still preserved
among the Shaftesbury papers. This constitution diverges widely in some
respects from such a document as would have expressed Locke’s own
ideas of the right sort of government. The scheme which it set forth
was in the main Ashley’s, with such modifications as were necessary
to secure the approval of the other proprietors. It is not worth
our while to recount its complicated provisions, inasmuch as it was
never anything but a dead letter, and civil government sprouted up as
spontaneously in Carolina as if neither statesman nor philosopher had
ever given thought to the subject. One provision, however, expressed
an idea of which Locke was one of the foremost representatives, and
herein Ashley agreed with him; it was the idea of complete liberty
of conscience in matters of religion. It was provided that any seven
or more persons who could agree among themselves upon any sort of
notion about God or any plan for worshipping him might set up a church
and be guaranteed against all interference or molestation. An ideal
so noble as this was never quite realized in the history of any of
the colonies; but there can be little doubt that the publication of
Locke’s “Fundamental Constitutions” in 1670, in 1682, and 1698 had
much influence in directing toward Carolina the stream of Huguenot
emigration from France, which was an event of the first importance.[256]
[Sidenote: The Carolina Palatinate.]
In its general character the government created by the Fundamental
Constitutions was a palatinate modelled after that of Durham. The
difference between Carolina and Maryland consisted chiefly in the fact
that the palatinate privileges were granted to eight co-proprietors
instead of a single proprietor. Those privileges were quasi-royal, but
they were limited by giving to the popular assembly the control over
all money bills. This limitation, however, was partly offset by giving
to the higher officers regular salaries payable from quit-rents or
the sales of public lands. These salaries went far toward making such
officers independent of the legislature, and thus led to much complaint
and dissatisfaction. Before the Revolution, questions concerning the
salaried independence of high public officials had in several of the
colonies come to be one of the most burning questions of the day.
[Sidenote: The Palatine.]
The lords proprietors, as tenants-in-chief of the crown, were feudal
sovereigns over Carolina. They could grant estates on any terms they
pleased, and subinfeudation, which had been forbidden in England since
1290, was expressly permitted here. The eldest of the proprietors was
called the Palatine; he presided at their meetings, and his vote with
those of three associates was reckoned a majority. As the proprietors
remained in England, it was arranged that each of them should be
represented in Carolina by a deputy; and the Palatine’s deputy,
sometimes called Vice-Palatine, was to be governor of the colony. But
any one of the proprietors coming into the colony, or the oldest of
those coming, if there were more than one, was to take precedence over
everybody and become at once Vice-Palatine.
[Sidenote: Titles of nobility.]
By a curious provision of the charter, the lords proprietors could
grant titles of nobility, provided they were unlike those used
in England. Hence the outlandish titles, such as “landgrave” and
“cacique,” which occur in the Fundamental Constitutions. With the
titles there was combined an artificial system of social gradations
which is not worth recounting. As for the political status of the
settlers, they were guaranteed in the possession of all the rights and
privileges enjoyed by Englishmen in England.
[Sidenote: The Albemarle colony.]
The planting of two distinct colonies in Carolina was no part of the
original scheme, but the early centres of colonization were so far
apart and communication between them was so difficult that they could
not well be united in a single community, although more than once there
was a single governor over the whole of Carolina. Emigration from
Virginia had begun as early as 1653, when Roger Greene with a hundred
men made a small settlement in the Chowan precinct, on the north shore
of Albemarle Sound.[257] In 1662 George Durant[258] followed, and
began a settlement in the Perquimans precinct, just east of Chowan.
In 1664 Governor Berkeley, of Virginia,--himself one of the eight
lords proprietors,--severed this newly settled region from Virginia,
and appointed William Drummond as its governor. Such were the
beginnings of Albemarle, the colony which in time was to develop into
North Carolina.
[Illustration:
MAP OF
NORTH CAROLINA
PRECINCTS,
1663-1729
THE M.-N. CO., BUFFALO, N. Y.]
[Sidenote: The visit of New Englanders.]
Meanwhile in 1660 a party from New England made a settlement at
the mouth of Cape Fear River; or perhaps we ought rather to call
it a visit. It lasted no longer than Thorfinn Karlsefni’s visit to
Vinland,[259] for the settlers had all departed by 1663. There is a
tradition that they were sorely harassed by the natives, in revenge
for their sending sundry Indian lads and girls aboard ship, to be
taken to Boston and “educated,” _i. e._ sold for slaves.[260] This
is not improbable. At all events, these New Englanders went off in a
mood not altogether amiable, leaving affixed to a post, at the mouth
of the river, a “scandalous writing ... the contents whereof tended
not only to the disparagement of the land ... but also to the great
discouragement of all such as should hereafter come into those parts to
settle.”[261]
[Sidenote: The Clarendon colony.]
But this emphatic warning did not frighten away Sir John Yeamans, who
arrived at Cape Fear early in October, 1663, and ascended the river for
more than a hundred and fifty miles. Sir John was the son of a gallant
Cavalier who had lost life and estate in the king’s service, and he
had come out to Barbadoes to repair his fortunes. His report of the
Cape Fear country was so favourable that by the end of May, 1665, we
find him there again, with several hundred settlers from Barbadoes, to
make the beginnings of the new colony of Clarendon, of which the lords
proprietors had appointed him governor. In the same year the colony of
Albemarle elected its first assembly.
[Sidenote: The Ashley River colony.]
[Sidenote: Founding of Charleston, 1670.]
In 1667 William Sayle, a Puritan from Bermuda, explored the coast, and
reported the value of the Bahama Islands for offensive and defensive
purposes in case of war with Spain. These islands were accordingly
appropriated and annexed to Carolina, as the Bermudas had once been
annexed to Virginia. It was decided to make a settlement at Port Royal;
the venerable Sayle, whose years were more than three-score-and-ten,
was appointed governor; and on March 17, 1670, the first colonists
arrived on the Carolina coast. On further inspection Port Royal seemed
too much exposed to the attacks of Spaniards from St. Augustine, and
accordingly the ships pursued their way northward till they reached and
entered the spacious bay formed by the junction of two noble rivers
since known as Ashley and Cooper. They proceeded up the Ashley as far
as an easily defensible highland at Albemarle Point, where they began
building a village which they called Charles Town. Their cautiousness
was soon justified. Spain and England were then at peace, but no sooner
were the Spaniards notified of these proceedings than a warship started
from St. Augustine and came as far as Stono Inlet, where it learned the
strength of the English position and concluded to retreat.[262] The
next year Governor Sayle died, and was succeeded by Sir John Yeamans,
who came in 1672, bringing from Barbadoes the first negro slaves ever
seen in Carolina. In 1674 Yeamans was superseded by Joseph West, under
whom the first assembly was elected.
Thus there were three small communities started on the coast of
Carolina: 1. Albemarle, on the Virginia border, constituted in 1664; 2.
Clarendon, on the Cape Fear River, in 1665; 3. The Ashley River colony,
in 1670.
[Sidenote: First legislation in Albemarle.]
For a moment we must follow the fortunes of Albemarle, where in 1667
Drummond was succeeded in the governorship by Samuel Stephens. Two
years later there was passed a statute which enacted that no subject
could be sued within five years for any cause of action that might have
arisen outside of the colony; that all debts contracted outside of the
colony were _ipso facto_ outlawed; and that all new settlers should
be exempted from taxes for one year.[263] Moreover, all “transient
persons,” not intending to remain in the colony, were forbidden to
trade with the Indians. It was furthermore provided that, since there
were no clergymen in the colony to perform the ceremony of marriage,
a declaration of mutual consent, before the governor and council and
in the presence of a few acquaintances, should be deemed a binding
contract.[264] These laws were of course intended to stimulate
immigration, and the effect of the first two was soon plainly indicated
in the indignant epithet, “Rogue’s Harbour,” bestowed by Virginia
people upon the colony of Albemarle.[265]
[Sidenote: Troubles caused by the Navigation Act.]
[Sidenote: The trade with New England.]
The desire of increasing the number of settlers, without regard
to their quality, induced the lords proprietors to sanction these
curiosities of legislation. But troubles, not of their own creating,
were at hand in this little forest community. In 1673 the Fundamental
Constitutions were promulgated by Governor Stephens, who soon afterward
died. Under his temporary successor, George Carteret, president of the
council, the troubles broke out, and it has been customary to ascribe
them to the attempt to enforce the Fundamental Constitutions upon an
unwilling community. It does not appear, however, that the official
promulgation of this frame of government was followed by any serious
attempts to enforce it.[266] The real source of the disturbances was
undoubtedly the Navigation Act,--that mischievous statute with which
the mother country was busily weaning from itself the affections of
its colonies all along the American seaboard. Sundry unfounded rumours
increased the bitter feeling. The king’s grant of Virginia to Arlington
and Culpeper in 1673 was part of the news of the day. It was reported
that the proprietors of Carolina were going to divide up the province
among themselves, and that Albemarle was to be the share of Sir William
Berkeley, a man especially hated by the Virginians of small means,
who were the larger part of the Albemarle population. Though these
reports were baseless, they found many believers. But the Navigation
Act and the attempts to break up the trade with Massachusetts were
very real grievances. Ships from Boston and Salem brought down to
Albemarle Sound all manner of articles needed by the planters, and
took their pay in cattle and lumber, which they carried to the West
Indies and exchanged for sugar, molasses, and rum. Often with this
cargo they returned to Albemarle and exchanged it for tobacco, which
they carried home and sent off to Europe at a good round profit, in
supreme defiance of the statutes. It was said that the new colony was
enriching Yankee merchants much faster than the lords proprietors.[267]
In truth the trade was profitable to merchants and planters alike,
and by the summer of 1676 sundry attempts to break it up had brought
the little colony into quite a rebellious frame of mind. We have
seen how Bacon looked forward to possible help from Carolina against
Sir William Berkeley. Bacon spoke of the desirableness of the people
electing their own governors.[268] New England furnished examples of
such elected governors who were in full sympathy with the people. The
men of Albemarle were likely to make trouble for governors appointed
in England to carry out an unpopular policy.
