In Old Virginia, as in all the other colonies, the scientific study and practice of medicine had scarcely made a beginning. Those were everywhere the days of “kill or cure” treatment, when there was small hope for patients who had not enough vitality to withstand both drugs and disease. In the light of the progress achieved since the mighty work of Bichat (1798-1801), the two preceding centuries seem a period of stagnation. Strong plasters, jalap, and bleeding were the universal remedies. Mr. Bruce gives us the items of a bill rendered by Dr. Haddon, of York, about 1660, for performing an amputation. “They included one highly flavoured and two ordinary cordials, three ointments for the wound, an ointment precipitate, the operation of letting blood, a purge per diem, two purges electuaries, external applications, a cordial and two astringent powders, phlebotomy, a defensive and a large cloth.” On another occasion the same doctor prescribed “a purging glister, a caphalick and a cordial electuary, oil of spirits and sweet almonds, a purging and a cordial bolus, purging pills, ursecatory, and oxymell. His charge for six visits after dark was a hogshead of tobacco weighing 400 pounds.”247 Of the many thousand victims of these heroic methods, the most illustrious was George Washington, who, but for medical treatment, might probably have lived a dozen or fifteen years into the nineteenth century. When Washington in full vigour found that he had caught a very bad cold he sent for the doctors, and meanwhile had half a pint of blood taken from him by one of his overseers. Of the three physicians in attendance, one was his dear friend, the good Scotchman, Dr. James Craik, “who from forty years’ experience,” said Washington, “is better qualified than a dozen of them put together.” His colleague, Dr. Elisha Dick, said, “Do not bleed the General; he needs all his strength.” But tradition prevailed over common sense, and three copious bleedings followed, in the last of which a quart of blood was taken. The third attendant, Dr. Gustavus Brown, afterward expressed bitter regret that Dr. Dick’s advice was not followed. Besides this wholesale bleeding, the patient was dosed with calomel and tartar emetic and scarified with blisters and poultices; or, as honest Tobias Lear said, in a letter written the next day announcing the fatal result, “every medical assistance was offered, but without the desired effect.”248

The physician in Old Virginia was very much the same as elsewhere, but the parson was a very different character from the grave ministers and dominies of Boston and New York. He belonged to the class of wine-bibbing, card-playing, fox-hunting parsons, of which there were so many examples in the mother country after the reaction against Puritanism had set in. The religious tone of the English church during the first half of the eighteenth century was very low, and it was customary to send out to Virginia and Maryland the poorest specimens of clergymen that the mother country afforded. Men unfit for any appointment at home were thought good enough for the colonies. The royal governor, as vicegerent of the sovereign, was head of the colonial church, while ecclesiastical affairs were superintended by a commissary appointed by the Bishop of London. The first commissary, Dr. Blair, as we have seen, was president of the college, and in his successors those two offices were usually united. Several attempts were made to substitute a bishop for the commissary, but the only result of the attempts was to alienate people’s sympathies from the church, while the conduct of the clergy was such as to destroy their respect for it. Bishop Meade has queer stories to tell of some of these parsons. One of them was for years the president of a jockey club. Another fought a duel within sight of his own church. A third, who was evidently a muscular Christian, got into a rough-and-tumble fight with his vestrymen and floored them; and then justified himself to his congregation next Sunday in a sermon from a text of Nehemiah, “And I contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair.” In 1711 a bequest of £100 was made to the vestry of Christ Church parish in Middlesex, providing that the interest should be paid to the minister for preaching four sermons each year against “the four reigning vices,—viz.: atheism and irreligion, swearing and cursing, fornication and adultery, and drunkenness.” Later in the century the living was held for eighteen years, and the sermons were preached, by a minister who was notoriously guilty of all the vices mentioned. He used to be seen in the tavern porch, reeling to and fro with a bowl of toddy in his hand, while he called to some passer-by to come in and have a drink. When this exemplary man of God was dying in delirium, his last words were halloos to the hounds. In 1726 a thoughtful and worthy minister named Lang wrote to the Bishop of London about the scandalous behaviour of the clergy, of whom the sober part were “slothful and negligent,” while the rest were debauched and “bent on all manner of vices.”249 This testimony against the clergy, it will be observed, comes from clergymen. Yet it seems clear that the cases cited must have been extreme ones,—cases of the sort that make a deep impression and are long remembered. A few such instances would suffice to bring down condemnation upon the whole establishment; and not unjustly, for a church in which such things could for a moment be tolerated must needs have been in a degraded condition. This state of things afforded an excellent field for the labours of Baptist and Presbyterian revivalist preachers, and to such good purpose did they work that by the time of the Revolution it was found that more than half of the people in Virginia were Dissenters. At that time the Episcopal clergy were not unnaturally inclined to the Tory side, and this last ounce was all that was needed to break down the establishment and cast upon it irredeemable discredit. The downfall of the Episcopal church in Virginia and its resurrection under more wholesome conditions make an interesting chapter of history.

