An enlargement of bounds.
In 1667 Samuel Stephens succeeded Governor Drummond, who went to Virginia, where he became a leader in the Bacon rebellion. The Lords Proprietors in 1665 secured a charter, with enlargements of their bounds; their new grants in terms included the present territory of the United States between Virginia and Florida, to the Pacific. In 1670 was added the Bahamas,—neither the claims of Virginia nor of Spain being considered in the grants. Stephens was assisted by a council of twelve, his own appointees when the proprietaries did not choose them. The assembly, of twelve members chosen by the people, was a lower house. |Immigrants attracted.| This first legislature met in 1669; and actuated by a desire to attract immigrants, declared that no debts contracted abroad by settlers previous to removal to Carolina could be collected in their new home. As a consequence, along with many desirable colonists flocking in from the Bermudas, Bahamas, New England, and Virginia, came others who were not worthy material for a pioneer community. The proprietaries themselves were quite liberal in their land-grants to inhabitants.
Locke's Fundamental Constitutions.
Unfortunately for the Carolinians, the Lords Proprietors engaged John Locke, the famous philosopher, to devise for them a scheme of colonial government (1669). It was a complicated feudal structure, entitled the Fundamental Constitutions, not suited to any community, old or new, and now chiefly interesting as a philosophical curiosity. The province was to be divided into counties, and they into seignories, baronies, precincts, and colonies; and the people were to be separated into four estates of the realm,—proprietaries, landgraves, caciques, and commons. Locke defined "political power to be the right of making laws for regulating and preserving property." The objects sought to be attained in his constitution were avowedly the "establishing the interest of the lords proprietors," the making of a government "most agreeable to the monarchy, ... that we may avoid erecting a numerous democracy," and the connecting political power with hereditary wealth. The leet-men, or tenants, were to be kept from asserting themselves by rigid feudal restrictions: "nor shall any leet-man or leet-woman have liberty to go off from the land of their particular lord and live anywhere else without license obtained from their said lord, under hand and seal. All the children of leet-men shall be leet-men, and so to all generations." The plan was the dream of an aristocrat; it was an attempt to reproduce the thirteenth century in the seventeenth; it was artificial and unwieldy. While the rough backwoods-men could not grasp its intricacies or understand its mediæval terms, they instinctively felt it to be a useless bit of constitutional romancing, and would have little to do with it.
The only important result of the attempt was to unsettle existing conditions and, especially in Albemarle, to create a contempt for all government; while the attempt of the proprietaries to regulate trade strengthened the too-prevalent spirit of lawlessness. Their officious lordships had set out to establish the Church of England; but the result of their interference was that the Quakers, elsewhere despised, took advantage of the spirit of dissent and obtained a firm hold over the Carolinians.
The planting of Charleston.
During this period of unrest in the northern settlements William Sayle, who had explored the coast in 1667, planted (1670-1671) a colony "on the first highland" at the junction of the Ashley and Cooper rivers,—the site of the Charleston of to-day.
38. The Two Settlements of Carolina (1671-1700).
North Carolina neglected by the proprietaries.
The settlements at Cape Fear and Charleston being more orderly and promising than that at Albemarle, the proprietaries were henceforth more considerate towards them. North Carolina, as it was ultimately called, was practically left to take care of itself for upwards of a decade, during which the neglected colonists made a rough struggle for existence upon their crude clearings in the wilderness, those nearest the coast eking out their scanty income by trafficking with New England smugglers. Throughout the rest of the seventeenth century the proprietaries had but a nominal hold upon the people of the northern colony. In 1676 Thomas Eastchurch was appointed governor of Albemarle, but he ruled only through deputies. Deputy Miller, collector of the king's customs, a drunken, vicious fellow, added to his unpopularity by attempting to browbeat the assembly. The colonists |The Culpeper rebellion.| rose in arms (1678), imprisoned Miller, chose one Culpeper as collector of customs, and convened a new assembly, which confirmed the revolutionary proceedings and controlled affairs until 1683, when Seth Sothel was sent out as governor. Sothel won the reputation of being an arbitrary and rapacious official, and in 1688 the unruly assembly deposed and banished him, despite the feeble remonstrance of the proprietaries.