[Sidenote: Eastchurch and Miller.]
When Carteret resigned his position in 1676, two men, who were supposed
to represent the popular party, had lately gone over to England. One
of them, by name Eastchurch, had been speaker of the assembly; and so
anxious were the lords proprietors to have their intentions carried
out without irritating the people, that in the autumn of 1676 they
appointed him governor of Albemarle. The other was a person named
Miller, who had been illegally carried to Virginia and tried by
Governor Berkeley for making a seditious speech in Carolina. In England
he found it profitable to pose as a martyr. The proprietors made him
secretary of Albemarle, and the king’s commissioners of customs made
him collector of the revenues of that colony. Early in 1677 the new
governor and secretary sailed for America, and made a stop at the
little island of Nevis, famous in later years as the birthplace of
Alexander Hamilton. For Eastchurch it proved to be an isle of Calypso.
He fell in love with a fair Creole and staid to press his suit, while
he appointed Miller president of the council, and sent him on in that
capacity to govern Albemarle.
[Sidenote: The Culpeper usurpation, 1677-79.]
That little commonwealth of less than 3,000 souls had in the mean time
been enjoying the sweets of uncurbed liberty, when there was no king in
Israel, and every man did what was right in his own eyes. Miller, as
a martyr to free speech, was cordially welcomed, but as proprietary
governor and king’s collector, he found his popularity quickly waning.
He tried to suppress the trade with Massachusetts, and thus arrayed
against himself the Yankee skippers, aided by a “party within,” at
the head of which was the wealthy George Durant, the earliest settler
of Perquimans. The train was well laid for an insurrection when
a demagogue arrived with the match to fire it. This man was John
Culpeper, surveyor-general of Carolina, whose seditious conduct on the
Ashley River had lately made it necessary for him to flee northward
to escape the hangman. Culpeper’s proposal to resist the enforcement
of the odious Navigation Act brought him many followers. In December,
1677, a Yankee schooner, heavily armed and bearing a seductive cargo
of rum and molasses, appeared in Pasquotank River. Her skipper, whose
name was Gillam, had scarcely set foot on land when he was arrested by
the governor and held to bail in £1,000. The astute Yankee, with an air
of innocent surprise, meekly promised to weigh anchor at once and not
return. Hereupon a thirsty mob, maddening with the thought of losing
so much rum, beset Gillam with entreaties to stay. Governor Miller was
a man in whom bravery prevailed over prudence, and, hearing at this
moment that Durant was on the schooner, he straightway boarded her,
pistol in hand, and arrested that influential personage on a charge of
treason. This rash act was the signal for an explosion. Culpeper’s mob
arrested the governor and council, and locked them up. Then they took
possession of the public records, convened the assembly, appointed
new justices, made Culpeper governor, and, seizing upon £3,000 of
customs revenue collected by Miller for the king, they applied it to
the support of this revolutionary government.
For two years these adventurers exercised full sway over Albemarle.
During this time Governor Eastchurch arrived from the island of Nevis,
bringing with him the fair Creole as his bride. He met with a cold
reception, and lost no time in finding shelter in Virginia, where he
drank a friendly glass with Governor Chicheley, and asked for military
aid against the usurping Culpeper. The request was granted, but before
the troops were ready the unfortunate Eastchurch succumbed to chagrin,
or perhaps to malaria, and his Creole bride was left a widow.
[Sidenote: How Culpeper fared in London.]
[Sidenote: Charleston moved to a new site.]
Culpeper, however, remained in some dread of what Virginia might do.
He had issued a manifesto, accusing Miller of tyranny and peculation
and seeking to justify himself; but he thought it wise to play a still
bolder part. He went to England in the hope of persuading the lords
proprietors to sanction what he had done, and to confirm him in the
governorship. In London he was surprised at meeting the deposed Miller,
who had broken jail and arrived there before him. The twain forthwith
told their eloquent but conflicting tales of woe, and Culpeper’s tongue
proved the more persuasive with the lords proprietors. He seemed on
the point of returning in triumph to Carolina, when suddenly the
king’s officers arrested him for robbing the custom-house of £3,000.
This led to his trial for treason, in the summer of 1680, before the
King’s Bench, under the statute of Henry VIII. anent “treason committed
abroad;” the same statute under which it was sought, on a fine April
morning ninety-five years later, to arrest Samuel Adams and John
Hancock. The Earl of Shaftesbury ably defended Culpeper, and he was
acquitted but not restored to power.[269] He returned to Carolina, a
sadder if not a wiser man; and in his old capacity of surveyor, it is
said, laid out the plan of the city of Charleston on its present site.
The original Charles Town, as already mentioned, was begun at Albemarle
Point on Ashley River, in 1670. Another settlement was made two years
later at Oyster Point, on the extremity of the peninsula enclosed
between the two rivers. This new situation had greater advantages for a
seaport, and its cooler breezes were appreciated by sojourners in that
fiery climate. It grew at the expense of the older settlement, until
in 1680 it had a population of 2,500 souls, and took over the name of
Charles Town, while Albemarle Point was abandoned. So the autumn of
1680 had work at Oyster Point for a surveyor like Culpeper.
[Sidenote: Seth Sothel.]
[Sidenote: Banishment of Sothel.]
The governor who succeeded this usurper in the Albemarle colony was a
new lord proprietor, by name Seth Sothel, to whom the Earl of Clarendon
had sold out his rights and interests. On his way to America, early
in 1680, Sothel was captured by Algerine pirates and carried off into
slavery. Not until 1683 did Sothel obtain his freedom and arrive at
his destination. In five years of misrule over Albemarle he proved
himself one of the dirtiest knaves that ever held office in America.
A few specimens of his conduct may be cited. On the arrival of two
ships from Barbadoes on legitimate business, Sothel seized them as
pirates and threw their captains into jail, where one of them died of
ill-treatment. The dying man made a will in which he named one of the
most respected men in the colony, Thomas Pollock, as his executor;
but Sothel refused to let the will go to probate, and seized the dead
man’s effects; the executor then threatened to carry the story of all
this to England, whereupon the governor lodged him in jail and kept him
there. George Durant called such proceedings unlawful, whereupon Sothel
straightway imprisoned him and confiscated his whole estate. If he saw
anything that pleased his fancy, be it a cow or a negro or a pewter
dish, he just took it without ceremony, and if the owner objected he
locked him up. From criminals he took tips and saved them from the
gallows. The people of Albemarle endured this tyranny until 1688,--that
year when over all English lands the sky was so black with political
thunder-clouds. One day certain leading colonists laid hands upon Seth
Sothel, and prepared to send him to England to be tried for a long
list of felonies. Then this model for governors and lords proprietors,
suddenly realizing the dismal prospect before him, with Tyburn looming
up in the distance, begged with frantic sobs and tears that he might
be tried by the assembly, and not be sent to England; for he felt
sure that the assembly would hardly dare take the responsibility of
hanging him. In this he calculated correctly; he was banished from the
colony for one year, and declared forever incapable of holding the
governorship.[270]
[Sidenote: Troubles in the southern colony.]
[Sidenote: The Scotch at Port Royal, 1683-86.]
[Sidenote: A state without laws.]
The prudence of the assembly was well considered. The lords proprietors
in England, ill informed as to the affairs of their colony, wearied
with the everlasting series of complaints, and unwilling to believe
that one of their associates could be such a scoundrel, were inclined
to scold the colonists for their treatment of Sothel. As for that
worthy, his full career was not yet run. Scenes of turbulence were
awaiting him in the little settlement between the Ashley and Cooper
rivers. Joseph West had ruled there with a strong hand from 1674 to
1683, and the colony prospered during that time, but disagreements
arose between West and the proprietors which ended in his removal.
The next seven years were a period of anarchy. After five changes of
governors in quick succession, the office was given to James Colleton,
brother of Colleton the lord proprietor, but the situation was not
improved. The troubles arose partly from the practice of kidnapping
Indians for slaves, which invited bloody reprisals; partly from the
demand that quit-rents be paid in coin, which was very scarce in
Carolina; partly from the low character of many of the settlers and
their dealings with pirates; partly from the unwillingness of the
English settlers to admit the Huguenot immigrants to a share in the
franchise; and partly from the fitful and arbitrary manner in which
the lords proprietors tried from beyond sea to cure the complicated
evils. The muddle was aggravated by Spanish hostility. In 1683 a few
Scotch families were brought by Lord Cardross to Port Royal, where
they made the beginnings of a settlement. Those were the cruel days
of Claverhouse in Scotland, and a scheme was entertained for bringing
10,000 sturdy Covenanters to Carolina; but it came to nothing. Cardross
got into difficulties with the people at Charleston, and went back
to Scotland in disgust. In 1686, in time of peace, a Spanish force
pounced upon Port Royal, murdered some of the Scotchmen, flogged others
within an inch of their lives, carried off what booty they could
find, and left the place a smoking ruin. Dire was the indignation of
the Charleston men at these “bloody insolencies.” Two stout ships
with 400 men were just ready to sail against St. Augustine, when the
newly appointed Governor Colleton arrived upon the scene and forbade
their sailing. His mandate was obeyed with growls and curses. The
lords proprietors upheld him. “No man,” as they reasonably said, “can
think that the dependencies of England can have power to make war
upon the king’s allies without his knowledge or consent.”[271] It was
an inauspicious beginning for Colleton. The old troubles continued,
along with others growing out of the Navigation Act. The wrangling
between governor and assembly grew so hot that in 1689 the proprietors
instructed Colleton to summon no more parliaments in Carolina without
express orders from them. The effect of such an order was probably not
foreseen by those well-meaning gentlemen. It was a curious feature in
the Ashley River colony that the acts of its assembly expired at the
end of twenty-three months unless renewed. This term had so nearly
elapsed when the order arrived that “in 1690 not one statute law was in
force in the colony!”[272]
[Sidenote: Reappearance of Sothel.]