In imputing to his tipsy parson the “vice” of atheism, Bishop Meade warns us that he does not mean a denial of the existence of God, but merely irreligion, or “living without God in the world.” In 1724 the Bishop of London was officially informed that there were no “infidels” in Virginia, negroes and Indians excepted. A few years later, “when the first infidel book was imported, ... it produced such an excitement that the governor and commissary communicated on the subject with the authorities in England.” In those days freethinkers, if prudent, kept their thoughts to themselves. All over Christendom the atmosphere was still murky with intolerance, and men’s conceptions of the universe were only beginning to emerge from the barbaric stage. Virginia was no exception to the general rule.

In respect also of superstition and crime the Old Dominion seems to have differed but little from other parts of English America. Belief in witchcraft lasted into the eighteenth century, and the statute-book reveals an abiding dread of what rebellious slaves might do; but there were no epidemics of savage terror, as at Salem in 1692, or in the negro panic of 1741 in New York. Of violent crime there was surely much less than in the England of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild, but probably more than in the colonies north of Delaware Bay; and its perpetrators seem to have been chiefly white freedmen and “outlying negroes.”250 Duelling seems to have been infrequent before the Revolution.251 Murder, rape, arson, and violent robbery were punished with death; while pillory, stocks, whipping-post, and ducking-stool were kept in readiness for minor offenders. The infliction of the death penalty in a cruel or shocking manner was not common. Negroes were occasionally burned at the stake, as in other colonies, north and south; and an instance is on record in which negro murderers were beheaded and quartered after hanging.252 No white persons were ever burned at the stake by any of the colonies.253

In the early days of Virginia there was not much practice of law except by the county magistrates in their work of maintaining the king’s peace. The legal profession was at first held in somewhat low repute, being sometimes recruited by white freedmen whose careers of rascality as attorneys in England had suddenly ended in penal servitude. But after the middle of the seventeenth century the profession grew rapidly in importance and improved in character. During the eighteenth century the development in legal learning and acumen, and in weight of judicial authority, was remarkable. The profession was graced by such eminent names as Pendleton, Wythe, and Henry, until in John Marshall the Old Dominion gave to the world a name second to none among the great judges of English race and speech.

One cause of this splendid development of legal talent was doubtless the necessarily close connection between legal and political activity. The Virginia planter meant that his government should be one of laws. With his extensive estates to superintend and country interests to look after, his position was in many respects like that of the country squire in England. In his House of Burgesses the planter had a parliament; and in the royal governor, who was liable to subordinate local to imperial interests, there was an abiding source of antagonism and distrust, requiring him to keep his faculties perpetually alert to remember all the legal maxims by which the liberties of England had been guarded since the days of Glanvil and Bracton. On the whole, it was a noble type of rural gentry that the Old Dominion had to show. Manly simplicity, love of home and family, breezy activity, disinterested public spirit, thorough wholesomeness and integrity,—such were the features of the society whose consummate flower was George Washington.

