This heroic medicine did not cure the malady. Things grew worse in the spring of 1690, when Colleton proclaimed martial law. The air was thick with sedition when Sothel arrived in Charleston. As a lord proprietor he had the right to act as governor over Colleton’s head. Several of the leading colonists begged him to call a parliament, and forthwith the exemplary Sothel posed as “the people’s friend.” He summoned a parliament which banished Colleton and enacted sundry laws. A queer spectacle it was, the victim of one popular revolution becoming the ringleader of another, the banished playing the part of banisher! But the lords proprietors had become aware of Sothel’s misdeeds; they annulled the acts of his parliament, deposed him, and ordered him to return to England to answer the charges against him. Sothel did not relish this. His term of banishment from Albemarle had expired, and he believed it to be a safer hiding-place than London. Where he skulked or how he died is unknown. All we know is that his will was admitted to probate February 5, 1694; and that his tombstone, which came from England, was never paid for!273

Since the founding of the Ashley River colony it had fared ill with the Clarendon colony on Cape Fear River, which under favouring circumstances might perhaps have developed into a Middle Carolina. There were not people enough, and there was not trade enough for so many settlements. So Clarendon dwindled until 1690, when it was abandoned. This left a wide interval of forest and stream between Albemarle and the Ashley River colony, or North Carolina and South Carolina, as they were beginning to be called. The formal separation of Carolina into two provinces did not take place until 1729, but the two colonies were from the outset, as we have seen, distinct and independent growths; and by 1690 the epithets North and South were commonly used.

Just at this time, however, the two were united under one governor. Colonel Philip Ludwell, of Virginia, who had ably supported Berkeley against Bacon, and had afterward married Berkeley’s widow, was Sothel’s successor in Albemarle in 1689, and he was appointed to succeed him at Charleston in 1691. The proprietors wished to bring all Carolina under one government, and the Albemarle people were requested to send their representatives to the assembly at Charleston, but distance made such a scheme impracticable. The northern colony, however, was often governed by a deputy appointed at Charleston. The troubles were not yet over. Ludwell was an upright and able man, but the disagreements between the settlers and the lords proprietors were more than he could cope with, and in 1692 he was superseded.

It is not worth while to recount the names of all the men who served as governors in the two Carolinas. In the world of history there is a certain amount of meaningless mediocrity which a general survey like the present may well pass by without notice. The brief administration of John Archdale, in 1695, marks a kind of era. Archdale was a Quaker, a man of broad intelligence and character at once strong and gentle. He had become one of the lords proprietors, and in that capacity came out to Carolina, where for one year he ruled the whole province with such authority as no one had wielded before; for while he was backed up by the proprietors, he conciliated the assemblies. In the matter of the Indians and the quit-rents much was done, and the veto power of the proprietors was curtailed. After a year Archdale felt able to go home, leaving his friend Joseph Blake, a nephew of the great admiral, as governor in Charleston. Under Blake still further progress was made by admitting to full political rights and privileges the Huguenot immigrants, who had come to be in some respects the most important element in the population of South Carolina. But after Blake’s death, in 1700, it grew stormy again. The new governor, James Moore, came out to make money, and to that end he renewed the vile practice of kidnapping Indians. This presently made it necessary to gather troops and defeat the angry red men. Quarrels with the assembly were chronic. When the war of the Spanish Succession broke out, Moore invaded Florida, but accomplished nothing except the creation of a heavy public debt. In 1703 he was superseded by Sir Nathaniel Johnson, a precious bigot, who undertook to force through the assembly a law excluding from it all Dissenters. This was effected by trickery; the act was passed by a majority of one, in a house from which several members were absent. After the fraud was discovered, the assembly by a large majority voted to repeal the act, but the governor refused to sign the repeal. The Dissenters were perhaps three fourths of the population. They made complaint to the lords proprietors, but a majority of that body sustained the governor. Then a successful appeal was made to the House of Lords, and the proprietors suddenly found themselves threatened with the loss of their charter. The result was a great victory for the South Carolina assembly, which at its next session restored Dissenters to their full privileges.

