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.
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.
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.
How Culpeper fared in London.
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.