This chapter must not close without a brief mention of the social features of Maryland, but a brief mention is all that is needed for my purpose, since the portraiture just given of Leah will answer in most respects for her younger sister Rachel. The English colonists in Maryland were of the same excellent class as the Cavaliers who were the strength of Virginia. Though tidewater Virginia at the beginning of the eighteenth century contained but few people who did not belong to the Church of England, on the other hand, in Maryland, not more than one sixth of the white population belonged to that church, while one twelfth were Roman Catholics, and three fourths were Puritans. But these differences in religion did not run parallel with differences in birth, refinement, or wealth. Naturally, from the circumstances under which the colony was founded, some of the best human material was always to be found among the Catholics; and they wielded an influence disproportionately greater than their numbers.

For the first three generations tobacco played as important a part in Maryland as in Virginia. Nearly all the people became planters. Cheap labour was supplied at first by indented white servants and afterwards by negro slaves, who never came, however, to number more than from one fourth to one third of the whole population. There was the same isolation, the same absence of towns, the same rudeness of roads and preference for water-ways, as in Virginia. The facilities for education were somewhat poorer; there was no university or college, no public schools until 1728, no newspaper until 1745.

But early in the eighteenth century there came about an important modification of industries, which was in large part due to the rapid growth of Maryland’s neighbour, Pennsylvania. In the latter colony a great deal of wheat was raised, and the export of flour became very profitable. This wheat culture extended into Maryland, where wheat soon became a vigorous rival of tobacco. In 1729 the town of Baltimore was founded, and at once rose to importance as a point for exporting flour. Moreover, as Pennsylvania exported various kinds of farm produce, besides large quantities of valuable furs, and as she had no seacoast and no convenient maritime outlet save Philadelphia, her export trade soon came to exceed the capacities of that outlet, and a considerable part of it went through Baltimore, which thus had a large and active rural district dependent upon it, and grew so fast that by 1770 it had become the fourth city in English America, with a population of nearly 20,000. The growth of Annapolis was further stimulated by these circumstances; and this development of town life, with the introduction of a wealthy class of merchants and the continual intercommunication with Pennsylvania, went far toward assimilating Maryland with the middle colonies while it diminished to some extent her points of resemblance to the Old Dominion.

CHAPTER XV.
THE CAROLINA FRONTIER.

“St. Augustine, a Spanish garrison, being planted to the southward of us about a hundred leagues, makes Carolina a frontier to all the English settlements on the Main.” These memorable words, from the report of the governor and council at Charleston to the lords proprietors of Carolina in London, in the year 1708, have a deeper historic significance than was realized by the men who wrote them. In a twofold sense Carolina was a frontier country. It was not only the border region where English and Spanish America marched upon each other, but it served for some time as a kind of backwoods for Virginia. Until recently one of the most important factors in American history has been the existence of a perpetually advancing frontier, where new territory has often had to be won by hard fighting against its barbarian occupants, where the life has been at once more romantic and more sordid than on the civilized seaboard, and where democracy has assumed its most distinctively American features. The cessation of these circumstances will probably be one of the foremost among the causes which are going to make America in the twentieth century different from America in the nineteenth. Now for the full development of this peculiar frontier life two conditions were requisite,—first, the struggle with the wilderness; secondly, isolation from the currents of European thought with which the commercial seaboard was kept in contact. These conditions were first realized in North Carolina, and there was originated the type of backwoods life which a century later prevailed among the settlers of Tennessee and Kentucky. That was the one point where the backwoods may be said to have started at the coast; and in this light we shall have to consider it. On the other hand, South Carolina, with the Georgia colony for its buffer, is to be considered more in the light of a frontier against the Spaniard. We shall have furthermore to contemplate the whole Carolina coast as preeminently the frontier upon which were wrecked the last remnants of the piracy and buccaneering that had grown out of the mighty Elizabethan world-struggle between England and Spain. Without some mention of all these points, our outline sketch of the complicated drama begun by Drake and Raleigh would be incomplete.