Like many another bigot, Governor Johnson was a good fighter. In August, 1706, Charleston was attacked by a French and Spanish squadron. A visitation of yellow fever, with half a dozen deaths daily in a population of 3,000, had frightened many people away from the town. On a broiling Saturday afternoon five columns of smoke floating lazily up over Sullivan’s Island announced that five warships were descried in the offing. They were French privateers with Spanish reinforcements from Cuba and St. Augustine. When the signal was reported to the governor at his country house, the militia were called together from all quarters and the ships in the harbour were quickly made ready for action. The evening air was vocal with alarm guns. But the enemy approached with such excessive caution that Johnson had ample time for preparation. It was not until Wednesday that the affair matured. Then the French commander sent a flag of truce ashore and demanded, in the name of Louis XIV., the surrender of the town and its inhabitants; the governor, he said, might have an hour to consider his answer. Johnson replied that he did not need a minute, and told the Frenchman to go to the devil. The enemy then landed 150 men on the north shore of the harbour, at Haddrell’s Beacon, but the militia soon drove them into the water, with the loss of a dozen killed and more than thirty prisoners. Many more were drowned in swimming to their boats. Another detachment on the south shore was similarly discomfited. On Thursday Colonel William Rhett, with six small craft heavily armed and a fire-ship, bore down upon the enemy’s fleet. But instead of waiting to fight, the French commander hastily stood out to sea. This conduct, as well as his whole delay, may be explained by the fact that an important part of his force had not come up. The best of the French ships, carrying beside her marine force some 200 regular infantry, did not arrive until Friday, when, in ignorance of the repulse of her consorts, she entered Sewee Bay and landed her soldiers. It was rushing into the lion’s jaws. The soldiers were promptly attacked and put to flight with the loss of one third of their number, while at the same time Colonel Rhett blockaded the bay and took the French ship with all on board. Thus the ill-concerted attack ended in ignominious defeat, with the loss of the best ship and 300 men out of 800.

After the halcyon days of Archdale there was quiet in North Carolina until 1704, when Governor Johnson sent a deputy, Robert Daniel, to rule there and set up the Church of England, while making it hot for Dissenters. As nearly all the Albemarle people came within the latter category, there was trouble at once. It was allayed for a moment by the same proceedings in England which gave victory to the Dissenters of South Carolina. The Quakers of Albemarle succeeded in getting Johnson to appoint a new deputy, Thomas Carey, in whom they had confidence. But their confidence proved to have been misplaced. A recent act of Queen Anne’s Parliament had prescribed certain test oaths for all public officials, without making any reservation in behalf of the conscientious scruples of Quakers. Carey, as deputy governor of North Carolina, undertook to administer these test oaths, and at once disgusted the Quakers, who sent John Porter to England to plead with the lords proprietors. This Porter, who was himself a Quaker, had a persuasive tongue. Acts of Parliament had not usually been heeded by the colonies; it was by no means clear that they were even intended to apply to the colonies without some declaratory clause to that effect, or without being supplemented by a royal order in council. The lords proprietors virtually admitted that the Queen Anne test oath act did not apply to the colonies, when in response to Porter’s petition they removed Carey from office. At the same time they suspended Governor Johnson’s authority over North Carolina. This action left that colony without a head, and there ought to have been no delay in appointing a new governor, but there was delay. On Porter’s return William Glover was chosen president of the council, which made him temporary governor. Glover belonged to the Church of England, but was believed to be opposed to the test oaths. We can fancy, then, the wrath of the Quakers when he insisted upon administering the oaths, precisely as the deposed Carey had done! The remedy was an instance of political homœopathy, or treatment with a hair of the dog that bit you. The angry Porter at once turned to Carey and entered into an alliance with him from which dire evils were to grow. Porter contrived to assemble various resident deputies of the lords proprietors, and persuaded them to depose Glover and reinstate Carey; but Glover refused to be bound by these irregular proceedings. He continued to act as governor and issued writs for the election of an assembly; Carey did likewise, and anarchy reigned supreme. Several of the principal colonists fled to Virginia for safety. In 1710, after a delay of more than three years, the proprietors sent out Edward Hyde, a kinsman if the queen’s grandfather, the first Earl of Clarendon, to govern North Carolina. His commission needed the signature of the governor-in-chief at Charleston, but that dignitary happened to die just before Hyde’s arrival, so that further delay was entailed in completing his commission. Early in 1711, before receiving it, he issued writs for an election. Carey made strenuous efforts to secure the election of a majority of his friends and adherents to the Commons House of Assembly, or House of Commons, as it came to be called. Failing in this attempt he maintained that the election was illegal because Hyde had not received his vouchers. The assembly retorted by summoning Carey to render an account of all the public moneys which he had used, and presently it issued orders for his arrest. Thus driven to bay, Carey set up a rival government and tried to arrest Hyde, who appealed to Virginia for military aid. Virginia’s response was prompt and effective. The discomfited Carey fled to the wilderness between the heads of Albemarle and Pamlico sounds. After a while he ventured into Virginia, intending to take passage there for England; but he was arrested and sent to England to be tried for treason. For lack of accessible evidence he seems to have been released without trial, and thereupon he made his way to the West Indies, where history loses sight of him. With his disappearance from North Carolina tranquillity seemed for the moment restored; but more terrible scenes were at hand.

