School History of North Carolina : from 1584 to the present time

by John W. Moore

3. The Lords Proprietors, as the last evidence of their lack of wisdom and interest in the province they had so long cursed with their misrule, sent over George Burrington. After the creation of the counties of Bath and Clarendon the representative of the Lords Proprietors was called "Governor of North Carolina."

4. Governor Burrington's character was very bad; he had been indicted and punished in the Old Bailey, in London, for beating an old woman, and was, all his life, drunken and quarrelsome. Yet such a man came over to be the guardian of a people who knew not when they were to be tomahawked by the savages or driven into further exile by the zealots who were disturbed at the nature of their religious belief.

1725.

5. This weak and wicked ruler only remained one year in charge, when Sir Richard Everhard came to replace him. They were brothers in iniquity, and before Burrington left Edenton these two men disgraced themselves by fighting in the streets of that village. The General Assembly met at Edenton, and by enactment of law the dividing line between North Carolina and Virginia was run in November of this year.

1729.

6. Such rulers as have just been mentioned so utterly disgusted every one in the colony that the King and Parliament were petitioned to buy the province and abolish the rule of those who had only hindered its growth. So, in 1729, for the sum of forty- five thousand dollars, all of the proprietors except Lord Carteret, sold to the crown their interest in Carolina . Thus, after sixty-six years of unbounded misrule, these men in London who had so greatly cursed North Carolina by their ignorance and mistakes, surrendered their title to property which had never paid them more than about one hundred dollars a piece in any one year.

7. They had never really cared for the people whom they were so anxious to disturb with their crude notions of religion. The schemes of London merchants were of far more moment thanthe welfare of Albemarle, and the folly of the Fundamental Constitutions was to be upheld even at the ruin of the province.

8. As an earnest of the want of care King George I. was to exhibit towards the colony, Governor Burrington was sent back to the people who were already so well acquainted with his faults of temper and character. He soon got into trouble with the leading men of the province, and pretending to go to South Carolina, returned to England, where he was soon after killed in a night- brawl in the city of London.

1734.

9. Nathaniel Rice was Governor until the arrival and qualification of Gabriel Johnston, who took the oaths of office at Brunswick, on the Cape Fear River. Governor Johnston was a Scotchman, who had lived for several years in London, and was to prove the wisest and best of all the men sent over to rule the people in Carolina. He married Penelope Eden, daughter of the late Governor, and dwelt at her home on the Chowan River.