The region long vaguely known as Carolina, or at least a portion of it, had formed part of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Virginia; the Spaniards had never ceased to regard it as part of Florida. In defiance of their claims, Jean Ribaut planted his first ill-fated Huguenot colony at Port Royal in 1562, and built a fort which he called Charlesfort, after Charles IX. of France. Whether the name “Carolina” was applied to the territory at that early time is doubtful,254 but we find it used in England, in the time of Charles I., when the first Lord Baltimore was entertaining a plan for a new colony south of Virginia. The name finally served to commemorate Charles II., who in 1663 granted the territory to eight “lords proprietors,” gentlemen who had done him inestimable services. To the most eminent, George Monk, Duke of Albemarle, he owed his restoration to the throne; the support of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, had been invaluable; the others were Anthony Ashley Cooper, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury, Lord Craven, Lord Berkeley, and his brother, Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, Sir George Carteret, and Sir John Colleton. All these names appear to-day on the map,—Albemarle Sound, Hyde, Craven, and Carteret counties in North Carolina; Clarendon and Colleton counties, Berkeley parish, and the Ashley and Cooper rivers in South Carolina, while in Charleston we have the name of the king.

These gentlemen contemplated founding a colony which should emulate the success of Virginia. The most actively engaged in the enterprise was the one whom we know best by his title of Shaftesbury, and it was thus that the founding of Carolina became connected for a moment with one of the greatest names in the history of England. A charming story is that of the residence of John Locke in the Ashley family, as physician, private tutor, and general adviser and guardian angel; how he once saved his lordship’s life by most daring and skilful surgery, how he taught Greek to the young Ashley, how he took the boy at the age of seventeen to Haddon Hall and made a happy match for him with pretty Lady Dorothy Manners aged twenty, how he afterward assisted at the birth of the grandson destined to become even more famous in literature than the grandfather in political history,—all this is pleasantly told by the grandson. “My father was too young and inexperienced to choose a wife for himself, and my grandfather too much in business to choose one for him. The affair was nice; for, though my grandfather required not a great fortune, he insisted on good blood, good person and constitution, and, above all, good education and a character as remote as possible from that of court or town-bred lady. All this was thrown upon Mr. Locke, who being ... so good a judge of men, my grandfather doubted not of his equal judgment in women. He departed from him, entrusted and sworn, as Abraham’s head servant that ruled over all that he had, and went into a far country (the north of England) to seek for his son a wife, whom he as successfully found.”255

In the summer of 1669, while the great philosopher was engaged upon this match-making expedition, he varied the proceedings by drawing up a constitution for Carolina, the original draft of which, a small neatly written volume of 75 pages bound in vellum, is still preserved among the Shaftesbury papers. This constitution diverges widely in some respects from such a document as would have expressed Locke’s own ideas of the right sort of government. The scheme which it set forth was in the main Ashley’s, with such modifications as were necessary to secure the approval of the other proprietors. It is not worth our while to recount its complicated provisions, inasmuch as it was never anything but a dead letter, and civil government sprouted up as spontaneously in Carolina as if neither statesman nor philosopher had ever given thought to the subject. One provision, however, expressed an idea of which Locke was one of the foremost representatives, and herein Ashley agreed with him; it was the idea of complete liberty of conscience in matters of religion. It was provided that any seven or more persons who could agree among themselves upon any sort of notion about God or any plan for worshipping him might set up a church and be guaranteed against all interference or molestation. An ideal so noble as this was never quite realized in the history of any of the colonies; but there can be little doubt that the publication of Locke’s “Fundamental Constitutions” in 1670, in 1682, and 1698 had much influence in directing toward Carolina the stream of Huguenot emigration from France, which was an event of the first importance.256

In its general character the government created by the Fundamental Constitutions was a palatinate modelled after that of Durham. The difference between Carolina and Maryland consisted chiefly in the fact that the palatinate privileges were granted to eight co-proprietors instead of a single proprietor. Those privileges were quasi-royal, but they were limited by giving to the popular assembly the control over all money bills. This limitation, however, was partly offset by giving to the higher officers regular salaries payable from quit-rents or the sales of public lands. These salaries went far toward making such officers independent of the legislature, and thus led to much complaint and dissatisfaction. Before the Revolution, questions concerning the salaried independence of high public officials had in several of the colonies come to be one of the most burning questions of the day.