In spite of all the turmoil the little colony had received new settlers, and had begun to expand until North Carolina was no longer synonymous with Albemarle. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, numbers of Huguenots settled in the neighbourhood of Bath, where the Taw River widens into an arm of Pamlico Sound; and parties of Swiss, with many Germans from the Rhenish Palatinate, under the lead of Baron de Graffenried, founded the town of New Berne, where the Trent River flows into the Neuse. The increase of population in Albemarle, moreover, had carried the frontier from the Chowan to the Roanoke. All this entailed some real and still more prospective displacement of native tribes, and some kind of mild remonstrance, after the well-known Indian fashion, was to be expected. It was believed by many persons at the time that Carey, on the occasion of his flight to the wilderness between the Roanoke and Taw rivers, solicited aid from the Indians, and that his Quaker friend, John Porter, had gone as emissary to the Tuscaroras, “promising great rewards to incite them to cut off all the inhabitants of that part of Carolina that adhered to Mr. Hyde.”274 But a charge of such frightful character needs strong evidence to make it credible, and in this case there is little but hearsay and the vague beliefs of men hostile to Carey and Porter, in a season of fierce political excitement. No such infernal wickedness is needed to account for the Indian outbreak. The ordinary incidents connected with the advance of the white man’s frontier into the red man’s country are quite sufficient to explain it. But, without feeling it necessary to accuse Carey and Porter of having urged the Indians to murder their fellow-countrymen, we must still admit that the civil discord into which they had plunged the colony had so weakened it as to offer the watchful red men an excellent opportunity.

The Indians of North Carolina at the time which we are treating belonged to three ethnic families. Along the coast, northward from Cape Lookout to the Virginia line, the Corees, Pamlicos, Mattamuskeets, Pasquotanks, and Chowanoes all belonged to the Algonquin family, and they could muster in all about 400 warriors. The coast territory occupied by these tribes was continuous with that which had once been controlled by the Powhatan Confederacy to the northward. The Corees, in Carteret Precinct, were the southernmost of these Algonquin tribes. The Cape Fear Indians, on the coast southwest of Carteret, belonged to the great Sioux or Dakota family. From the meridian of 77° 30´ westward to the Blue Ridge, and from the Santee River on the south to the Potomac on the north, the country was occupied by Sioux tribes, of which the names most familiarly known are the Waxhaws, Catawbas, Waterees, Saponis and Tutelos, Monacans and Manahoacs.275 Now deep into this Sioux country, in North Carolina, there ran a powerful wedge of alien stock. The thick end of the wedge covered the precincts of Bath and Craven, with part of New Hanover; and from its centre, at the mouth of Trent River, it ran northwestward more than a hundred miles, a little beyond the site of Raleigh, with an average width of less than thirty miles. This wedge of population consisted of the Tuscaroras, a large tribe of the dreaded Iroquois family, able to send forth at least 1,200 warriors. Another tribe of Iroquois then dwelt in Bertie Precinct, between the Chowan and Roanoke rivers. It was known as the Meherrins, and was really the remnant of the fierce Susquehannocks, from whom Bacon had delivered Virginia in 1676. Its fighting numbers can hardly have been much over a hundred. Just north of the Meherrins was another small Iroquois tribe called Nottoways. To frame our picture, although it takes us away from the scene of action, we should add that the whole Alpine region west of the Sioux country, from the Peaks of Otter as far southwest as Lookout and Chickamauga mountains, belonged to the great Iroquois tribe of Cherokees; while to the south of Santee River, from Florida to the Mississippi River, we encounter a fourth ethnic family, the Muskogi, represented by such tribes as Choctaws and Chickasaws, the Creek Confederacy, the Yamassees, and others.

