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.
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.
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]
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]
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.