We have hitherto considered only the earliest period of North Carolina history. From about 1720 marked changes began to be visible. There was such a change in the character of the immigration as by and by to result in more or less displacement of population. Since the barbarous devastation of the Rhenish Palatinate by French troops in 1688-93 there had been much distress among those worthy Germans, and after a while they sought to mend their fortunes by coming to America. This migration continued for many years. Some of these Germans settled in the Mohawk valley, where their mark was placed upon the map in such town names as Minden, Frankfort, and Oppenheim, and where they contributed to our Revolutionary War one of its most picturesque figures in Nicholas Herkimer. A great many came to the Susquehanna valley in what was then the western part of Pennsylvania, where their descendants still speak and write that sweet old-fashioned language which we ought hardly to call Pennsylvania Dutch, since it is a dialect of High German besprinkled with English. From Pennsylvania large numbers followed the valleys between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies and made their way as far as South Carolina. We have already noted the arrival of Germans, Swiss, and Huguenots on the North Carolina seaboard early in the century. Later on, in 1745, after the suppression of the Jacobite rebellion, there came to North Carolina a powerful reinforcement of Scotch Highlanders, among them many of the clan Macdonald, including the romantic Flora Macdonald, who had done so much for the young fugitive prince. But more important and far more numerous than all the other elements in the population were the Scotch-Irish from Ulster, who—goaded by unwise and unjust laws—began coming in large numbers about 1719, and have played a much greater and more extensive part in American history than has yet been recognized. There was hardly one of the thirteen colonies upon which these Scotch-Irish did not leave their mark. To the story of their coming I shall revert in my concluding chapter, where it forms the most important part of the story of the westward advance of Virginia. For the present it may suffice to point out that in North Carolina they had come, before the Revolutionary War, to be the strongest element in the population of the colony. Under the influence of these various and excellent streams of immigration, the character of the colony was gradually but effectively altered. Industry and thrift came to prevail in the wilderness, and various earnest Puritanic types of religion flourished side by side on friendly terms.
As society in North Carolina became more and more orderly and civilized, the old mean white element, or at least the more intractable part of it, was gradually pushed out to the westward. This stream that had started from Old Virginia flowed for a while southwestward into the South Carolina back-country. But the southerly movement was gradually turned more and more to the westward.
Always clinging to the half-savage frontier, these poor white people made their way from North Carolina westward through Tennessee, and their descendants may still be found here and there in Arkansas, southern Missouri, and what is sometimes known as the Egyptian extremity of Illinois. From the South Carolina back-country, through Georgia, they were scattered here and there among the states on the Gulf of Mexico. Taken at its worst, this type of American citizen is portrayed in Martin Chuzzlewit’s unwelcome visitor, the redoubtable Hannibal Chollop. Specimens of him might have been found among the border ruffians led by the savage Quantrell in 1863 to the cruel massacre at Lawrence, and among the desperadoes whose dark deeds used forty years ago to give such cities as Memphis an unenviable prominence in the pages of the “Police Gazette.” But in the average specimens of the type one would find not criminality of disposition so much as shiftlessness. Of the stunted, gaunt, and cadaverous “sand-hillers” of South Carolina and Georgia, a keen observer says that “they are incapable of applying themselves steadily to any labour, and their habits are very much like those of the old Indians.”290 The “clay-eaters,” who are said to sustain life on crude whiskey and aluminous earth, are doubtless of similar type, as well as the “conches,” “crackers,” and “corn-crackers” of various Southern states. All these seem to represent a degraded variety or strain of the English race. Concerning the origin of this degraded strain, detailed documentary evidence is not easy to get; but the facts of its distribution furnish data for valid inferences such as the naturalist entertains concerning the origin and migrations of some species of animal or plant.