Between the Tuscaroras and the numerous Sioux tribes by which they were partly surrounded there was incessant and murderous hostility. On the other hand, there was amity and alliance, at least for the moment, between the Tuscaroras and the Algonquin coast tribes whose lands the palefaces were invading. The first murders of white settlers occurred in Bertie Precinct at the hands of Meherrins, and seem to have been isolated cases. But a general conspiracy of Iroquois and Algonquin tribes was not long in forming, and the day before the new moon, September 22, 1711, was appointed for a wholesale massacre.

A few days before the appointed time the Baron de Graffenried started in his pinnace from New Berne to explore the Neuse River. His only companions were a negro servant and John Lawson, a Scotchman who for a dozen years had been surveyor-general of the colony. Lawson was the author of an extremely valuable and fascinating book on Carolina and its native races,—a book which one cannot read without loving the writer and mourning his melancholy fate.276 No man in the colony was better known by the Indians, who had frequently observed and carefully noted the fact that his appearance in the woods with his surveying instruments was apt to be followed by some fresh encroachment upon their lands. Lawson and Graffenried had advanced but little way into the Tuscarora wilderness when they were surrounded by a host of Indians and taken prisoners. The Indians were very curious to learn why they had come up the river; perhaps it might indicate that the people at New Berne had some suspicion of the intended massacre and had sent them forward as scouts. If any such dread beset the minds of the red men, it was probably soon allayed; for it is clear that, had there been any suspicion, Graffenried and Lawson would not thus have ventured out of all reach of support. The barbarians were two or three days in making up their minds what to do. Then they took poor Lawson, and thrust into his skin all over, from head to foot, sharp splinters of lightwood, almost dripping with its own turpentine, and set him afire.277 The negro was also put to death with fiendish torments, but Graffenried was kept a prisoner, perhaps in order to be burned on some festal occasion.

Before the news of this dreadful affair could reach New Berne, the blow had fallen, not only there, but also at Bath and on the Roanoke River. Some hundreds of settlers were massacred,—at New Berne 130 within two hours from the signal. No circumstance of horror was wanting. Men were gashed and scorched, children torn in pieces, women impaled on stakes. The slaughter went on for three days. A war-chief called by the white men Handcock seems to have been the leading spirit in this concerted attack, but as usual in Indian warfare the concert was incomplete.278 An outlying detachment of Tuscaroras in Bertie Precinct, whose head war-chief was called Tom Blunt, took no part in the massacre and remained on good terms with the whites. Perhaps Blunt’s attitude may have been affected by nearness to Virginia and its able governor, Alexander Spotswood, who was certainly instrumental in keeping the Nottoways and Meherrins quiet. Through Blunt’s intervention, Spotswood secured the release of Graffenried, after five weeks of captivity, and it was not the fault of this valiant governor that Virginia troops did not march against Handcock; for his House of Burgesses, after advising such a measure, behaved like a “whimsical multitude,” and refused to vote the necessary funds.279 Important aid, however, was obtained from South Carolina, which had for the moment a more complaisant assembly, and in Charles Craven a wise and able governor. Advantage was taken of the deadly hatred which the Sioux and Muskogi tribes bore to the Iroquois. With a small body of white men, supported by large numbers of Muskogi Creeks and Yamassees, and of Sioux Catawbas, Colonel John Barnwell made a long and arduous winter march through more than 250 miles of virgin forest to the Neuse River, where he encountered the Tuscaroras, and in an obstinate battle defeated them with the loss of 400 warriors. Then Handcock, retiring behind a stockade, sought and obtained terms from Barnwell; a treaty was made, and the South Carolina forces went home.