The lords proprietors, as tenants-in-chief of the crown, were feudal sovereigns over Carolina. They could grant estates on any terms they pleased, and subinfeudation, which had been forbidden in England since 1290, was expressly permitted here. The eldest of the proprietors was called the Palatine; he presided at their meetings, and his vote with those of three associates was reckoned a majority. As the proprietors remained in England, it was arranged that each of them should be represented in Carolina by a deputy; and the Palatine’s deputy, sometimes called Vice-Palatine, was to be governor of the colony. But any one of the proprietors coming into the colony, or the oldest of those coming, if there were more than one, was to take precedence over everybody and become at once Vice-Palatine.

By a curious provision of the charter, the lords proprietors could grant titles of nobility, provided they were unlike those used in England. Hence the outlandish titles, such as “landgrave” and “cacique,” which occur in the Fundamental Constitutions. With the titles there was combined an artificial system of social gradations which is not worth recounting. As for the political status of the settlers, they were guaranteed in the possession of all the rights and privileges enjoyed by Englishmen in England.

The planting of two distinct colonies in Carolina was no part of the original scheme, but the early centres of colonization were so far apart and communication between them was so difficult that they could not well be united in a single community, although more than once there was a single governor over the whole of Carolina. Emigration from Virginia had begun as early as 1653, when Roger Greene with a hundred men made a small settlement in the Chowan precinct, on the north shore of Albemarle Sound.257 In 1662 George Durant258 followed, and began a settlement in the Perquimans precinct, just east of Chowan. In 1664 Governor Berkeley, of Virginia,—himself one of the eight lords proprietors,—severed this newly settled region from Virginia, and appointed William Drummond as its governor. Such were the beginnings of Albemarle, the colony which in time was to develop into North Carolina.

Meanwhile in 1660 a party from New England made a settlement at the mouth of Cape Fear River; or perhaps we ought rather to call it a visit. It lasted no longer than Thorfinn Karlsefni’s visit to Vinland,259 for the settlers had all departed by 1663. There is a tradition that they were sorely harassed by the natives, in revenge for their sending sundry Indian lads and girls aboard ship, to be taken to Boston and “educated,” i. e. sold for slaves.260 This is not improbable. At all events, these New Englanders went off in a mood not altogether amiable, leaving affixed to a post, at the mouth of the river, a “scandalous writing ... the contents whereof tended not only to the disparagement of the land ... but also to the great discouragement of all such as should hereafter come into those parts to settle.”261

But this emphatic warning did not frighten away Sir John Yeamans, who arrived at Cape Fear early in October, 1663, and ascended the river for more than a hundred and fifty miles. Sir John was the son of a gallant Cavalier who had lost life and estate in the king’s service, and he had come out to Barbadoes to repair his fortunes. His report of the Cape Fear country was so favourable that by the end of May, 1665, we find him there again, with several hundred settlers from Barbadoes, to make the beginnings of the new colony of Clarendon, of which the lords proprietors had appointed him governor. In the same year the colony of Albemarle elected its first assembly.

In 1667 William Sayle, a Puritan from Bermuda, explored the coast, and reported the value of the Bahama Islands for offensive and defensive purposes in case of war with Spain. These islands were accordingly appropriated and annexed to Carolina, as the Bermudas had once been annexed to Virginia. It was decided to make a settlement at Port Royal; the venerable Sayle, whose years were more than three-score-and-ten, was appointed governor; and on March 17, 1670, the first colonists arrived on the Carolina coast. On further inspection Port Royal seemed too much exposed to the attacks of Spaniards from St. Augustine, and accordingly the ships pursued their way northward till they reached and entered the spacious bay formed by the junction of two noble rivers since known as Ashley and Cooper. They proceeded up the Ashley as far as an easily defensible highland at Albemarle Point, where they began building a village which they called Charles Town. Their cautiousness was soon justified. Spain and England were then at peace, but no sooner were the Spaniards notified of these proceedings than a warship started from St. Augustine and came as far as Stono Inlet, where it learned the strength of the English position and concluded to retreat.262 The next year Governor Sayle died, and was succeeded by Sir John Yeamans, who came in 1672, bringing from Barbadoes the first negro slaves ever seen in Carolina. In 1674 Yeamans was superseded by Joseph West, under whom the first assembly was elected.

