Governor Eden, in his corrupt connivance with Blackbeard, was not
representative of the public opinion of the Carolinas in 1718. The
proprietary provinces--for these things were shortly before the
revolution which placed them directly under the Crown--had become tired
of pirates.
It’s a long story, but of powerful interest. The short of the matter
is that the Carolinas had fostered pirates for her own interest until
in time they became a menace. From the middle of the sixteen-hundreds
the Southern provinces had been the outfitting grounds of a shoal of
privateers who under royal commissions threshed the waters of the
Spanish Main for Monsieur le Roy, as the French were called, or the
Dons of Spain.
These letters-of-marque lads really protected the baby colonies from
those two voracious wolves for quite a while, but naturally if business
in the legitimate line of their letters slacked up, they were prone to
mistake the ensign of St. George for that of the Fleur-de-lys, and thus
kept their hands in practice by despoiling friends as well as foes.
Far too often they crossed too easily the thin line which separated a
privateer from a pirate, so that in something less than half a century
Charles Town, which had trembled at the French and Spanish invasions,
now was equally fearful of the guns of the erstwhile protectors, the
pirates.
English navigation laws, which had delivered the provinces, bound
hand and foot, into the hard fists of the English merchants, did not
a little to promote piracy, for the sea robbers came to town with
holds crammed full of all sorts of merchandise and peddled it to
the colonists less the duties and imposts, and so made one of the
cheapest markets in the world. Their customers all along the coast met
them gladly and made no bones of the traffic, until the black flag
threatened to monopolize the whole commerce, when the community awoke
to the circumstance that there was a price in the cheap bazaar after
all.
Consider that Blackbeard, a month or so before he took the Act of
Grace, had “salvaged” no less than twenty-seven ships--nearly a ship
a day--and you have a measure of the situation; add, too, this, that
Blackbeard was but one of many, and you will understand why Jamaica,
for instance, wailed to the home Government that it was ruined.
North and South Carolina had not formally divided at that time, though
the distinction of names was used; Governor Eden ruled wickedly in the
North; Governor Johnson ruled justly and wisely in the South.