They had scarcely departed when the faithless red men renewed their bloody work, and in March the distracted colony was again obliged to ask for succour. Summer added to the other horrors the scourge of yellow fever, which carried off some hundreds of victims, among them Governor Hyde. In December a force of 50 white men and 1,000 Indians from South Carolina, under Colonel James Moore, arrived on the scene, and in March, 1713, Handcock was driven to cover on the site of the present town of Snow Hill, in Greene County. His palisaded fort was stormed with great slaughter, and that was the end of the Indian power in eastern North Carolina. Their remnant of defeated Tuscaroras withdrew to the upper waters of the Roanoke, and thence migrated northward to central New York, where they were admitted into the great confederacy of their kinsmen, the Iroquois of the Long House. Thus did the celebrated Five Nations become the Six Nations.

After Hyde’s death the government was ably administered by one of the leading colonists, Thomas Pollock, as president of the council. In 1714 Charles Eden came out as governor. Under the stress of war the colony had begun to issue paper money, a curse from which it was destined long to suffer. But some other evils were remedied. Liberty of conscience was secured to Dissenters, and in the matter of test oaths the Quaker’s affirmation was accepted as an equivalent. Eden was a very popular governor and managed affairs with ability until his death in 1722. His name is preserved in that of the town of Edenton, in Chowan County, which was in his time the seat of government.

We must now turn to South Carolina, where we have seen Governor Craven using the Yamassee and Catawba warriors as allies to be sent against the Tuscaroras. The year 1713, which witnessed the crushing defeat of the Tuscaroras, was the year of the treaty of Utrecht, which ended the long war of the Spanish Succession. Throughout that war the powerful tribe of Yamassees had been steadfast friends of the English. From time to time they made incursions into Florida and brought away many a Spanish captive to be burned alive, until government checked their cruelty by offering a ransom for Spanish prisoners delivered in safety at Charleston; the prisoners were then sent home on payment of the amount of their ransom by the government at St. Augustine.

The Yamassee country was the last quarter from which the South Carolinians would have expected hostilities to come. But after 1713, in spite of treaty obligations, the St. Augustine government bent all its energies to stirring up all the frontier tribes to a concerted attack upon the English. Bribes in the shape of gaudy coats, steel hatchets, and firearms were distributed among the chiefs; the solemn palavers, the banquets of boiled dog, the exchanges of wampum belts, the puffing of red clay pipes, the beastly orgies of fire-water, may be left to our imagination, for we have no such minute chroniclers here as the Jesuits of Canada. The outcome of it all was a grand conspiracy of Yamassees, Creeks, Catawbas, and Cherokees, with other less important tribes, comprising perhaps 7,000 or 8,000 warriors, against the colony of South Carolina. But, as in all such plans for concerted action among Indians, the concert was very imperfect. Hostilities began in April, 1715, with the massacre of ninety persons at Pocotaligo, and lasted until February, 1716, by which time 400 Christians had lost their lives; while the red men were thoroughly vanquished, and the shattered remnant of the Yamassees sought shelter in Florida.

Governor Craven, who had conducted this war with great ability and courage, was a man of high character, and when he returned to England in 1717 his departure was mourned. His successor, Robert Johnson, was son of Sir Nathaniel Johnson, who had formerly been governor. The younger Johnson, an able and popular official, was the last governor of South Carolina under the lords proprietors. His romantic experiences in dealing with pirates will be recounted in my next chapter. The chain of events which brought about a political revolution in 1719 admits of brief description. The Indian war had laden South Carolina with debt, and it was felt that the lords proprietors ought to contribute something toward relieving the distress of a colony which had yielded them a princely income. But the lords proprietors did not take this view of the case. As a means of discharging the public debt, the assembly laid a revenue tariff upon imports, but the lords proprietors vetoed it. The assembly proposed to raise money by selling Yamassee lands to settlers, but the lords proprietors laid claim to the conquered territory for their own use and behoof. Thus the situation was fast becoming unendurable.