Thus there were three small communities started on the coast of Carolina: 1. Albemarle, on the Virginia border, constituted in 1664; 2. Clarendon, on the Cape Fear River, in 1665; 3. The Ashley River colony, in 1670.

For a moment we must follow the fortunes of Albemarle, where in 1667 Drummond was succeeded in the governorship by Samuel Stephens. Two years later there was passed a statute which enacted that no subject could be sued within five years for any cause of action that might have arisen outside of the colony; that all debts contracted outside of the colony were ipso facto outlawed; and that all new settlers should be exempted from taxes for one year.263 Moreover, all “transient persons,” not intending to remain in the colony, were forbidden to trade with the Indians. It was furthermore provided that, since there were no clergymen in the colony to perform the ceremony of marriage, a declaration of mutual consent, before the governor and council and in the presence of a few acquaintances, should be deemed a binding contract.264 These laws were of course intended to stimulate immigration, and the effect of the first two was soon plainly indicated in the indignant epithet, “Rogue’s Harbour,” bestowed by Virginia people upon the colony of Albemarle.265

The desire of increasing the number of settlers, without regard to their quality, induced the lords proprietors to sanction these curiosities of legislation. But troubles, not of their own creating, were at hand in this little forest community. In 1673 the Fundamental Constitutions were promulgated by Governor Stephens, who soon afterward died. Under his temporary successor, George Carteret, president of the council, the troubles broke out, and it has been customary to ascribe them to the attempt to enforce the Fundamental Constitutions upon an unwilling community. It does not appear, however, that the official promulgation of this frame of government was followed by any serious attempts to enforce it.266 The real source of the disturbances was undoubtedly the Navigation Act,—that mischievous statute with which the mother country was busily weaning from itself the affections of its colonies all along the American seaboard. Sundry unfounded rumours increased the bitter feeling. The king’s grant of Virginia to Arlington and Culpeper in 1673 was part of the news of the day. It was reported that the proprietors of Carolina were going to divide up the province among themselves, and that Albemarle was to be the share of Sir William Berkeley, a man especially hated by the Virginians of small means, who were the larger part of the Albemarle population. Though these reports were baseless, they found many believers. But the Navigation Act and the attempts to break up the trade with Massachusetts were very real grievances. Ships from Boston and Salem brought down to Albemarle Sound all manner of articles needed by the planters, and took their pay in cattle and lumber, which they carried to the West Indies and exchanged for sugar, molasses, and rum. Often with this cargo they returned to Albemarle and exchanged it for tobacco, which they carried home and sent off to Europe at a good round profit, in supreme defiance of the statutes. It was said that the new colony was enriching Yankee merchants much faster than the lords proprietors.267 In truth the trade was profitable to merchants and planters alike, and by the summer of 1676 sundry attempts to break it up had brought the little colony into quite a rebellious frame of mind. We have seen how Bacon looked forward to possible help from Carolina against Sir William Berkeley. Bacon spoke of the desirableness of the people electing their own governors.268 New England furnished examples of such elected governors who were in full sympathy with the people. The men of Albemarle were likely to make trouble for governors appointed in England to carry out an unpopular policy.

When Carteret resigned his position in 1676, two men, who were supposed to represent the popular party, had lately gone over to England. One of them, by name Eastchurch, had been speaker of the assembly; and so anxious were the lords proprietors to have their intentions carried out without irritating the people, that in the autumn of 1676 they appointed him governor of Albemarle. The other was a person named Miller, who had been illegally carried to Virginia and tried by Governor Berkeley for making a seditious speech in Carolina. In England he found it profitable to pose as a martyr. The proprietors made him secretary of Albemarle, and the king’s commissioners of customs made him collector of the revenues of that colony. Early in 1677 the new governor and secretary sailed for America, and made a stop at the little island of Nevis, famous in later years as the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton. For Eastchurch it proved to be an isle of Calypso. He fell in love with a fair Creole and staid to press his suit, while he appointed Miller president of the council, and sent him on in that capacity to govern Albemarle.