[Sidenote: His death.]
This heroic medicine did not cure the malady. Things grew worse in the
spring of 1690, when Colleton proclaimed martial law. The air was thick
with sedition when Sothel arrived in Charleston. As a lord proprietor
he had the right to act as governor over Colleton’s head. Several of
the leading colonists begged him to call a parliament, and forthwith
the exemplary Sothel posed as “the people’s friend.” He summoned a
parliament which banished Colleton and enacted sundry laws. A queer
spectacle it was, the victim of one popular revolution becoming the
ringleader of another, the banished playing the part of banisher! But
the lords proprietors had become aware of Sothel’s misdeeds; they
annulled the acts of his parliament, deposed him, and ordered him to
return to England to answer the charges against him. Sothel did not
relish this. His term of banishment from Albemarle had expired, and he
believed it to be a safer hiding-place than London. Where he skulked
or how he died is unknown. All we know is that his will was admitted
to probate February 5, 1694; and that his tombstone, which came from
England, was never paid for![273]
[Sidenote: Clarendon colony abandoned.]
Since the founding of the Ashley River colony it had fared ill with
the Clarendon colony on Cape Fear River, which under favouring
circumstances might perhaps have developed into a Middle Carolina.
There were not people enough, and there was not trade enough for
so many settlements. So Clarendon dwindled until 1690, when it was
abandoned. This left a wide interval of forest and stream between
Albemarle and the Ashley River colony, or North Carolina and South
Carolina, as they were beginning to be called. The formal separation
of Carolina into two provinces did not take place until 1729, but
the two colonies were from the outset, as we have seen, distinct and
independent growths; and by 1690 the epithets North and South were
commonly used.
[Sidenote: Philip Ludwell.]
Just at this time, however, the two were united under one governor.
Colonel Philip Ludwell, of Virginia, who had ably supported Berkeley
against Bacon, and had afterward married Berkeley’s widow, was Sothel’s
successor in Albemarle in 1689, and he was appointed to succeed him at
Charleston in 1691. The proprietors wished to bring all Carolina under
one government, and the Albemarle people were requested to send their
representatives to the assembly at Charleston, but distance made such a
scheme impracticable. The northern colony, however, was often governed
by a deputy appointed at Charleston. The troubles were not yet over.
Ludwell was an upright and able man, but the disagreements between the
settlers and the lords proprietors were more than he could cope with,
and in 1692 he was superseded.
[Sidenote: John Archdale.]
[Sidenote: Joseph Blake.]
[Sidenote: Sir Nathaniel Johnson and the Dissenters.]
It is not worth while to recount the names of all the men who served
as governors in the two Carolinas. In the world of history there is a
certain amount of meaningless mediocrity which a general survey like
the present may well pass by without notice. The brief administration
of John Archdale, in 1695, marks a kind of era. Archdale was a Quaker,
a man of broad intelligence and character at once strong and gentle.
He had become one of the lords proprietors, and in that capacity came
out to Carolina, where for one year he ruled the whole province with
such authority as no one had wielded before; for while he was backed
up by the proprietors, he conciliated the assemblies. In the matter of
the Indians and the quit-rents much was done, and the veto power of
the proprietors was curtailed. After a year Archdale felt able to go
home, leaving his friend Joseph Blake, a nephew of the great admiral,
as governor in Charleston. Under Blake still further progress was made
by admitting to full political rights and privileges the Huguenot
immigrants, who had come to be in some respects the most important
element in the population of South Carolina. But after Blake’s death,
in 1700, it grew stormy again. The new governor, James Moore, came
out to make money, and to that end he renewed the vile practice of
kidnapping Indians. This presently made it necessary to gather troops
and defeat the angry red men. Quarrels with the assembly were chronic.
When the war of the Spanish Succession broke out, Moore invaded
Florida, but accomplished nothing except the creation of a heavy public
debt. In 1703 he was superseded by Sir Nathaniel Johnson, a precious
bigot, who undertook to force through the assembly a law excluding from
it all Dissenters. This was effected by trickery; the act was passed by
a majority of one, in a house from which several members were absent.
After the fraud was discovered, the assembly by a large majority
voted to repeal the act, but the governor refused to sign the repeal.
The Dissenters were perhaps three fourths of the population. They
made complaint to the lords proprietors, but a majority of that body
sustained the governor. Then a successful appeal was made to the House
of Lords, and the proprietors suddenly found themselves threatened with
the loss of their charter. The result was a great victory for the South
Carolina assembly, which at its next session restored Dissenters to
their full privileges.
[Sidenote: Unsuccessful attempt of a French and Spanish fleet upon
Charleston.]
Like many another bigot, Governor Johnson was a good fighter. In
August, 1706, Charleston was attacked by a French and Spanish
squadron. A visitation of yellow fever, with half a dozen deaths
daily in a population of 3,000, had frightened many people away from
the town. On a broiling Saturday afternoon five columns of smoke
floating lazily up over Sullivan’s Island announced that five warships
were descried in the offing. They were French privateers with Spanish
reinforcements from Cuba and St. Augustine. When the signal was
reported to the governor at his country house, the militia were called
together from all quarters and the ships in the harbour were quickly
made ready for action. The evening air was vocal with alarm guns. But
the enemy approached with such excessive caution that Johnson had
ample time for preparation. It was not until Wednesday that the affair
matured. Then the French commander sent a flag of truce ashore and
demanded, in the name of Louis XIV., the surrender of the town and its
inhabitants; the governor, he said, might have an hour to consider his
answer. Johnson replied that he did not need a minute, and told the
Frenchman to go to the devil. The enemy then landed 150 men on the
north shore of the harbour, at Haddrell’s Beacon, but the militia soon
drove them into the water, with the loss of a dozen killed and more
than thirty prisoners. Many more were drowned in swimming to their
boats. Another detachment on the south shore was similarly discomfited.
On Thursday Colonel William Rhett, with six small craft heavily armed
and a fire-ship, bore down upon the enemy’s fleet. But instead of
waiting to fight, the French commander hastily stood out to sea. This
conduct, as well as his whole delay, may be explained by the fact that
an important part of his force had not come up. The best of the French
ships, carrying beside her marine force some 200 regular infantry,
did not arrive until Friday, when, in ignorance of the repulse of her
consorts, she entered Sewee Bay and landed her soldiers. It was rushing
into the lion’s jaws. The soldiers were promptly attacked and put to
flight with the loss of one third of their number, while at the same
time Colonel Rhett blockaded the bay and took the French ship with all
on board. Thus the ill-concerted attack ended in ignominious defeat,
with the loss of the best ship and 300 men out of 800.
[Sidenote: Thomas Carey and the Quakers in North Carolina.]
[Sidenote: Porter’s mission to England.]
[Sidenote: Alliance between Porter and Carey.]
[Sidenote: Edward Hyde.]
[Sidenote: Carey’s rebellion.]
After the halcyon days of Archdale there was quiet in North Carolina
until 1704, when Governor Johnson sent a deputy, Robert Daniel, to
rule there and set up the Church of England, while making it hot for
Dissenters. As nearly all the Albemarle people came within the latter
category, there was trouble at once. It was allayed for a moment by the
same proceedings in England which gave victory to the Dissenters of
South Carolina. The Quakers of Albemarle succeeded in getting Johnson
to appoint a new deputy, Thomas Carey, in whom they had confidence.
But their confidence proved to have been misplaced. A recent act of
Queen Anne’s Parliament had prescribed certain test oaths for all
public officials, without making any reservation in behalf of the
conscientious scruples of Quakers. Carey, as deputy governor of
North Carolina, undertook to administer these test oaths, and at once
disgusted the Quakers, who sent John Porter to England to plead with
the lords proprietors. This Porter, who was himself a Quaker, had a
persuasive tongue. Acts of Parliament had not usually been heeded by
the colonies; it was by no means clear that they were even intended to
apply to the colonies without some declaratory clause to that effect,
or without being supplemented by a royal order in council. The lords
proprietors virtually admitted that the Queen Anne test oath act did
not apply to the colonies, when in response to Porter’s petition they
removed Carey from office. At the same time they suspended Governor
Johnson’s authority over North Carolina. This action left that colony
without a head, and there ought to have been no delay in appointing
a new governor, but there was delay. On Porter’s return William
Glover was chosen president of the council, which made him temporary
governor. Glover belonged to the Church of England, but was believed
to be opposed to the test oaths. We can fancy, then, the wrath of the
Quakers when he insisted upon administering the oaths, precisely as
the deposed Carey had done! The remedy was an instance of political
homœopathy, or treatment with a hair of the dog that bit you. The
angry Porter at once turned to Carey and entered into an alliance with
him from which dire evils were to grow. Porter contrived to assemble
various resident deputies of the lords proprietors, and persuaded
them to depose Glover and reinstate Carey; but Glover refused to be
bound by these irregular proceedings. He continued to act as governor
and issued writs for the election of an assembly; Carey did likewise,
and anarchy reigned supreme. Several of the principal colonists fled
to Virginia for safety. In 1710, after a delay of more than three
years, the proprietors sent out Edward Hyde, a kinsman if the queen’s
grandfather, the first Earl of Clarendon, to govern North Carolina. His
commission needed the signature of the governor-in-chief at Charleston,
but that dignitary happened to die just before Hyde’s arrival, so that
further delay was entailed in completing his commission. Early in
1711, before receiving it, he issued writs for an election. Carey made
strenuous efforts to secure the election of a majority of his friends
and adherents to the Commons House of Assembly, or House of Commons, as
it came to be called. Failing in this attempt he maintained that the
election was illegal because Hyde had not received his vouchers. The
assembly retorted by summoning Carey to render an account of all the
public moneys which he had used, and presently it issued orders for his
arrest. Thus driven to bay, Carey set up a rival government and tried
to arrest Hyde, who appealed to Virginia for military aid. Virginia’s
response was prompt and effective. The discomfited Carey fled to the
wilderness between the heads of Albemarle and Pamlico sounds. After
a while he ventured into Virginia, intending to take passage there
for England; but he was arrested and sent to England to be tried for
treason. For lack of accessible evidence he seems to have been released
without trial, and thereupon he made his way to the West Indies, where
history loses sight of him. With his disappearance from North Carolina
tranquillity seemed for the moment restored; but more terrible scenes
were at hand.