In December, 1718, war broke out again between Spain and England. The Spaniards planned an expedition against Charleston, and Johnson asked the assembly for money. They proposed to raise it by collecting revenue under the tariff act, in disregard of the veto. Nicholas Trott, the chief justice, declared that this would not do; the courts would uphold delinquents who should refuse to pay. The assembly denied the right of the proprietors to veto their acts. The members consulted their constituents and were sustained by them. Finally the assembly resolved itself into a revolutionary convention, deposed the lords proprietors, and offered the governorship to Johnson as royal governor. On his refusal to take part in such proceedings, the convention chose for provisional royal governor Colonel James Moore, the hero of the Tuscarora war. Johnson’s only reliance, in such an emergency, was the militia; but the militia deserted him and went over to the convention, and thus, in December, 1719, the popular revolution was complete. When the news reached London, the course of the assembly was approved by the crown, the proprietary charter was declared to be forfeited, and our old friend Sir Francis Nicholson was sent out to South Carolina as royal governor.

Three years later there was renewal of civil discord in North Carolina, after the death of Governor Eden and the arrival of his successor, George Burrington, a vulgar ruffian who had served a term in prison for an infamous assault upon an old woman. Five years of turmoil, with changes of governors, followed. In 1728 Parliament requested the king to buy Carolina, and appropriated money for the purpose. The proprietors were Henry Somerset, Duke of Beaufort, and his brother, Lord Charles Somerset; Lord Craven; Lord Carteret; John Cotton; the heirs of Sir John Colleton; James and Henry Bertie; Mary Dawson and Elizabeth Moore. Lord Carteret would not sell his share. All the others consented to sell for a modest sum total scarcely amounting to £50,000; and so in 1729 the many-headed palatinate founded by Charles II. came to an end, and in its place were the two royal provinces of North and South Carolina.

The careers of the two southern colonies whose beginnings we have thus sketched were very different, and between their respective social characteristics the contrasts were so great that it is impossible to make general statements applicable alike to the two. In one respect the contrast was different from that which one would observe in comparing Virginia with New England. In New England a marked concentration of social life in towns and villages co-existed with complete democracy, while in Virginia the isolated life upon great plantations was connected with an aristocratic structure of society. But between the two Carolinas the contrast was just the reverse of this. Of all the southern colonies, North Carolina was the one in which society was the most scattered, and town life the least developed, while it was also the one in which the general aspect of society was the least aristocratic. On the other hand, in South Carolina there was a peculiarly strong concentration of social life into a single focus in Charleston; and in connection with this we find a type of society in some respects more essentially aristocratic than in Virginia. We shall find it worth our while to dwell for a moment upon some of the immediate causes of these differences.

The history of North America affords an interesting illustration of the way in which the character of a community may be determined for good or ill by geographical circumstances. There have been historians and philosophers unable to see anything except such physical conditions at work in determining the course of human affairs. With such views I have small sympathy,280 but it would be idle to deny that physical conditions are very important, and the study of them is highly instructive. But for the peculiar physical conformation of its coast, North Carolina, rather than Virginia, would doubtless have been the first American state. It was upon Roanoke Island that the earliest attempts were made, but Ralph Lane in 1585 already came to the conclusion that the Chesapeake region would afford better opportunities. First and foremost, the harbourage was spoiled by the prevalent sand-bars. Then huge pine barrens near the coast hindered the first efforts of the planter, and extensive malarial swamps imperilled his life.281 The first attempts at cultivation increased the danger, which was of a kind that would yield only to modern methods of drainage. It was only by the coast that the conditions were thus forbidding. No American state has greater natural advantages than North Carolina. For diversity of eligible soils, for salubrity of climate, for variety of flora and fauna, she is unsurpassed; while for beauty and grandeur of scenery she may well claim to be first among the states east of the Rocky Mountains.282 John Lawson describes North Carolina with enthusiasm as “a delicious country, being placed in that girdle of the world which affords wine, oil, fruit, grain, and silk, with other rich commodities, besides a sweet air, moderate climate, and fertile soil. These are the blessings, under Heaven’s protection, that spin out the thread of life to its utmost extent, and crown our days with the sweets of health and plenty, which, when joined with content, render the possessors the happiest race of men upon earth.”283 The good Lawson, who was somewhat inclined to see things in rose-colour, praised even the gentleness of the Indians, who (as we have seen) returned the compliment after their manner, by roasting him alive. But, with all this beauty and richness of the interior country, the obstacles presented at the coast turned the first great wave of English colonization into Virginia; and thereafter the settlement of North Carolina was determined largely, and by no means to its advantage, by the social conditions of the older colony.