That little commonwealth of less than 3,000 souls had in the mean time been enjoying the sweets of uncurbed liberty, when there was no king in Israel, and every man did what was right in his own eyes. Miller, as a martyr to free speech, was cordially welcomed, but as proprietary governor and king’s collector, he found his popularity quickly waning. He tried to suppress the trade with Massachusetts, and thus arrayed against himself the Yankee skippers, aided by a “party within,” at the head of which was the wealthy George Durant, the earliest settler of Perquimans. The train was well laid for an insurrection when a demagogue arrived with the match to fire it. This man was John Culpeper, surveyor-general of Carolina, whose seditious conduct on the Ashley River had lately made it necessary for him to flee northward to escape the hangman. Culpeper’s proposal to resist the enforcement of the odious Navigation Act brought him many followers. In December, 1677, a Yankee schooner, heavily armed and bearing a seductive cargo of rum and molasses, appeared in Pasquotank River. Her skipper, whose name was Gillam, had scarcely set foot on land when he was arrested by the governor and held to bail in £1,000. The astute Yankee, with an air of innocent surprise, meekly promised to weigh anchor at once and not return. Hereupon a thirsty mob, maddening with the thought of losing so much rum, beset Gillam with entreaties to stay. Governor Miller was a man in whom bravery prevailed over prudence, and, hearing at this moment that Durant was on the schooner, he straightway boarded her, pistol in hand, and arrested that influential personage on a charge of treason. This rash act was the signal for an explosion. Culpeper’s mob arrested the governor and council, and locked them up. Then they took possession of the public records, convened the assembly, appointed new justices, made Culpeper governor, and, seizing upon £3,000 of customs revenue collected by Miller for the king, they applied it to the support of this revolutionary government.

For two years these adventurers exercised full sway over Albemarle. During this time Governor Eastchurch arrived from the island of Nevis, bringing with him the fair Creole as his bride. He met with a cold reception, and lost no time in finding shelter in Virginia, where he drank a friendly glass with Governor Chicheley, and asked for military aid against the usurping Culpeper. The request was granted, but before the troops were ready the unfortunate Eastchurch succumbed to chagrin, or perhaps to malaria, and his Creole bride was left a widow.

Culpeper, however, remained in some dread of what Virginia might do. He had issued a manifesto, accusing Miller of tyranny and peculation and seeking to justify himself; but he thought it wise to play a still bolder part. He went to England in the hope of persuading the lords proprietors to sanction what he had done, and to confirm him in the governorship. In London he was surprised at meeting the deposed Miller, who had broken jail and arrived there before him. The twain forthwith told their eloquent but conflicting tales of woe, and Culpeper’s tongue proved the more persuasive with the lords proprietors. He seemed on the point of returning in triumph to Carolina, when suddenly the king’s officers arrested him for robbing the custom-house of £3,000. This led to his trial for treason, in the summer of 1680, before the King’s Bench, under the statute of Henry VIII. anent “treason committed abroad;” the same statute under which it was sought, on a fine April morning ninety-five years later, to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock. The Earl of Shaftesbury ably defended Culpeper, and he was acquitted but not restored to power.269 He returned to Carolina, a sadder if not a wiser man; and in his old capacity of surveyor, it is said, laid out the plan of the city of Charleston on its present site. The original Charles Town, as already mentioned, was begun at Albemarle Point on Ashley River, in 1670. Another settlement was made two years later at Oyster Point, on the extremity of the peninsula enclosed between the two rivers. This new situation had greater advantages for a seaport, and its cooler breezes were appreciated by sojourners in that fiery climate. It grew at the expense of the older settlement, until in 1680 it had a population of 2,500 souls, and took over the name of Charles Town, while Albemarle Point was abandoned. So the autumn of 1680 had work at Oyster Point for a surveyor like Culpeper.