[Sidenote: Expansion of the northern colony; arrival of Graffenried.]
[Sidenote: Improbable charges against Carey and Porter.]
In spite of all the turmoil the little colony had received new
settlers, and had begun to expand until North Carolina was no longer
synonymous with Albemarle. In the first decade of the eighteenth
century, numbers of Huguenots settled in the neighbourhood of Bath,
where the Taw River widens into an arm of Pamlico Sound; and parties of
Swiss, with many Germans from the Rhenish Palatinate, under the lead of
Baron de Graffenried, founded the town of New Berne, where the Trent
River flows into the Neuse. The increase of population in Albemarle,
moreover, had carried the frontier from the Chowan to the Roanoke. All
this entailed some real and still more prospective displacement of
native tribes, and some kind of mild remonstrance, after the well-known
Indian fashion, was to be expected. It was believed by many persons at
the time that Carey, on the occasion of his flight to the wilderness
between the Roanoke and Taw rivers, solicited aid from the Indians,
and that his Quaker friend, John Porter, had gone as emissary to the
Tuscaroras, “promising great rewards to incite them to cut off all the
inhabitants of that part of Carolina that adhered to Mr. Hyde.”[274]
But a charge of such frightful character needs strong evidence to
make it credible, and in this case there is little but hearsay and
the vague beliefs of men hostile to Carey and Porter, in a season of
fierce political excitement. No such infernal wickedness is needed to
account for the Indian outbreak. The ordinary incidents connected with
the advance of the white man’s frontier into the red man’s country are
quite sufficient to explain it. But, without feeling it necessary to
accuse Carey and Porter of having urged the Indians to murder their
fellow-countrymen, we must still admit that the civil discord into
which they had plunged the colony had so weakened it as to offer the
watchful red men an excellent opportunity.
[Sidenote: Carolina Indians; Algonquin tribes.]
[Sidenote: Sioux tribes.]
[Sidenote: Iroquois tribes.]
[Sidenote: Muskogi tribes.]
The Indians of North Carolina at the time which we are treating
belonged to three ethnic families. Along the coast, northward from Cape
Lookout to the Virginia line, the Corees, Pamlicos, Mattamuskeets,
Pasquotanks, and Chowanoes all belonged to the Algonquin family, and
they could muster in all about 400 warriors. The coast territory
occupied by these tribes was continuous with that which had once been
controlled by the Powhatan Confederacy to the northward. The Corees, in
Carteret Precinct, were the southernmost of these Algonquin tribes. The
Cape Fear Indians, on the coast southwest of Carteret, belonged to the
great Sioux or Dakota family. From the meridian of 77° 30´ westward to
the Blue Ridge, and from the Santee River on the south to the Potomac
on the north, the country was occupied by Sioux tribes, of which the
names most familiarly known are the Waxhaws, Catawbas, Waterees,
Saponis and Tutelos, Monacans and Manahoacs.[275] Now deep into this
Sioux country, in North Carolina, there ran a powerful wedge of alien
stock. The thick end of the wedge covered the precincts of Bath and
Craven, with part of New Hanover; and from its centre, at the mouth of
Trent River, it ran northwestward more than a hundred miles, a little
beyond the site of Raleigh, with an average width of less than thirty
miles. This wedge of population consisted of the Tuscaroras, a large
tribe of the dreaded Iroquois family, able to send forth at least 1,200
warriors. Another tribe of Iroquois then dwelt in Bertie Precinct,
between the Chowan and Roanoke rivers. It was known as the Meherrins,
and was really the remnant of the fierce Susquehannocks, from whom
Bacon had delivered Virginia in 1676. Its fighting numbers can hardly
have been much over a hundred. Just north of the Meherrins was another
small Iroquois tribe called Nottoways. To frame our picture, although
it takes us away from the scene of action, we should add that the whole
Alpine region west of the Sioux country, from the Peaks of Otter as far
southwest as Lookout and Chickamauga mountains, belonged to the great
Iroquois tribe of Cherokees; while to the south of Santee River, from
Florida to the Mississippi River, we encounter a fourth ethnic family,
the Muskogi, represented by such tribes as Choctaws and Chickasaws, the
Creek Confederacy, the Yamassees, and others.
[Sidenote: Algonquin-Iroquois conspiracy.]
Between the Tuscaroras and the numerous Sioux tribes by which they
were partly surrounded there was incessant and murderous hostility. On
the other hand, there was amity and alliance, at least for the moment,
between the Tuscaroras and the Algonquin coast tribes whose lands the
palefaces were invading. The first murders of white settlers occurred
in Bertie Precinct at the hands of Meherrins, and seem to have been
isolated cases. But a general conspiracy of Iroquois and Algonquin
tribes was not long in forming, and the day before the new moon,
September 22, 1711, was appointed for a wholesale massacre.
[Sidenote: Capture of Graffenried and Lawson.]
[Sidenote: Lawson’s horrible death.]
A few days before the appointed time the Baron de Graffenried started
in his pinnace from New Berne to explore the Neuse River. His only
companions were a negro servant and John Lawson, a Scotchman who for
a dozen years had been surveyor-general of the colony. Lawson was the
author of an extremely valuable and fascinating book on Carolina and
its native races,--a book which one cannot read without loving the
writer and mourning his melancholy fate.[276] No man in the colony was
better known by the Indians, who had frequently observed and carefully
noted the fact that his appearance in the woods with his surveying
instruments was apt to be followed by some fresh encroachment upon
their lands. Lawson and Graffenried had advanced but little way into
the Tuscarora wilderness when they were surrounded by a host of Indians
and taken prisoners. The Indians were very curious to learn why they
had come up the river; perhaps it might indicate that the people at New
Berne had some suspicion of the intended massacre and had sent them
forward as scouts. If any such dread beset the minds of the red men,
it was probably soon allayed; for it is clear that, had there been any
suspicion, Graffenried and Lawson would not thus have ventured out of
all reach of support. The barbarians were two or three days in making
up their minds what to do. Then they took poor Lawson, and thrust into
his skin all over, from head to foot, sharp splinters of lightwood,
almost dripping with its own turpentine, and set him afire.[277] The
negro was also put to death with fiendish torments, but Graffenried was
kept a prisoner, perhaps in order to be burned on some festal occasion.
[Sidenote: The massacre, Sept. 22-24, 1711.]
[Sidenote: Aid from Virginia and South Carolina.]
[Sidenote: Barnwell defeats the Tuscaroras, Jan. 28. 1712.]
Before the news of this dreadful affair could reach New Berne, the blow
had fallen, not only there, but also at Bath and on the Roanoke River.
Some hundreds of settlers were massacred,--at New Berne 130 within two
hours from the signal. No circumstance of horror was wanting. Men were
gashed and scorched, children torn in pieces, women impaled on stakes.
The slaughter went on for three days. A war-chief called by the white
men Handcock seems to have been the leading spirit in this concerted
attack, but as usual in Indian warfare the concert was incomplete.[278]
An outlying detachment of Tuscaroras in Bertie Precinct, whose head
war-chief was called Tom Blunt, took no part in the massacre and
remained on good terms with the whites. Perhaps Blunt’s attitude may
have been affected by nearness to Virginia and its able governor,
Alexander Spotswood, who was certainly instrumental in keeping the
Nottoways and Meherrins quiet. Through Blunt’s intervention, Spotswood
secured the release of Graffenried, after five weeks of captivity, and
it was not the fault of this valiant governor that Virginia troops did
not march against Handcock; for his House of Burgesses, after advising
such a measure, behaved like a “whimsical multitude,” and refused to
vote the necessary funds.[279] Important aid, however, was obtained
from South Carolina, which had for the moment a more complaisant
assembly, and in Charles Craven a wise and able governor. Advantage
was taken of the deadly hatred which the Sioux and Muskogi tribes bore
to the Iroquois. With a small body of white men, supported by large
numbers of Muskogi Creeks and Yamassees, and of Sioux Catawbas, Colonel
John Barnwell made a long and arduous winter march through more than
250 miles of virgin forest to the Neuse River, where he encountered
the Tuscaroras, and in an obstinate battle defeated them with the loss
of 400 warriors. Then Handcock, retiring behind a stockade, sought
and obtained terms from Barnwell; a treaty was made, and the South
Carolina forces went home.
[Sidenote: Crushing defeat of the Tuscaroras; migration to New York.]
They had scarcely departed when the faithless red men renewed their
bloody work, and in March the distracted colony was again obliged to
ask for succour. Summer added to the other horrors the scourge of
yellow fever, which carried off some hundreds of victims, among them
Governor Hyde. In December a force of 50 white men and 1,000 Indians
from South Carolina, under Colonel James Moore, arrived on the scene,
and in March, 1713, Handcock was driven to cover on the site of the
present town of Snow Hill, in Greene County. His palisaded fort was
stormed with great slaughter, and that was the end of the Indian
power in eastern North Carolina. Their remnant of defeated Tuscaroras
withdrew to the upper waters of the Roanoke, and thence migrated
northward to central New York, where they were admitted into the great
confederacy of their kinsmen, the Iroquois of the Long House. Thus did
the celebrated Five Nations become the Six Nations.
[Sidenote: Charles Eden.]
After Hyde’s death the government was ably administered by one of the
leading colonists, Thomas Pollock, as president of the council. In 1714
Charles Eden came out as governor. Under the stress of war the colony
had begun to issue paper money, a curse from which it was destined long
to suffer. But some other evils were remedied. Liberty of conscience
was secured to Dissenters, and in the matter of test oaths the Quaker’s
affirmation was accepted as an equivalent. Eden was a very popular
governor and managed affairs with ability until his death in 1722. His
name is preserved in that of the town of Edenton, in Chowan County,
which was in his time the seat of government.
