“The four-and-twenty colonies of each county were divided into four precincts, each precinct having a local court, whence appeals were to lie to the court of Chief Justice. Juries were to decide by majority.” To plead for money or reward in any court was denounced as “base and vile,” an enactment little in accordance with the interests of the lawyer.
“None could be freemen who did not acknowledge God and the obligation of public worship. The Church of England—against the wishes of Locke, who wished to put all sects on the same footing—was to be supported by the state. Any seven freemen might, however, form a church or religious society, provided its members admitted the rightfulness of oaths—which clause at once excluded the Quakers. By another provision, every freeman of Carolina, of whatsoever opinion or religion, possessed absolute power and authority over his negro slaves.”
This “Grand Model Constitution,” which was extravagantly praised in England, was signed in March, 1670, and Monk, Duke of Albemarle, as the oldest of the proprietaries, was appointed Palatine.
Whilst this pompous scheme of legislature was occupying the wisest heads in England, three vessels conveyed out emigrants, at the expense of £12,000 to the proprietaries, under the command of William Sayle, who established themselves on the old site of Port Royal.
The grand aristocratical constitution was sent over in due form to Carolina, but neither was it found more suitable at Albemarle, in the north, than by Sayle’s colony in the south. The character of the people of Albemarle rendered its introduction impossible; “those sturdy dwellers in scattered log cabins of the wilderness could not be noblemen, and would not be serfs.” This unfortunate constitution, which made John Locke a landgrave, and the noble proprietaries in succession palatines, led to a long and fruitless struggle of its founders to force upon the settlers a form of government incompatible with their circumstances, and from which they had nothing to gain, but everything to lose. The contest continued for three-and-twenty years, when the Grand Model, baseless as a fabric of mist, was formally abrogated.
About the time when the new constitution was first exciting the derision and abhorrence of the sturdy Nonconformists of Albemarle, distinguished ministers among the Quakers travelled from Virginia into North Carolina, and were received “tenderly” by a people naturally religious, but among whom, at that time, was no minister of Christ. Unlike the Puritans of Massachusetts, they warmly welcomed these later apostles of religious and civil liberty; and whilst they sturdily rejected a form of government which was at variance with all their principles of social and political life, received gladly “the authority of truth,” and so the “Society of Friends” were the first to organise a religious government in this portion of America.
In the autumn of 1672, George Fox himself visited Carolina, travelling across “the great bogs” of the Dismal Swamp, “commonly, as he relates, wet to the knees, and lying abroad at nights in the woods by a fire, until reaching a house where the woman had the sense of God upon her, he was indulged in the luxury of a mat to lie upon by the fireside.”
Carolina, like Rhode Island, was a place of refuge for schismatics of all kinds, who now “lived lonely in the woods, with great dogs to guard their houses;” men and women of thoughtful minds “open to the conviction of truth,” and who received the preachings and teachings of George Fox and his brethren with great joy; and not only they of the poorer sort, but the richer and more influential inhabitants of the province, heard him gladly and received him as an honoured guest to their houses.
The plantations of that day, we are told, lay along the bay and the rivers that flow into it, and these and the inlets were the highways of Carolina; therefore we find George Fox and his friends taken, on one occasion, in a boat lent them by a kind-hearted man, a captain of the country, to the house of the governor, who, with his wife, received them very lovingly, and the next morning accompanied them courteously two miles through the woods to the water’s edge, and so on to the house of Joseph Scot, one of the representatives of the county, where they had “a sound and precious meeting, and the people were very tender.” Again, he was at the house of the secretary, to arrive at which, however, they had “much ado, for the water was shallow and the boat could not come ashore, but the secretary’s wife, he being from home, seeing their strait, put out in her little canoe and brought them to land.” These little touches of life and character are worth pages of laboured description; they show the spirit of the people; they show the joy with which Fox and his friends were welcomed, when the wife of the chief secretary herself paddled her little canoe to bring them safely on shore. It is a genuine picture of simple primeval life. And not alone did George Fox preach to the white settlers of “the light of the Spirit of God which is in every one,” but to the natives of the wilderness also, who approved of what he said, and “received the truth lovingly; the Indian priests themselves sitting soberly among the people listening to the words that were spoken.”
Willing disciples of George Fox, as the people of North Carolina proved themselves to be, were sure to protest against and oppose a constitution like that of Shaftesbury and Locke. The introduction of it was not only difficult, but was soon rendered impossible, by the accession of dissenters from England, and so-called “runaways, rogues, and rebels” from Virginia, who, on the suppression of an insurrection there, of which we shall speak anon, fled daily to Carolina as their common place of refuge. Another cause of dissatisfaction with the English government, and of constant irritation, was the enforcement of the Navigation Laws. The population of the whole state as yet, in 1677, amounted to little more than 4,000; “a few fat cattle, a little maize, and 800 hogsheads of tobacco, formed all their exports,” and the few foreign articles which they required were brought to them by the traders of Boston. Yet, small as this traffic was, it was envied by the English merchants; the Navigation Law was ordered to be strictly enforced, the New England trader was driven from their harbour by unreasonable duties, and the Carolinians themselves had no other free market for their few exports than England. Miller, a man who had already become extremely unpopular, returned from England to Carolina, as chief magistrate and collector of the royal customs, empowered to levy one penny on every pound weight of tobacco exported to New England. But spite of this, and spite of attempts to excite ill-feeling between the two colonies, Carolina continued to trade with Boston, and the traffic grew in defiance of imposts, which only served to render both colonies more determined and more averse to the parent state.