Chapter XV: The Carolina Frontier (1)

[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.

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.]