[Sidenote: The Yamassees and the Spaniards.]
We must now turn to South Carolina, where we have seen Governor Craven
using the Yamassee and Catawba warriors as allies to be sent against
the Tuscaroras. The year 1713, which witnessed the crushing defeat of
the Tuscaroras, was the year of the treaty of Utrecht, which ended the
long war of the Spanish Succession. Throughout that war the powerful
tribe of Yamassees had been steadfast friends of the English. From
time to time they made incursions into Florida and brought away many
a Spanish captive to be burned alive, until government checked their
cruelty by offering a ransom for Spanish prisoners delivered in safety
at Charleston; the prisoners were then sent home on payment of the
amount of their ransom by the government at St. Augustine.
[Sidenote: Alliance of Indian tribes against the South Carolinians.]
[Sidenote: The Indian war.]
The Yamassee country was the last quarter from which the South
Carolinians would have expected hostilities to come. But after 1713, in
spite of treaty obligations, the St. Augustine government bent all its
energies to stirring up all the frontier tribes to a concerted attack
upon the English. Bribes in the shape of gaudy coats, steel hatchets,
and firearms were distributed among the chiefs; the solemn palavers,
the banquets of boiled dog, the exchanges of wampum belts, the puffing
of red clay pipes, the beastly orgies of fire-water, may be left to
our imagination, for we have no such minute chroniclers here as the
Jesuits of Canada. The outcome of it all was a grand conspiracy of
Yamassees, Creeks, Catawbas, and Cherokees, with other less important
tribes, comprising perhaps 7,000 or 8,000 warriors, against the colony
of South Carolina. But, as in all such plans for concerted action among
Indians, the concert was very imperfect. Hostilities began in April,
1715, with the massacre of ninety persons at Pocotaligo, and lasted
until February, 1716, by which time 400 Christians had lost their
lives; while the red men were thoroughly vanquished, and the shattered
remnant of the Yamassees sought shelter in Florida.
[Sidenote: Robert Johnson.]
Governor Craven, who had conducted this war with great ability and
courage, was a man of high character, and when he returned to England
in 1717 his departure was mourned. His successor, Robert Johnson, was
son of Sir Nathaniel Johnson, who had formerly been governor. The
younger Johnson, an able and popular official, was the last governor of
South Carolina under the lords proprietors. His romantic experiences in
dealing with pirates will be recounted in my next chapter. The chain
of events which brought about a political revolution in 1719 admits
of brief description. The Indian war had laden South Carolina with
debt, and it was felt that the lords proprietors ought to contribute
something toward relieving the distress of a colony which had yielded
them a princely income. But the lords proprietors did not take
this view of the case. As a means of discharging the public debt, the
assembly laid a revenue tariff upon imports, but the lords proprietors
vetoed it. The assembly proposed to raise money by selling Yamassee
lands to settlers, but the lords proprietors laid claim to the
conquered territory for their own use and behoof. Thus the situation
was fast becoming unendurable.
[Illustration: A Map _of y^e most_ Improved Part of CAROLINA ]
[Sidenote: The revolution of 1719 in South Carolina.]
In December, 1718, war broke out again between Spain and England.
The Spaniards planned an expedition against Charleston, and Johnson
asked the assembly for money. They proposed to raise it by collecting
revenue under the tariff act, in disregard of the veto. Nicholas Trott,
the chief justice, declared that this would not do; the courts would
uphold delinquents who should refuse to pay. The assembly denied the
right of the proprietors to veto their acts. The members consulted
their constituents and were sustained by them. Finally the assembly
resolved itself into a revolutionary convention, deposed the lords
proprietors, and offered the governorship to Johnson as royal governor.
On his refusal to take part in such proceedings, the convention chose
for provisional royal governor Colonel James Moore, the hero of the
Tuscarora war. Johnson’s only reliance, in such an emergency, was the
militia; but the militia deserted him and went over to the convention,
and thus, in December, 1719, the popular revolution was complete. When
the news reached London, the course of the assembly was approved by the
crown, the proprietary charter was declared to be forfeited, and our
old friend Sir Francis Nicholson was sent out to South Carolina as
royal governor.
[Sidenote: End of the proprietary government.]
Three years later there was renewal of civil discord in North Carolina,
after the death of Governor Eden and the arrival of his successor,
George Burrington, a vulgar ruffian who had served a term in prison
for an infamous assault upon an old woman. Five years of turmoil,
with changes of governors, followed. In 1728 Parliament requested the
king to buy Carolina, and appropriated money for the purpose. The
proprietors were Henry Somerset, Duke of Beaufort, and his brother,
Lord Charles Somerset; Lord Craven; Lord Carteret; John Cotton; the
heirs of Sir John Colleton; James and Henry Bertie; Mary Dawson and
Elizabeth Moore. Lord Carteret would not sell his share. All the others
consented to sell for a modest sum total scarcely amounting to £50,000;
and so in 1729 the many-headed palatinate founded by Charles II. came
to an end, and in its place were the two royal provinces of North and
South Carolina.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Contrasts between the two Carolinas.]
The careers of the two southern colonies whose beginnings we have thus
sketched were very different, and between their respective social
characteristics the contrasts were so great that it is impossible to
make general statements applicable alike to the two. In one respect the
contrast was different from that which one would observe in comparing
Virginia with New England. In New England a marked concentration
of social life in towns and villages co-existed with complete
democracy, while in Virginia the isolated life upon great plantations
was connected with an aristocratic structure of society. But between
the two Carolinas the contrast was just the reverse of this. Of all
the southern colonies, North Carolina was the one in which society
was the most scattered, and town life the least developed, while
it was also the one in which the general aspect of society was the
least aristocratic. On the other hand, in South Carolina there was a
peculiarly strong concentration of social life into a single focus
in Charleston; and in connection with this we find a type of society
in some respects more essentially aristocratic than in Virginia. We
shall find it worth our while to dwell for a moment upon some of the
immediate causes of these differences.
[Sidenote: Effects of geographical conditions.]
[Sidenote: Interior of North Carolina contrasted with the coast.]
The history of North America affords an interesting illustration
of the way in which the character of a community may be determined
for good or ill by geographical circumstances. There have been
historians and philosophers unable to see anything except such physical
conditions at work in determining the course of human affairs. With
such views I have small sympathy,[280] but it would be idle to deny
that physical conditions are very important, and the study of them
is highly instructive. But for the peculiar physical conformation
of its coast, North Carolina, rather than Virginia, would doubtless
have been the first American state. It was upon Roanoke Island that
the earliest attempts were made, but Ralph Lane in 1585 already came
to the conclusion that the Chesapeake region would afford better
opportunities. First and foremost, the harbourage was spoiled by the
prevalent sand-bars. Then huge pine barrens near the coast hindered
the first efforts of the planter, and extensive malarial swamps
imperilled his life.[281] The first attempts at cultivation increased
the danger, which was of a kind that would yield only to modern methods
of drainage. It was only by the coast that the conditions were thus
forbidding. No American state has greater natural advantages than North
Carolina. For diversity of eligible soils, for salubrity of climate,
for variety of flora and fauna, she is unsurpassed; while for beauty
and grandeur of scenery she may well claim to be first among the states
east of the Rocky Mountains.[282] John Lawson describes North Carolina
with enthusiasm as “a delicious country, being placed in that girdle of
the world which affords wine, oil, fruit, grain, and silk, with other
rich commodities, besides a sweet air, moderate climate, and fertile
soil. These are the blessings, under Heaven’s protection, that spin
out the thread of life to its utmost extent, and crown our days with
the sweets of health and plenty, which, when joined with content,
render the possessors the happiest race of men upon earth.”[283] The
good Lawson, who was somewhat inclined to see things in rose-colour,
praised even the gentleness of the Indians, who (as we have seen)
returned the compliment after their manner, by roasting him alive.
But, with all this beauty and richness of the interior country, the
obstacles presented at the coast turned the first great wave of English
colonization into Virginia; and thereafter the settlement of North
Carolina was determined largely, and by no means to its advantage, by
the social conditions of the older colony.
[Sidenote: Unkempt life.]
In its early days North Carolina was simply a portion of Virginia’s
frontier; and to this wild frontier the shiftless people who could not
make a place for themselves in Virginia society, including many of
the “mean whites,” flocked in large numbers. In their new home they
soon acquired the reputation of being very lawless in temper, holding
it to be the chief end of man to resist all constituted authority,
and above all things to pay no taxes. In some respects, as in the
administration of justice, one might have witnessed such scenes as
continued for generations to characterize American frontier life. The
courts sat oftentimes in taverns, where the tedium of business was
relieved by glasses of grog, while the judge’s decisions were not put
on record, but were simply shouted by the crier from the inn door or
at the nearest market-place. It was not until 1703 that a clergyman
was settled in the colony, though there were Quaker meetings before
that time. As late as 1729 Colonel Byrd writes of Edenton, the seat of
government: “I believe this is the only metropolis in the Christian
or Mohammedan world where there is neither church, chapel, mosque,
synagogue, or any other place of public worship, of any sect or
religion whatsoever.” In this country “they pay no tribute, either to
God or to Cæsar.”[284]
[Sidenote: A genre picture by Colonel Byrd.]
According to Colonel Byrd, these people were chargeable with laziness,
but more especially the men, who let their wives work for them. The
men, he says, “make their wives rise out of their beds early in the
morning, at the same time that they lie and snore till the sun has
run one third of his course and dispersed all the unwholesome damps.
Then, after stretching and yawning for half an hour, they light their
pipes, and under the protection of a cloud of smoke venture out into
the open air; though, if it happens to be never so little cold, they
quickly return shivering into the chimney corner. When the weather is
mild, they stand leaning with both their arms upon the cornfield fence,
and gravely consider whether they had best go and take a small heat at
the hoe, but generally find reasons to put it off until another time.