There is, first, the importation of degraded English humanity in large numbers to the two oldest colonies in which there is a demand for wholesale cheap labour; secondly, the substitution of black cheap labour for white; thirdly, the tendency of the degraded white humanity to seek the frontier, as described by Spotswood, or else to lodge in sequestered nooks outside of the main currents of progress. These data are sufficient in general to explain the origin and distribution of the “crackers,” but a word of qualification is needed. It is not to be supposed that the ancestors of all the persons designated as “crackers” were once white freedmen in Virginia and Maryland; it is more probable that this class furnished a nucleus about which various wrecks of decayed and broken-down humanity from many quarters were gradually gathered. Nor are we bound to suppose that every community of ignorant, semi-civilized white people in the Southern states is descended from those white freedmen. Prolonged isolation from the currents of thought and feeling that sway the great world will account for almost any extent of ignorance and backwardness; and there are few geographical situations east of the Mississippi River more conducive to isolation than the southwestern portion of the great Appalachian highlands. All these circumstances should be borne in mind in dealing with what, from whatever point of view, is one of the interesting problems of American history.
The settlement of South Carolina took place under different circumstances from those of the sister colony, and the resulting state of society was very different. In the earliest days there were many settlers of a rough and turbulent character, which their peculiar dealings with pirates, to be recounted in the following chapter, did not tend to improve. But the Huguenots, in whose veins flowed some of the sturdiest blood of France, soon came in great numbers. From the acquaintanceship of the Berkeleys, the Ashleys, the Hydes, and others, there came a certain number of Cavaliers; but at the end of the seventeenth century the impulse which had carried thousands of Cavaliers to Virginia had quite died out, and on the whole the general complexion of South Carolina, as regarded religion and politics, was strongly Puritan.
In one respect there is a resemblance by no means superficial between the settlement of South Carolina and that of Massachusetts. Most of the South Carolina settlers had left their homes in Europe for reasons connected with religion; and emigrants who quit their homes for such reasons are likely to show a higher average of intelligence and energy than the great mass of their fellow-countrymen who stay at home. Calvinism was the prevailing form of theology in South Carolina, though there were some Lutherans, and perhaps one fifth of the people may have belonged to the Church of England, which was established by the proprietary charter, and remained the state church until 1776. We have seen how much disturbance was caused by the attempts of the High Churchmen early in the eighteenth century to enforce conformity on the part of the Dissenters; but such attempts were soon abandoned as hopeless, and a policy of toleration prevailed. Though the Church of England was supported by public taxation, yet the clergymen were not appointed to office, but were elected by their congregations like the Dissenting clergymen. Their education was in general very good, and their character lofty; and in all respects the tone of the church in South Carolina was far higher than in Virginia. At the outbreak of the Revolution the elected Episcopal clergy of South Carolina were generally found on the side of the Whigs; a significant contrast to the appointed Episcopal clergy of Virginia, whose Toryism was carried so far as to ruin the reputation of their church. But the most interesting feature connected with the establishment of the English Church was the introduction of the parish system of local self-government in very much the same form in which it existed in England. The vestries in South Carolina discharged many of the functions which in New England were performed by the town meeting,—the superintendence of the poor, the maintenance of roads, the election of representatives to the Commons House of Assembly, and the assessment of the local taxes.
In one fundamental respect the political constitution of South Carolina was more democratic than that of Virginia. The vestrymen were elected yearly by all the taxpayers of the parish. In this they were analogous to the selectmen of New England. Parish government in Virginia was in the hands of a close vestry; in South Carolina it was administered by an open vestry. Moreover, while in Virginia the unit of representation in the legislature was the county, in South Carolina it was the parish. Now the South Carolina parish was of purely English origin, not of French origin like the parishes of Louisiana. The Louisiana parish is analogous to a county, that of South Carolina was nearly equivalent to a township.291 Although the colony had such a large proportion of French settlers, and of such marked ability and character, the development of its governmental institutions was as thoroughly English as if no Frenchman had ever set foot upon its soil. The approximation to the New England township is interesting. The freemen of South Carolina, with their open vestry, possessed what the smaller landed proprietors of Virginia in Bacon’s rebellion strove for in vain.
