Here let us notice the policy and plans of the Proprietors with respect to their distant colonies. The two charters differ only in a few particulars. The second increases the extent of territory, its main object, gives power to subdivide the province into distinct governments, and is a little more explicit with regard to religious toleration. No person was to be molested for difference of religious opinion or practice who did not actually disturb the peace of the community. With regard to political privileges, there is an important clause in both charters conferring upon the Proprietors power to ordain any laws and constitutions whatsoever (if consonant to reason and, as far as possible, to the laws and customs of England), but only “by and with the advice, assent, and approbation of the freemen,” or the majority of them, or of their delegates or deputies, who, for enacting such ordinances, were to be duly assembled from time to time. These privileges, we shall see in the history of the colony, were maintained by the people with a pertinacity commensurate with their importance, whenever their lordships attempted to control the colonists without due regard to their approbation and consent. The charter reserved to the king only allegiance and sovereignty; in all other respects the Proprietors were absolute lords, with no other service or duty to their monarch than the annual payment of a trifling sum of money, and in case gold or silver should be found a fourth part thereof.
On August 6, 1663, a letter to the Proprietors, from members of a Cape Fear company of New England adventurers, claimed full liberty to choose their governors, make and confirm laws, and to be free from taxes, except such as they might impose on themselves, and deprecated “discouragement in reference to their government” as to the accustomed privileges of English colonists. While their claims were not conceded, this letter was answered generally by their lordships, on August 25th, announcing their concessions to all wishing to settle in Carolina.[713] The New England claim of privileges is worthy of notice for what we now call “advanced ideas.” And if we compare the charters of Connecticut (1662) and Rhode Island (1663) with that of Carolina (1663), it will appear that the self-interest of Clarendon[714] and his associates stood in the way of their securing to their colony some civil privileges which it would not have seemed strange at that time to concede. And it may as well be stated here, at once, that besides considerations of self-interest it was also the express policy of their lordships to “avoid erecting a numerous democracy” in their province. To carry out this policy, a grand scheme of government, called the Fundamental Constitutions, was framed by Shaftesbury and the philosopher Locke, and solemnly confirmed as a compact among themselves,—the Proprietors,—and which was to be unalterable forever. A scheme more utopian, more unsuited to the actual condition of the colonists, could hardly have been devised. Yet its adoption by the people was recommended, ordered, stubbornly insisted on by their lordships at the risk of balking—as, for a while, it did balk—the prosperity of their colony. The first set of the unalterable Constitutions is dated 21st July, 1669; the second was issued in March, 1670,—and so on till a fifth set had been constructed. Under the right conferred by the charter, respecting the consent of the freemen, or their delegates, in establishing laws and constitutions, such consent was never formally given; and the code was, at least in South Carolina, again and again rejected. It was a gage of political contention foolishly thrown down; but in taking it up, the colonists were made ardent students of political rights.
By these Constitutions, the eldest Proprietor was made Palatine,—a sort of king of the province. The other seven Proprietors were to be high functionaries: admiral, chamberlain, constable, chief justice, chancellor, high steward, and treasurer.[715] There was to be a Parliament: eight superior courts, one to each Proprietor according to his high office; county and precinct courts; and a grand Executive Council, among whose duties was the preparation and first enactment of all matters to be submitted to Parliament. Among the carefully composed articles in these Constitutions should be noticed such as enjoin that no person above seventeen years of age could have the benefit and protection of the law who was not a member of some church; and no one could hold an estate or become a freeman of the province, or have any habitation in it, who did not acknowledge a God and that He is publicly and solemnly to be worshipped. Moreover, in the set of the Constitutions printed and sent over for adoption, the Church of England[716] was made the established church, and “it alone shall be allowed to receive a public maintenance by grant of Parliament.” It was also enjoined that no one seventeen years old should have any estate or possession or the protection of the law in the province, unless he subscribed the Fundamental Constitutions and promised in writing to defend and maintain them to the utmost of his power.