Thus they loiter away their lives, like Solomon’s sluggard, with their
arms across, and at the winding up of the year scarcely have bread
to eat.”[285] Every one has met with the type of man here described.
In Massachusetts to-day you may find sporadic examples of him in
decaying mountain villages, left high and dry by the railroads that
follow the winding valleys; or now and then you may find him clustered
in some tiny hamlet of crazy shanties nestling in a secluded area of
what Mr. Ricardo would have called “the worst land under cultivation,”
and bearing some such pithy local name as “Hardscrabble” or “Satan’s
Kingdom.” Such men do not make the strength of Massachusetts, or of any
commonwealth. They did not make the strength of North Carolina, and it
should not be forgotten that Byrd’s testimony is that of an unfriendly
or at least a satirical observer. Nevertheless there is strong reason
for believing that his portrait is one for which the old Albemarle
colony could have furnished many sitters. Such people were sure to be
drawn thither by the legislation which made the colony an Alsatia for
insolvent debtors.
[Sidenote: Industries.]
The industries of North Carolina in the early times were purely
agricultural. There were no manufactures. The simplest and commonest
articles of daily use were imported from the northern colonies or
from England. Agriculture was conducted more wastefully and with
less intelligence than in any of the other colonies. In the northern
counties tobacco was almost exclusively cultivated. In the Cape Fear
region there were flourishing rice-fields. A great deal of excellent
timber was cut; in particular the yellow pine of North Carolina
was then, as now, famous for its hardness and durability. Tar and
turpentine were also produced in large quantities. All this furnished
the basis for a flourishing foreign commerce; but the people did
not take kindly to the sea, and the carrying trade was monopolized
by New Englanders. The fisheries, which were of considerable value,
were altogether neglected. All business or traffic about the coast was
carried on under perilous conditions; for pirates were always hovering
about, secure in the sympathy of many of the people, like the brigands
of southern Italy in recent times.
[Sidenote: Absence of towns.]
In the absence of manufactures, and with commerce so little developed,
there was no town life. Byrd describes Edenton as containing forty
or fifty houses, small and cheaply built: “a citizen here is
counted extravagant if he has ambition enough to aspire to a brick
chimney.”[286] As late as 1776 New Berne and Wilmington were villages
of five or six hundred inhabitants each. Not only were there no towns,
but there were very few large plantations with stately manor houses
like those of Virginia. A great part of the country was covered with
its primeval forest, in which thousands of hogs, branded with their
owners’ marks, wandered and rooted until the time came for hunting them
out and slaughtering them. Where rude clearings had been made in the
wilderness there were small, ill-kept farms. Nearly all the people were
small farmers, whose work was done chiefly by black slaves or by white
servants. The treatment of the slaves is said to have been usually
mild, as in Virginia. The white servants fared better, and the general
state of society was so low that when their time of service was
ended they had here a good chance of rising to a position of equality
with their masters. The country swarmed with ruffians of all sorts,
who fled thither from South Carolina and Virginia; life and property
were insecure, and Lynch law was not unfrequently administered. The
small planters were apt to be hard drinkers, and among their social
amusements were scrimmages, in which noses were sometimes broken and
eyes gouged out. There was a great deal of gambling. But, except at
elections and other meetings for political purposes, people saw very
little of each other. The isolation of homesteads, which prevailed over
the South, reached its maximum in North Carolina. It is not strange,
then, that the colony was a century old before it could boast of a
printing-press, or that there were no schools until shortly before the
war for Independence. A mail from Virginia came some eight or ten times
in a year, but it only reached a few towns on the coast, and down to
the time of the Revolution the interior of the country had no mails at
all.
[Sidenote: A frontier democracy.]
[Sidenote: Segregation and dispersal of Virginia’s poor whites.]
[Sidenote: Spotswood’s account of the matter.]
All these consequences clearly followed from the character of the
emigration by which North Carolina was first peopled, and that
character was determined by its geographical position as a wilderness
frontier to such a commonwealth as Virginia. In the character of
this emigration we find the reasons for the comparatively democratic
state of society. As there were so few large plantations and wealthy
planters, while nearly all the white people were small land-owners,
and as the highest class was thus so much lower in dignity than the
corresponding class in Virginia, it became just so much the easier
for the “mean whites” to rise far enough to become a part of it.
North Carolina, therefore, was not simply an Alsatia for debtors
and criminals, but it afforded a home for the better portion of
Virginia’s poor people. We can thus see how there would come about a
natural segregation of Virginia’s white freedmen into four classes:
1. The most enterprising and thrifty would succeed in maintaining
a respectable existence in Virginia; 2. A much larger class, less
thrifty and enterprising, would find it easier to make a place for
themselves in the ruder society of North Carolina; 3. A lower stratum
would consist of persons without enterprise or thrift who remained
in Virginia to recruit the ranks of “white trash;” 4. The lowest
stratum would comprise the outlaws who fled into North Carolina to
escape the hangman. Of the third class the eighteenth century seems
to have witnessed a gradual exodus from Virginia, so that in 1773 it
was possible for the traveller, John Ferdinand Smyth, to declare that
there were fewer cases of poverty in proportion to the population than
anywhere else “in the universe.” The statement of Bishop Meade in 1857,
which was quoted in the preceding chapter,[287] shows that the class
of “mean whites” had not even then become extinct in Virginia; but it
is clear that the slow but steady exodus had been such as greatly to
diminish its numbers and its importance as a social feature. Some of
these freedmen went northward into Pennsylvania,[288] but most of them
sought the western and southern frontiers, and at first the southern
frontier was a far more eligible retreat than the western. Of this
outward movement of white freedmen the governor of Virginia wrote in
1717: “The Inhabitants of our ffrontiers are composed generally of such
as have been transported hither as Servants, and being out of their
time, ... settle themselves where Land is to be taken up ... that will
produce the necessarys of Life with little Labour. It is pretty well
known what Morals such people bring with them hither, which are not
like to be much mended by their Scituation, remote from all places of
worship; they are so little concerned about Religion, that the Children
of many of the Inhabitants of those ffrontier Settlements are 20, and
some 30 years of age before they are baptized, and some not at all....
These people, knowing the Indians to be lovers of strong liquors, make
no scruple of first making them drunk and then cheating them of their
skins; on the other hand, the Indians, being unacquainted with the
methods of obtaining reparation by Law, frequently revenged themselves
by the murder of the persons who thus treated them, or (according
to their notions of Satisfaction) of the next Englishman they could
most easily cutt off.”[289] In this description we may recognize some
features of frontier life in recent times.
[Sidenote: The German immigration.]
[Sidenote: The Scotch-Irish immigration.]
We have hitherto considered only the earliest period of North Carolina
history. From about 1720 marked changes began to be visible. There
was such a change in the character of the immigration as by and by to
result in more or less displacement of population. Since the barbarous
devastation of the Rhenish Palatinate by French troops in 1688-93 there
had been much distress among those worthy Germans, and after a while
they sought to mend their fortunes by coming to America. This migration
continued for many years. Some of these Germans settled in the Mohawk
valley, where their mark was placed upon the map in such town names
as Minden, Frankfort, and Oppenheim, and where they contributed to
our Revolutionary War one of its most picturesque figures in Nicholas
Herkimer. A great many came to the Susquehanna valley in what was then
the western part of Pennsylvania, where their descendants still speak
and write that sweet old-fashioned language which we ought hardly
to call Pennsylvania _Dutch_, since it is a dialect of High German
besprinkled with English. From Pennsylvania large numbers followed
the valleys between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies and made their
way as far as South Carolina. We have already noted the arrival of
Germans, Swiss, and Huguenots on the North Carolina seaboard early in
the century. Later on, in 1745, after the suppression of the Jacobite
rebellion, there came to North Carolina a powerful reinforcement of
Scotch Highlanders, among them many of the clan Macdonald, including
the romantic Flora Macdonald, who had done so much for the young
fugitive prince. But more important and far more numerous than all the
other elements in the population were the Scotch-Irish from Ulster,
who--goaded by unwise and unjust laws--began coming in large numbers
about 1719, and have played a much greater and more extensive part in
American history than has yet been recognized. There was hardly one of
the thirteen colonies upon which these Scotch-Irish did not leave their
mark. To the story of their coming I shall revert in my concluding
chapter, where it forms the most important part of the story of the
westward advance of Virginia. For the present it may suffice to point
out that in North Carolina they had come, before the Revolutionary War,
to be the strongest element in the population of the colony. Under the
influence of these various and excellent streams of immigration, the
character of the colony was gradually but effectively altered. Industry
and thrift came to prevail in the wilderness, and various earnest
Puritanic types of religion flourished side by side on friendly terms.
[Sidenote: Displacement and further dispersal of poor whites.]
As society in North Carolina became more and more orderly and
civilized, the old mean white element, or at least the more intractable
part of it, was gradually pushed out to the westward. This stream that
had started from Old Virginia flowed for a while southwestward into the
South Carolina back-country. But the southerly movement was gradually
turned more and more to the westward.
[Sidenote: “Crackers,” etc.]
Always clinging to the half-savage frontier, these poor white people
made their way from North Carolina westward through Tennessee, and
their descendants may still be found here and there in Arkansas,
southern Missouri, and what is sometimes known as the Egyptian
extremity of Illinois. From the South Carolina back-country, through
Georgia, they were scattered here and there among the states on the
Gulf of Mexico. Taken at its worst, this type of American citizen is
portrayed in Martin Chuzzlewit’s unwelcome visitor, the redoubtable
Hannibal Chollop. Specimens of him might have been found among the
border ruffians led by the savage Quantrell in 1863 to the cruel
massacre at Lawrence, and among the desperadoes whose dark deeds
used forty years ago to give such cities as Memphis an unenviable
prominence in the pages of the “Police Gazette.” But in the average
specimens of the type one would find not criminality of disposition
so much as shiftlessness. Of the stunted, gaunt, and cadaverous
“sand-hillers” of South Carolina and Georgia, a keen observer says that
“they are incapable of applying themselves steadily to any labour,
and their habits are very much like those of the old Indians.”[290]
The “clay-eaters,” who are said to sustain life on crude whiskey
and aluminous earth, are doubtless of similar type, as well as the
“conches,” “crackers,” and “corn-crackers” of various Southern
states. All these seem to represent a degraded variety or strain of
the English race. Concerning the origin of this degraded strain,
detailed documentary evidence is not easy to get; but the facts of its
distribution furnish data for valid inferences such as the naturalist
entertains concerning the origin and migrations of some species of
animal or plant.