The governor who succeeded this usurper in the Albemarle colony was a new lord proprietor, by name Seth Sothel, to whom the Earl of Clarendon had sold out his rights and interests. On his way to America, early in 1680, Sothel was captured by Algerine pirates and carried off into slavery. Not until 1683 did Sothel obtain his freedom and arrive at his destination. In five years of misrule over Albemarle he proved himself one of the dirtiest knaves that ever held office in America. A few specimens of his conduct may be cited. On the arrival of two ships from Barbadoes on legitimate business, Sothel seized them as pirates and threw their captains into jail, where one of them died of ill-treatment. The dying man made a will in which he named one of the most respected men in the colony, Thomas Pollock, as his executor; but Sothel refused to let the will go to probate, and seized the dead man’s effects; the executor then threatened to carry the story of all this to England, whereupon the governor lodged him in jail and kept him there. George Durant called such proceedings unlawful, whereupon Sothel straightway imprisoned him and confiscated his whole estate. If he saw anything that pleased his fancy, be it a cow or a negro or a pewter dish, he just took it without ceremony, and if the owner objected he locked him up. From criminals he took tips and saved them from the gallows. The people of Albemarle endured this tyranny until 1688,—that year when over all English lands the sky was so black with political thunder-clouds. One day certain leading colonists laid hands upon Seth Sothel, and prepared to send him to England to be tried for a long list of felonies. Then this model for governors and lords proprietors, suddenly realizing the dismal prospect before him, with Tyburn looming up in the distance, begged with frantic sobs and tears that he might be tried by the assembly, and not be sent to England; for he felt sure that the assembly would hardly dare take the responsibility of hanging him. In this he calculated correctly; he was banished from the colony for one year, and declared forever incapable of holding the governorship.270

The prudence of the assembly was well considered. The lords proprietors in England, ill informed as to the affairs of their colony, wearied with the everlasting series of complaints, and unwilling to believe that one of their associates could be such a scoundrel, were inclined to scold the colonists for their treatment of Sothel. As for that worthy, his full career was not yet run. Scenes of turbulence were awaiting him in the little settlement between the Ashley and Cooper rivers. Joseph West had ruled there with a strong hand from 1674 to 1683, and the colony prospered during that time, but disagreements arose between West and the proprietors which ended in his removal. The next seven years were a period of anarchy. After five changes of governors in quick succession, the office was given to James Colleton, brother of Colleton the lord proprietor, but the situation was not improved. The troubles arose partly from the practice of kidnapping Indians for slaves, which invited bloody reprisals; partly from the demand that quit-rents be paid in coin, which was very scarce in Carolina; partly from the low character of many of the settlers and their dealings with pirates; partly from the unwillingness of the English settlers to admit the Huguenot immigrants to a share in the franchise; and partly from the fitful and arbitrary manner in which the lords proprietors tried from beyond sea to cure the complicated evils. The muddle was aggravated by Spanish hostility. In 1683 a few Scotch families were brought by Lord Cardross to Port Royal, where they made the beginnings of a settlement. Those were the cruel days of Claverhouse in Scotland, and a scheme was entertained for bringing 10,000 sturdy Covenanters to Carolina; but it came to nothing. Cardross got into difficulties with the people at Charleston, and went back to Scotland in disgust. In 1686, in time of peace, a Spanish force pounced upon Port Royal, murdered some of the Scotchmen, flogged others within an inch of their lives, carried off what booty they could find, and left the place a smoking ruin. Dire was the indignation of the Charleston men at these “bloody insolencies.” Two stout ships with 400 men were just ready to sail against St. Augustine, when the newly appointed Governor Colleton arrived upon the scene and forbade their sailing. His mandate was obeyed with growls and curses. The lords proprietors upheld him. “No man,” as they reasonably said, “can think that the dependencies of England can have power to make war upon the king’s allies without his knowledge or consent.”271 It was an inauspicious beginning for Colleton. The old troubles continued, along with others growing out of the Navigation Act. The wrangling between governor and assembly grew so hot that in 1689 the proprietors instructed Colleton to summon no more parliaments in Carolina without express orders from them. The effect of such an order was probably not foreseen by those well-meaning gentlemen. It was a curious feature in the Ashley River colony that the acts of its assembly expired at the end of twenty-three months unless renewed. This term had so nearly elapsed when the order arrived that “in 1690 not one statute law was in force in the colony!”272