Their lordships in England, and most, if not all, of their appointed officers in the colonies, as in duty bound, contended strenuously for the adoption of this preposterous form of government till the year 1698; and hardly then did the incontrovertible logic of events convince them of their folly. A late historian of North Carolina remarks, “Their lordships theorized, the colonists felt; the Proprietors drew pictures, but the hardy woodsmen of Carolina were grappling with stern realities. Titles of nobility, orders of precedence, the shows of an empty pageantry, were to them but toys which might amuse children; but there was no romance in watching the savage, or felling the forest, or planting the corn, or gathering the crop, with the ever-present weapon in reach of the laboring hand.”
There was another cause of irritation on the part of the colonists, both in North and South Carolina. The terms of the tenure of land were of paramount interest to them and their children. The quantity offered in 1663 was augmented in 1666, and two years later, by the “Great Deed of Grant,” the fear of forfeiture was removed for not clearing and planting a specified portion of the land; in other words, settlers were permitted to hold lands as they were held in the adjoining royal province of Virginia. At first each freeman received one hundred acres, the same for his wife, each child and manservant, and fifty for each woman-servant; paying a half-penny per acre. After the expiration of servitude, each servant received a liberal quantity of land with implements for tillage.[717] In 1669, in the settling of the colony at Ashley River, one hundred and fifty acres were offered to all free persons above sixteen years of age, and the same for able-bodied men-servants; and a proportionate increase for others, if they arrived before the 25th of March, 1670; then a less number of acres for subsequent arrivals. The annual rent was a penny or the value of a penny per acre (as also announced in the unalterable Constitutions); payments to begin September, 1689.[718] When Governor Sayle died (a year after settling on Ashley River), Sir John Yeamans came from Barbadoes to the new settlement; and having been made a landgrave claimed the government as vice-palatine under the Fundamental Constitutions. Such claim was denied by the colonists;[719] but he soon received a commission, and his first measure, on assuming control, was to have an accurate survey made and a record of lands held by settlers in South Carolina, with a view to the collection of quit-rents for the Proprietors. When ten years of outlay for their province had brought them no pecuniary return, they began to think “the country was not worth having at that rate.” They removed their former favorite Yeamans, because further outlays were incurred, and placed West in authority, who had attended more successfully to their interests. In November, 1682, all prior terms for granting land were annulled, and if a penny an acre (the words “or the value of a penny” being omitted) was not paid, a right of reëntry was claimed: “to enter and distraine, and the distress or distresses then and there found to take, lead, and carry and drive away and impound, and to detain and keep until they shall be fully satisfied and paid all arrears of the said rent.” This produced inequality of tenure, or operated to the injury of many who had previously taken up, on more liberal terms, only part of the lands they were entitled to.[720] Their lordships were too just to interfere with the stability of titles, but the alteration of the tenure for new grants or of the mode of conveyance, from time to time, was at least unwise. Besides, there was scarcely any coin in the province, and the people found it hard that they could no longer pay in merchantable produce. To their reasonable request for relief and a better encouragement to new settlers came the reply, “We insist to sell our lands our own way.” With this reply a peremptory order was sent that the third set of the unalterable Constitutions should be put in force.
A part of this manifest diminution of the generosity of the Proprietors and their unwillingness to bestow further concessions may be accounted for by the opposition their favorite scheme of government had encountered in both colonies, and especially by a rebellious outbreak which had just occurred in Albemarle County. Clarendon County at Cape Fear had broken up and disappeared, as we have related; and henceforth our attention must be directed to Albemarle at the northern end of the province and the Ashley River colony at the south, remote from each other, with a vast forest intervening, the dwelling place of numerous tribes of Indians. Before the province was authoritatively divided (1729), it had divided itself, as it were, into North and South Carolina; and it is best that, in this narrative, we should begin to call them so.