In its early days North Carolina was simply a portion of Virginia’s frontier; and to this wild frontier the shiftless people who could not make a place for themselves in Virginia society, including many of the “mean whites,” flocked in large numbers. In their new home they soon acquired the reputation of being very lawless in temper, holding it to be the chief end of man to resist all constituted authority, and above all things to pay no taxes. In some respects, as in the administration of justice, one might have witnessed such scenes as continued for generations to characterize American frontier life. The courts sat oftentimes in taverns, where the tedium of business was relieved by glasses of grog, while the judge’s decisions were not put on record, but were simply shouted by the crier from the inn door or at the nearest market-place. It was not until 1703 that a clergyman was settled in the colony, though there were Quaker meetings before that time. As late as 1729 Colonel Byrd writes of Edenton, the seat of government: “I believe this is the only metropolis in the Christian or Mohammedan world where there is neither church, chapel, mosque, synagogue, or any other place of public worship, of any sect or religion whatsoever.” In this country “they pay no tribute, either to God or to Cæsar.”284

According to Colonel Byrd, these people were chargeable with laziness, but more especially the men, who let their wives work for them. The men, he says, “make their wives rise out of their beds early in the morning, at the same time that they lie and snore till the sun has run one third of his course and dispersed all the unwholesome damps. Then, after stretching and yawning for half an hour, they light their pipes, and under the protection of a cloud of smoke venture out into the open air; though, if it happens to be never so little cold, they quickly return shivering into the chimney corner. When the weather is mild, they stand leaning with both their arms upon the cornfield fence, and gravely consider whether they had best go and take a small heat at the hoe, but generally find reasons to put it off until another time. Thus they loiter away their lives, like Solomon’s sluggard, with their arms across, and at the winding up of the year scarcely have bread to eat.”285 Every one has met with the type of man here described. In Massachusetts to-day you may find sporadic examples of him in decaying mountain villages, left high and dry by the railroads that follow the winding valleys; or now and then you may find him clustered in some tiny hamlet of crazy shanties nestling in a secluded area of what Mr. Ricardo would have called “the worst land under cultivation,” and bearing some such pithy local name as “Hardscrabble” or “Satan’s Kingdom.” Such men do not make the strength of Massachusetts, or of any commonwealth. They did not make the strength of North Carolina, and it should not be forgotten that Byrd’s testimony is that of an unfriendly or at least a satirical observer. Nevertheless there is strong reason for believing that his portrait is one for which the old Albemarle colony could have furnished many sitters. Such people were sure to be drawn thither by the legislation which made the colony an Alsatia for insolvent debtors.

The industries of North Carolina in the early times were purely agricultural. There were no manufactures. The simplest and commonest articles of daily use were imported from the northern colonies or from England. Agriculture was conducted more wastefully and with less intelligence than in any of the other colonies. In the northern counties tobacco was almost exclusively cultivated. In the Cape Fear region there were flourishing rice-fields. A great deal of excellent timber was cut; in particular the yellow pine of North Carolina was then, as now, famous for its hardness and durability. Tar and turpentine were also produced in large quantities. All this furnished the basis for a flourishing foreign commerce; but the people did not take kindly to the sea, and the carrying trade was monopolized by New Englanders. The fisheries, which were of considerable value, were altogether neglected. All business or traffic about the coast was carried on under perilous conditions; for pirates were always hovering about, secure in the sympathy of many of the people, like the brigands of southern Italy in recent times.