There is, _first_, the importation of degraded English humanity in
large numbers to the two oldest colonies in which there is a demand
for wholesale cheap labour; _secondly_, the substitution of black
cheap labour for white; _thirdly_, the tendency of the degraded
white humanity to seek the frontier, as described by Spotswood, or
else to lodge in sequestered nooks outside of the main currents of
progress. These data are sufficient in general to explain the origin
and distribution of the “crackers,” but a word of qualification is
needed. It is not to be supposed that the ancestors of all the persons
designated as “crackers” were once white freedmen in Virginia and
Maryland; it is more probable that this class furnished a nucleus
about which various wrecks of decayed and broken-down humanity from
many quarters were gradually gathered. Nor are we bound to suppose
that every community of ignorant, semi-civilized white people in the
Southern states is descended from those white freedmen. Prolonged
isolation from the currents of thought and feeling that sway the great
world will account for almost any extent of ignorance and backwardness;
and there are few geographical situations east of the Mississippi River
more conducive to isolation than the southwestern portion of the great
Appalachian highlands. All these circumstances should be borne in mind
in dealing with what, from whatever point of view, is one of the
interesting problems of American history.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Settlers of South Carolina.]
The settlement of South Carolina took place under different
circumstances from those of the sister colony, and the resulting state
of society was very different. In the earliest days there were many
settlers of a rough and turbulent character, which their peculiar
dealings with pirates, to be recounted in the following chapter, did
not tend to improve. But the Huguenots, in whose veins flowed some
of the sturdiest blood of France, soon came in great numbers. From
the acquaintanceship of the Berkeleys, the Ashleys, the Hydes, and
others, there came a certain number of Cavaliers; but at the end of
the seventeenth century the impulse which had carried thousands of
Cavaliers to Virginia had quite died out, and on the whole the general
complexion of South Carolina, as regarded religion and politics, was
strongly Puritan.
[Sidenote: Churchmen and Dissenters.]
[Sidenote: The vestries.]
In one respect there is a resemblance by no means superficial between
the settlement of South Carolina and that of Massachusetts. Most
of the South Carolina settlers had left their homes in Europe for
reasons connected with religion; and emigrants who quit their homes
for such reasons are likely to show a higher average of intelligence
and energy than the great mass of their fellow-countrymen who stay at
home. Calvinism was the prevailing form of theology in South Carolina,
though there were some Lutherans, and perhaps one fifth of the people
may have belonged to the Church of England, which was established by
the proprietary charter, and remained the state church until 1776.
We have seen how much disturbance was caused by the attempts of the
High Churchmen early in the eighteenth century to enforce conformity
on the part of the Dissenters; but such attempts were soon abandoned
as hopeless, and a policy of toleration prevailed. Though the Church
of England was supported by public taxation, yet the clergymen were
not appointed to office, but were elected by their congregations like
the Dissenting clergymen. Their education was in general very good,
and their character lofty; and in all respects the tone of the church
in South Carolina was far higher than in Virginia. At the outbreak of
the Revolution the elected Episcopal clergy of South Carolina were
generally found on the side of the Whigs; a significant contrast to the
appointed Episcopal clergy of Virginia, whose Toryism was carried so
far as to ruin the reputation of their church. But the most interesting
feature connected with the establishment of the English Church was the
introduction of the parish system of local self-government in very much
the same form in which it existed in England. The vestries in South
Carolina discharged many of the functions which in New England were
performed by the town meeting,--the superintendence of the poor, the
maintenance of roads, the election of representatives to the Commons
House of Assembly, and the assessment of the local taxes.
[Sidenote: The South Carolina parish.]
In one fundamental respect the political constitution of South
Carolina was more democratic than that of Virginia. The vestrymen
were elected yearly by all the taxpayers of the parish. In this they
were analogous to the selectmen of New England. Parish government in
Virginia was in the hands of a close vestry; in South Carolina it was
administered by an open vestry. Moreover, while in Virginia the unit
of representation in the legislature was the county, in South Carolina
it was the parish. Now the South Carolina parish was of purely English
origin, not of French origin like the parishes of Louisiana. The
Louisiana parish is analogous to a county, that of South Carolina was
nearly equivalent to a township.[291] Although the colony had such a
large proportion of French settlers, and of such marked ability and
character, the development of its governmental institutions was as
thoroughly English as if no Frenchman had ever set foot upon its soil.
The approximation to the New England township is interesting. The
freemen of South Carolina, with their open vestry, possessed what the
smaller landed proprietors of Virginia in Bacon’s rebellion strove for
in vain.
[Sidenote: Free schools.]
In this connection it is worth while to observe that, from the first
decade of the eighteenth century, a strong interest in popular
education was felt in South Carolina. The same obstacles to schools in
the rural districts that we have already observed in Virginia prevented
the growth of anything like the public school system of New England.
But of private free schools in the colony of South Carolina there
were quite a number, and their quality was very good. The first was
established in Charleston in 1712, and it not only taught the three Rs,
along with bookkeeping, but it had classes in Greek and Latin. Private
donations were encouraged by a provision that every giver of £20 “could
nominate a scholar to be taught free for five years.” The commissioners
of the school also appointed twelve scholars. Free schools were
afterward erected by private bequests and subscriptions at Dorchester,
Beaufort, Ninety-Six, and in many other places. A noteworthy instance
was afforded by St. Thomas parish, where “James Childs bequeathed
£600 toward erecting a free school, and the parishioners, by local
subscription, increased the amount to £2,800.”[292] In such beginnings
there lay the possibilities of a more healthy development than can be
secured by the prevalent semi-socialist method of supporting schools by
public taxation;[293] but the influences of negro slavery were adverse
to any such development.
[Sidenote: Rice and indigo.]
The economic circumstance which chiefly determined the complexion of
society in South Carolina was the cultivation of rice and indigo. The
value of the former crop was discovered in 1693, when a ship from
Madagascar, accidentally stopping at Charleston, had on board a little
bag of rice, which was planted with very notable success. Rice was not
long in becoming the great staple of the colony. By 1740 it yielded
more than £200,000 yearly. Indigo was next in importance. Much corn was
raised, and cattle in large numbers were exported to the West Indies.
Some attention was paid to silk, flax, and hemp, tobacco, olives, and
oranges. Some cotton was raised, but that crop did not attain paramount
importance until after the invention of the gin and the development of
great factories in England.
Rice and indigo absorbed the principal attention of the colony, as
tobacco absorbed the attention of Virginia. Manufactures did not
thrive. Every article, great or small, whether a mere luxury or an
article of prime necessity, that had to be manufactured, was imported,
and paid for with rice or indigo. This created a very prosperous trade
in Charleston. The planters did not deal directly with the shipmasters,
as in Virginia, but sold their crops to the merchants in Charleston,
whence they were shipped, sometimes in British, sometimes in New
England vessels, to all parts of the world.
[Sidenote: Some characteristics of South Carolina slavery.]
Now the cultivation of rice and the cultivation of indigo are both very
unhealthy occupations. The work in the swamps is deadly to white men.
But after 1713 negroes were brought to South Carolina in such great
numbers that an athletic man could be had for £40 or less. Every such
negro could raise in a single year much more indigo or rice than would
repay the cost of his purchase, so that it was actually more profitable
to work him to death than to take care of him. Assuming, then, that
human nature in South Carolina was neither better nor worse than in
other parts of the civilized world, we need not be surprised when told
that the relations between master and slave were noticeably different
from what they were in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. The
negroes of the southern colony were reputed to be more brutal and
unmanageable than those to the northward, and for this there is a
twofold explanation. In the first place, slaves newly brought from
Africa, half-savage heathen, were less tractable than African slaves
who had lived many years under kindly treatment among white people,
and far less tractable than slaves of the next generation born in
America. Such newcomers as had been tribal chiefs or elders in their
country were noted as especially insolent and insubordinate.[294] In
many respects the negro has proved quickly amenable to the softening
influences of civilized life, and to the teachings of Christianity,
however imperfectly apprehended. In the second place, the type of
Virginia slavery was old-fashioned and patriarchal, while South
Carolina slavery was of the modern and commercial type. The slaves on
a Virginia plantation were like members of a great family, while in a
South Carolina rice swamp their position was much more analogous to
that of a gang of navvies. This circumstance was closely connected
with a peculiarity of South Carolina life, in which it afforded a
striking contrast to the slave states north of it. Except in the
immediate neighbourhood of Charleston, few if any planters lived on
their estates. The reason for this was doubtless the desire to escape
the intense heat and unwholesome air of the newly tilled lowlands.
The latitude of South Carolina is that of Morocco, and it was natural
for settlers coming from the cool or chilly climates of France and
England to seek such relief as the breezes of Charleston harbour could
afford.[295] As a rule, the planters had houses in Charleston and dwelt
there the year round, making occasional visits to their plantations,
but leaving them in the meanwhile to be managed by overseers. Thus the
slaves, while set to much harder labour than in Virginia, were in the
main left subject to the uncurbed tyranny of underlings, which is apt
to be a very harsh kind of tyranny. The diminutions in their numbers,
whether due to hardship or to whatever cause, were repaired by fresh
importations from Africa, so that there was much less improvement
in their quality than under the milder patriarchal system. The dog
that is used to kicks is prone to snarl and bite, and the slaves of
South Carolina were an object of dread to their masters, all the more
so because of their overwhelming numbers. Nothing can indicate more
forcibly the social difference between the two Carolinas than the
different ratios of their black to their white population. About 1760
the inhabitants of North Carolina were reckoned at 200,000, of whom
one fourth were slaves; those of South Carolina at 150,000, of whom
nearly or quite three fourths were slaves. In the former case the
typical picture is that of a few black men raising tobacco and corn on
the small plantation where the master lives; in the latter case it is
that of an immense gang toiling in a rice swamp under the lash of an
overseer. Care should always be taken not to exaggerate such contrasts,
but after making all allowances the nature of the difference is here,
I think, correctly indicated.