In North Carolina, the Quakers, who were in close association and unison, and so far influential in action,[721] opposed the Fundamental Constitutions and the Church of England establishment; and all the settlers looked upon the enforcement of the recent orders of the Proprietors—the displacement of an easy and liberal method of government without asking their assent—as a violation of the terms of settlement, and of the inducements at first held out to them.[722] Governor Stephens endeavored to enforce the orders of the Proprietors, but he died soon after receiving them, and was succeeded by Carteret, president of the council, till an appointment should be made. Carteret appears not to have been of a nature to contend against the disaffection and turbulence which had arisen, and, in 1675, went to England to make known personally, it is said, the distracted condition of the colony. But two of the colonists, Eastchurch and Miller, had also gone over to represent, personally, the grievances of the people. They seemed, to the Proprietors, the ablest men to carry out their instructions; and the former was made governor and the latter deputy of Earl Shaftesbury and secretary of the province; he was also made, by the commissioners of the king’s revenue, collector of such revenue in Albemarle. They sailed for Carolina in 1677, but the new governor remained a long while in the West Indies (winning “a lady and her fortune”), and died soon after reaching Albemarle. Miller as representing Eastchurch, but really without legal authority to act as governor, ruled with a high hand. He had gone to represent the grievances of his fellow colonists; he returned to harass them still more. The new “model” of government, the denial of “a free election of an assembly” (as the Pasquotank people complained), the attempt to enforce strictly the navigation laws, the collection of the tax on tobacco at their very doors,[723] his drunkenness and “putting the people in general by his threats and actions in great dread of their lives and estates,” as the Proprietors themselves express it, became intolerable to the colonists.
The New Englanders, with their characteristic enterprise, had long been sailing through the shallow waters of the Sound in coasting vessels, adapted to such navigation, and had largely monopolized the trade of North Carolina; buying or trafficking for lumber and cattle, which they sold in the West Indies, and bringing back rum, molasses, salt, and sugar, they exchanged these for tobacco, which they carried to Massachusetts, and shipped thence to Europe without much regard to the navigation laws. Miller, according to instructions sent to Governor Eastchurch, sought to break up this thriving and lucrative business, and to introduce a more direct trade with England. The populace generally, including the Quakers, had their own grievances, and fraternized with the New England skippers. Gillam, one of these bold captains, arrived with his vessel laden with the commodities the people needed, and armed, this time, with cannon. A wealthy Quaker, Durant, was on board with him. On land, John Culpepper, who had lately left South Carolina, where he had created commotions, became a leader of the malcontents. Influenced, no doubt, by the recent rebellion of Bacon in Virginia, some participators in which had taken refuge among them, and led on by men of courage whose hard-earned emoluments were threatened with ruin, the insurgents seized and imprisoned Miller and seven of the proprietary deputies, and took from the former a large amount of money which he had collected for the king. They had won over to their side the remaining deputy, the president of the council; and together they now governed the colony as seemed best to them. But they were aware that violence and usurpation could not be passed over with impunity by higher authority; and as Miller and some of his adherents had escaped and gone to England, Culpepper and Holden were also sent to the Proprietors on a mission of explanation. The explanation of neither party was entirely satisfactory. Miller lost his offices, and Culpepper, though he was unpunished by the Proprietors, was seized by the Commissioners of the Customs to answer for the revenue money which had been used in the time of the disorders. He was put on trial, in 1680, for “treason committed without the realm.” It is said by Chalmers that the judges ruled that taking up arms against the proprietary government was treason against the king. Notwithstanding this view of the case, Culpepper was acquitted of treason, because Shaftesbury asserted that the county of Albemarle had not a regular government, and the offence of the prisoner amounted to no more than a riot.[724]
At this time the Earl of Clarendon sold his proprietary share to Seth Sothel, who was appointed governor. Mr. John Harvey, as president of the council at Albemarle, was to exercise the functions of governor till Sothel’s arrival. The latter, on his voyage, was captured by an Algerine corsair; Harvey died; Jenkins was made governor, and was deposed by the people without reprimand from the Proprietors; and in February, 1681, Wilkinson was appointed. These sudden changes in executive authority were unfortunate for the prestige of proprietary power in the colony; for all this while and until Sothel came in 1683, the old adherents of the Culpepper party, or the popular party, held control in Albemarle. But still more unfortunate for the Proprietors was the coming of Sothel. He seems to have purchased his place as Proprietor and to have come as governor in order to have a clear field for the exercise of his rapacity. If he was “a sober, moderate man,” as his colleagues thought when they intrusted their interests and the welfare of the county to his hands, his association with the Algerines must have materially changed his character. In 1688, the outraged colonists seized him, intending to send him to England for trial. On his appeal this was not done, but the case referred to the colonial assembly, who condemned him. His sentence, however, amounted only to banishment for twelve months and perpetual deposition from authority, Proprietor though he was. He went to South Carolina, and his further career will be noticed when we review the history of that colony.