In the absence of manufactures, and with commerce so little developed, there was no town life. Byrd describes Edenton as containing forty or fifty houses, small and cheaply built: “a citizen here is counted extravagant if he has ambition enough to aspire to a brick chimney.”286 As late as 1776 New Berne and Wilmington were villages of five or six hundred inhabitants each. Not only were there no towns, but there were very few large plantations with stately manor houses like those of Virginia. A great part of the country was covered with its primeval forest, in which thousands of hogs, branded with their owners’ marks, wandered and rooted until the time came for hunting them out and slaughtering them. Where rude clearings had been made in the wilderness there were small, ill-kept farms. Nearly all the people were small farmers, whose work was done chiefly by black slaves or by white servants. The treatment of the slaves is said to have been usually mild, as in Virginia. The white servants fared better, and the general state of society was so low that when their time of service was ended they had here a good chance of rising to a position of equality with their masters. The country swarmed with ruffians of all sorts, who fled thither from South Carolina and Virginia; life and property were insecure, and Lynch law was not unfrequently administered. The small planters were apt to be hard drinkers, and among their social amusements were scrimmages, in which noses were sometimes broken and eyes gouged out. There was a great deal of gambling. But, except at elections and other meetings for political purposes, people saw very little of each other. The isolation of homesteads, which prevailed over the South, reached its maximum in North Carolina. It is not strange, then, that the colony was a century old before it could boast of a printing-press, or that there were no schools until shortly before the war for Independence. A mail from Virginia came some eight or ten times in a year, but it only reached a few towns on the coast, and down to the time of the Revolution the interior of the country had no mails at all.

All these consequences clearly followed from the character of the emigration by which North Carolina was first peopled, and that character was determined by its geographical position as a wilderness frontier to such a commonwealth as Virginia. In the character of this emigration we find the reasons for the comparatively democratic state of society. As there were so few large plantations and wealthy planters, while nearly all the white people were small land-owners, and as the highest class was thus so much lower in dignity than the corresponding class in Virginia, it became just so much the easier for the “mean whites” to rise far enough to become a part of it. North Carolina, therefore, was not simply an Alsatia for debtors and criminals, but it afforded a home for the better portion of Virginia’s poor people. We can thus see how there would come about a natural segregation of Virginia’s white freedmen into four classes: 1. The most enterprising and thrifty would succeed in maintaining a respectable existence in Virginia; 2. A much larger class, less thrifty and enterprising, would find it easier to make a place for themselves in the ruder society of North Carolina; 3. A lower stratum would consist of persons without enterprise or thrift who remained in Virginia to recruit the ranks of “white trash;” 4. The lowest stratum would comprise the outlaws who fled into North Carolina to escape the hangman. Of the third class the eighteenth century seems to have witnessed a gradual exodus from Virginia, so that in 1773 it was possible for the traveller, John Ferdinand Smyth, to declare that there were fewer cases of poverty in proportion to the population than anywhere else “in the universe.” The statement of Bishop Meade in 1857, which was quoted in the preceding chapter,287 shows that the class of “mean whites” had not even then become extinct in Virginia; but it is clear that the slow but steady exodus had been such as greatly to diminish its numbers and its importance as a social feature. Some of these freedmen went northward into Pennsylvania,288 but most of them sought the western and southern frontiers, and at first the southern frontier was a far more eligible retreat than the western. Of this outward movement of white freedmen the governor of Virginia wrote in 1717: “The Inhabitants of our ffrontiers are composed generally of such as have been transported hither as Servants, and being out of their time, ... settle themselves where Land is to be taken up ... that will produce the necessarys of Life with little Labour. It is pretty well known what Morals such people bring with them hither, which are not like to be much mended by their Scituation, remote from all places of worship; they are so little concerned about Religion, that the Children of many of the Inhabitants of those ffrontier Settlements are 20, and some 30 years of age before they are baptized, and some not at all.... These people, knowing the Indians to be lovers of strong liquors, make no scruple of first making them drunk and then cheating them of their skins; on the other hand, the Indians, being unacquainted with the methods of obtaining reparation by Law, frequently revenged themselves by the murder of the persons who thus treated them, or (according to their notions of Satisfaction) of the next Englishman they could most easily cutt off.”289 In this description we may recognize some features of frontier life in recent times.