[Sidenote: Negro insurrection of 1740.]
In 1740, while war was going on between Spain and England, there was
a brief but startling insurrection of slaves in South Carolina. It
was suspected that Spanish emissaries were concerned in it. However
that may have been, the occasion of such a war might well seem to the
negroes to furnish a good opportunity. Under the lead of a fellow
named Cato the insurgents gathered near Stono Inlet and began an
indiscriminate massacre of men, women, children. The alarm was quickly
given and the affair was soon brought to an end, though not until too
many lives had been lost. The news arrived in Wilton while the people
were attending church. It was the custom of the planters to carry
rifles and pistols, and very little time was lost before Captain Bee
led forth a well-equipped body of militia in quest of the rebels.
They were overtaken in a large field, all in hilarious disorder,
celebrating their bloody achievement with potations of rum; in which
plight they were soon dispersed with slaughter, and their ringleaders
were summarily hanged.[296]
[Sidenote: Cruelties.]
The habit of carrying fire-arms to church was part of a general system
of patrol which grew out of the dread in which the planters lived. The
chief business of the patrol was to visit all the plantations within
its district at least once a fortnight and search the negro quarters
for concealed weapons or stolen goods.[297] The patrolmen also hunted
fugitives, and were authorized to flog stray negroes wherever found.
The ordinary death penalty for the black man was hanging. Burning at
the stake was not unknown, but, as I have already mentioned, there
is one instance of such an execution in Massachusetts, and there are
several in New York, so that it cannot be cited as illustrating any
peculiarity of the South Carolina type of slavery. The most hideous
instance of cruelty recorded of South Carolina is that of a slave who
for the murder of an overseer was left to starve in a cage suspended
to the bough of a tree, where insects swarmed over his naked flesh
and birds had picked his eyes out before the mercy of death overtook
him.[298] That such atrocities must have been condemned by public
opinion is shown by the act of 1740, prescribing a fine of £700 current
money for the wilful murder of a slave by his master or any other white
man; £350 for killing him in a sudden heat of passion, or by undue
correction; and £100 for inflicting mutilation or cruel punishment.[299]
[Sidenote: Life in Charleston.]
[Sidenote: Contrast between the two Carolinas.]
The circumstance that most of the great planters had houses in
Charleston went along with the brisk foreign trade to make it a very
important town, according to the American standards of those days. In
1776, with its population of 15,000 souls, it ranked as the fifth city
of the United States. Charleston had a theatre, while concerts, balls,
and dinner parties gave animation to its social life. It was a general
custom with the planters to send their children to Europe for an
education, and it was said that a knowledge of the world thus acquired
gave to society in South Carolina a somewhat less provincial aspect
than it wore in other parts of English America.[300] The sharpest
contrast, however, was with its next neighbour. As South Carolina may
have been in some respects the most cosmopolitan of the colonies south
of Pennsylvania, so on the other hand North Carolina was certainly the
most sequestered and provincial. As I observed at the beginning of
this chapter, for the development of the frontier or backwoods phase
of American life two conditions were requisite: first, the struggle
with the wilderness; secondly, isolation from European influences. This
combination of conditions was not realized in the case of the first
settlers of Virginia and Maryland, of the Puritans in New England,
or the Dutch in New Netherland, or the Quakers in Pennsylvania. In
all these cases there was more or less struggle with the wilderness,
but the contact with European influences was never broken. With North
Carolina it was different; the direct trade with England was from
the outset much less than that of the other colonies. For a time
its chief seaport was Norfolk in Virginia; European ideas reached
it chiefly through slow overland journeys; and it was practically
a part of Virginia’s backwoods. On the other hand, South Carolina,
focussing all its activities in the single seaport of Charleston, was
eminently accessible to European influences. Its life was not that of
a wilderness frontier, like its northern neighbour. But its military
position, with reference to the whole Atlantic seaboard, was that of an
English march or frontier against the Spaniards in Florida and the West
Indies.
The contrast above indicated applies only to lowland South Carolina,
the only part with which the earlier decades of the eighteenth century
are concerned. At that time the highlands of both Carolinas remained
in the possession of the Cherokees, so that they have nothing to do
with my comparison. At a later time that whole highland region became a
wilderness frontier, the scene of the civilized white man’s backwoods
life. All the way, indeed, from Pennsylvania to Georgia, along the
Appalachian chain, there was a strong similarity of conditions and of
life, in marked contrast with the divergencies along the coast region,
in stepping from Pennsylvania into Maryland, thence into Virginia, and
so on; but that life along the coast which approached most nearly to
the life of the interior wilderness was to be seen about Albemarle and
Pamlico sounds.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Spanish frontier.]
The mention of Georgia serves to introduce the statement that, with
the growth of civilization on the South Carolina coast, the need for a
buffer against the Spaniards began to be more and more strongly felt.
We have seen how the vexatious Yamassee war of 1715 was brought on by
Spanish intrigues. After the overthrow of the Yamassees the troubles
did not entirely cease. For some years the Indians continued to be a
source of annoyance, and in their misdeeds the secret hand of Spain was
discernible. The multitude of slaves, too, in regions accessible to
Spanish influence, greatly increased the danger.
[Sidenote: James Oglethorpe.]
[Sidenote: Beginnings of Georgia.]
In 1732 the state of affairs on the South Carolina frontier attracted
the attention of a gallant English soldier whose name deserves a
very high place among the heroes of early American history. James
Oglethorpe, an officer who in youth had served with distinction under
Prince Eugene against the Turks,[301] conceived the plan of freeing
the insolvent debtors who crowded English prisons by carrying them
over to America and establishing a colony which might serve as a
strong military outpost against the Spaniards. The scheme was an
opportune one, as the South Sea Bubble and other wild projects had
ruined hundreds of English families. The land between the Savannah
and Altamaha rivers, with the strip starting between their two main
sources and running westward to the Pacific Ocean,[302] was made over
to a board of trustees, and was named Georgia, in honour of the king,
George II. The charter created a kind of proprietary government, but
with powers less plenary and extensive than had been granted to the
proprietors of Maryland, Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Oglethorpe was
appointed governor; German Protestants and Highlanders from Scotland
were brought over in large numbers; and a few people from New England
joined in the enterprise, and founded the town of Sunbury. All laws
were to be made by the trustees, and the settlers were at first to have
no representative assembly and no voice in making the government. But
this despotic arrangement was merely temporary and provisional; it was
intended that after the lapse of one-and-twenty years the colony should
be held to have come of age, and should choose its own government.
Military drill was to be rigidly enforced. Slave-labour was absolutely
prohibited, as was also the sale of intoxicating liquors; so that Maine
cannot rightfully claim the doubtful honour of having been the first
American commonwealth to try the experiment of a “Maine Law.” Such were
the beginnings of Georgia, and in the Spanish war of 1739 it quite
justified the foresight of its founder. The valour of the Highlanders
and the admirable generalship of Oglethorpe were an efficient bulwark
for the older colonies. In 1742 the Spaniards were at last decisively
defeated at Frederica, and from that time forth until the Revolution
the frontier was more quiet. But proprietary government in Georgia
fared no better than in the Carolinas. In 1752, one year before the
coming of age, the government by trustees was abandoned. Georgia was
made a crown colony, and a representative government was introduced
simultaneously with negro slavery and Jamaica rum.
The social condition of colonial Georgia does not present many
distinctive or striking features. In 1770 the population numbered about
50,000, of which perhaps one half were slaves. There was no town life.
Rice and indigo were the principal crops, and there was a large export
of lumber. Near Savannah there were a few extensive plantations, with
fine houses, after the Virginia pattern; but most of the estates were
small, and their owners poor. The Church of England was supported by
the government, but the clergy had little influence. The condition
of the slaves differed but slightly, if at all, from their condition
in South Carolina. There were a good many “mean whites,” and there
was, perhaps, more crime and lawlessness than in the older colonies.
The roads were mere Indian trails, and there were neither schools,
nor mails, nor any kind of literature. Colonial Georgia, in short,
with many of the characteristics of a “wild West,” stood in relation
to South Carolina somewhat as North Carolina to Virginia. It was
essentially a frontier community, though the activity of Savannah as a
seaport somewhat qualified the situation.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Cavaliers and Puritans once more.]
A comparative survey of Old Virginia’s neighbours shows how extremely
loose and inaccurate is the common habit of alluding to the old
Cavalier society of England as if it were characteristic of the
southern states in general. Equally loose and ignorant is the habit of
alluding to Puritanism as if it were peculiar to New England. In point
of fact the Cavalier society was reproduced nowhere save on Chesapeake
Bay. On the other hand, the English or Independent phase of Puritanism
was by no means confined to the New England colonies. Three fourths
of the people of Maryland were Puritans; English Puritanism, with the
closely kindred French Calvinism, swayed South Carolina; and in our
concluding chapter we shall see how the Scotch or Presbyterian phase
of Puritanism extended throughout the whole length of the Appalachian
region, from Pennsylvania to Georgia, and has exercised in the
southwest an influence always great and often predominant. In the South
to-day there is much more Puritanism surviving than in New England.
But before we join in the westward progress from tidewater to the peaks
of the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky range, we must look back upon the
ocean for a moment and see how it came to be infested with buccaneers
and pirates, and what effects they wrought upon our coasts.