We must now take a hasty glance at the colonies, which we left at the eve of the Revolution of 1688, and discover how this great change affected them.
We have seen the Grand Model constitution of Carolina fall before the wishes of the people, and a more practical and popular form of government take its place. In 1694, considerable dissatisfaction existed in the colony owing to contentions between Dissenters and Churchmen, who, though forming but a small minority, yet demanded exclusive privileges. It was therefore advised by Thomas Smith, who had succeeded Philip Ludwell as governor, that in order to give respectability to the office, and to restore harmony between the contending parties, one of the proprietaries himself should be sent out as governor. The young Earl of Shaftesbury was elected to this office, but he declining it, John Archdale, an honest Quaker proprietary, was chosen.
Archdale, as might be expected, gave the Dissenters a majority in the council, as they formed a majority in the colony; he also appeased the discontent which the system of quit-rents had caused, by remitting them for three or four years, and forgiving the arrears due—a very politic act, as it would have been next to impossible to collect them. He was a wise and humane man, and not only succeeded in quieting the discontents and disputes of the colonists, but established an amicable relationship with the Indians by an act of humanity. He protected the natives round Cape Fear from kidnappers, and they in return engaged to befriend shipwrecked mariners on their coast. Spite of his peace principles, he yet raised a militia-force for the defence of the colony, excusing however all from being enrolled who could plead scruples of conscience against it. With the Spaniards of St. Augustine he also established friendly relations, by ransoming four Indian Catholic priests, prisoners among the Yamasees, and sending them back to St. Augustine. “I shall return your kindness,” was the reply of the Spaniard; and when an English vessel soon afterwards was wrecked on the coast of Florida, and the crew taken captive by Indians, they were ransomed by him.
Archdale soon brought the affairs of Carolina into a flourishing condition; the fame of her prosperity attracted to her soil industrious Scotch emigrants, as well as settlers from Massachusetts; she was in fact looked upon as a sort of “American Canaan flowing with milk and honey.”
Archdale having thus, by his wisdom, patience and labour, laid a firm foundation for a most glorious superstructure, he appointed Joseph Blake, son of that Joseph Blake, brother of the admiral, who twenty years before led a colony of Dissenters into Carolina, as his successor, and returned to England. Scarcely, however, was Archdale gone, than Blake, to satisfy the importunate church party, endowed the episcopal church at Charleston with a parsonage and annual stipend; and though the Huguenots, who had suffered so long disabilities on account of religion and country, were very properly enfranchised, yet were Catholics excluded from liberty of conscience, which was granted to all other Christians. Again religious, or rather irreligious, contentions raged violently. Nathaniel Moore, the successor of Blake, not only established the episcopal form of worship, but excluded all Dissenters from any share in the government. The Dissenters, indignant at this arbitrary and unjust exclusion, appealed to the British parliament in 1706, and these acts were declared contrary to the laws of the charter. They were repealed therefore by the colonial assembly; but though the disabilities of the Dissenters were removed, the Church of England remained the established religion of the province until the American Revolution.
Party spirit and strife had entered the colony, not only as regarded religion, but on the questions of finance and quit-rents; nevertheless the colony continued to flourish.
Rice, of which a bag had accidentally been brought to Charleston in a vessel from Madagascar at the time of Archdale’s government, and distributed among various planters, had been cultivated at first as a matter of curiosity, but was now becoming a staple product of the colony, and a great source of wealth. So important had it become indeed, in 1704, that an act of parliament placed it amongst the “enumerated articles.” The cultivation of this grain led to the large importations of negroes which yearly took place into Carolina.
The fur-traders of Carolina adventured far into the interior; the oak of the inland forest was cleft into staves for the West Indies, and the pine furnished masts, boards and joists, tar and turpentine. These naval stores, however, were rather the produce of the hardier North Carolina, where but few negro slaves were to be found, and the inhabitants were of a much more sturdy and independent character. “North Carolina,” says the historian, “like ancient Rome, was famed as the sanctuary of runaways. Seventy years after its origin, it is described as a country where there is scarce any form of government; and it long continued to be said, with but slight exaggeration, that in North Carolina every one did that which was right in his own eyes, paying tribute neither to God nor to Cæsar.” But in this lawless state, where there was neither church nor creed, where “Quakers, Atheists, Deists and other evil-disposed persons,” lived a life of freedom and peace, all went well; and the stone which marks the grave, beneath the shade of a large cedar-tree, of Henderson Walker, the governor in 1694, records simply that “North Carolina, during his administration, enjoyed tranquillity.”
But to this irreligious state, as it was considered, the proprietaries determined to put an end, by establishing episcopacy as the religion of the colony; and Robert Daniel was sent over by them as deputy-governor for this purpose. The apple of discord was now thrown into the colony, and long and bitter disputes followed, the Quakers being accused as the principal fomenters of these distractions. The colony was broken up into two factions, and each party in 1706 had their own governor and their own house of representatives, neither of which were able to gain the ascendancy—the one, of which Thomas Cary was head, wanting a legal sanction; the other, led by William Glover, popular favour. At length, Edward Hyde, a relative of Queen Anne’s, was sent over, in the hope of restoring order; and he, as deputy-governor of North Carolina, was to receive as usual his commission from Tynte, the governor of South Carolina; but Tynte was dead when he arrived, and the turbulent people of North Carolina paid him no respect. Affairs grew desperate; the friends of Hyde took up arms to assert his power, and called in the aid of Spotswood, an experienced soldier and governor of Virginia. But Spotswood, though vehement against “the mutinous spirit of North Carolina, yet pleaded the difficulties of marching forces into a country so cut up with rivers;” besides which he had no troops but militia, and Virginia herself, at least the counties bordering on Carolina, “were stocked with Quakers;” and he only sent a party of marines from the guardship as an evidence of his good disposition. Cary and the leaders of his party having, however, appeared in Virginia with the intention, as they said, of appealing to England in defence of their actions, were compelled by Spotswood to take their passage in a man-of-war just then returning.
Whilst all these disturbances were going forward, North Carolina increased greatly in population. Disturbances, in fact, in these young American states, seem to have been merely like the ebullitions of vigorous youth, which grows in spite of them, and through which all their powers are brought into exercise. In 1698, the first settlements were made on Pamlico River, the Indians of that vicinity having been nearly destroyed by fever and the ravages of war with more powerful tribes. In 1707, a number of French Protestants removed into Carolina from Virginia; and a few years later, a hundred German families from the Palatinate, whence they were driven by the devastations of war and religious persecution, found a home there also, 250 acres of land being assigned by the proprietaries to each family.