Thomas Carey and the Quakers in North Carolina.
Porter’s mission to England.
Alliance between Porter and Carey.
Edward Hyde.
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.
Expansion of the northern colony; arrival of Graffenried.
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.
Carolina Indians; Algonquin tribes.