In this connection it is worth while to observe that, from the first decade of the eighteenth century, a strong interest in popular education was felt in South Carolina. The same obstacles to schools in the rural districts that we have already observed in Virginia prevented the growth of anything like the public school system of New England. But of private free schools in the colony of South Carolina there were quite a number, and their quality was very good. The first was established in Charleston in 1712, and it not only taught the three Rs, along with bookkeeping, but it had classes in Greek and Latin. Private donations were encouraged by a provision that every giver of £20 “could nominate a scholar to be taught free for five years.” The commissioners of the school also appointed twelve scholars. Free schools were afterward erected by private bequests and subscriptions at Dorchester, Beaufort, Ninety-Six, and in many other places. A noteworthy instance was afforded by St. Thomas parish, where “James Childs bequeathed £600 toward erecting a free school, and the parishioners, by local subscription, increased the amount to £2,800.”292 In such beginnings there lay the possibilities of a more healthy development than can be secured by the prevalent semi-socialist method of supporting schools by public taxation;293 but the influences of negro slavery were adverse to any such development.
The economic circumstance which chiefly determined the complexion of society in South Carolina was the cultivation of rice and indigo. The value of the former crop was discovered in 1693, when a ship from Madagascar, accidentally stopping at Charleston, had on board a little bag of rice, which was planted with very notable success. Rice was not long in becoming the great staple of the colony. By 1740 it yielded more than £200,000 yearly. Indigo was next in importance. Much corn was raised, and cattle in large numbers were exported to the West Indies. Some attention was paid to silk, flax, and hemp, tobacco, olives, and oranges. Some cotton was raised, but that crop did not attain paramount importance until after the invention of the gin and the development of great factories in England.
Rice and indigo absorbed the principal attention of the colony, as tobacco absorbed the attention of Virginia. Manufactures did not thrive. Every article, great or small, whether a mere luxury or an article of prime necessity, that had to be manufactured, was imported, and paid for with rice or indigo. This created a very prosperous trade in Charleston. The planters did not deal directly with the shipmasters, as in Virginia, but sold their crops to the merchants in Charleston, whence they were shipped, sometimes in British, sometimes in New England vessels, to all parts of the world.
Now the cultivation of rice and the cultivation of indigo are both very unhealthy occupations. The work in the swamps is deadly to white men. But after 1713 negroes were brought to South Carolina in such great numbers that an athletic man could be had for £40 or less. Every such negro could raise in a single year much more indigo or rice than would repay the cost of his purchase, so that it was actually more profitable to work him to death than to take care of him. Assuming, then, that human nature in South Carolina was neither better nor worse than in other parts of the civilized world, we need not be surprised when told that the relations between master and slave were noticeably different from what they were in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. The negroes of the southern colony were reputed to be more brutal and unmanageable than those to the northward, and for this there is a twofold explanation. In the first place, slaves newly brought from Africa, half-savage heathen, were less tractable than African slaves who had lived many years under kindly treatment among white people, and far less tractable than slaves of the next generation born in America. Such newcomers as had been tribal chiefs or elders in their country were noted as especially insolent and insubordinate.294 In many respects the negro has proved quickly amenable to the softening influences of civilized life, and to the teachings of Christianity, however imperfectly apprehended. In the second place, the type of Virginia slavery was old-fashioned and patriarchal, while South Carolina slavery was of the modern and commercial type. The slaves on a Virginia plantation were like members of a great family, while in a South Carolina rice swamp their position was much more analogous to that of a gang of navvies. This circumstance was closely connected with a peculiarity of South Carolina life, in which it afforded a striking contrast to the slave states north of it. Except in the immediate neighbourhood of Charleston, few if any planters lived on their estates. The reason for this was doubtless the desire to escape the intense heat and unwholesome air of the newly tilled lowlands. The latitude of South Carolina is that of Morocco, and it was natural for settlers coming from the cool or chilly climates of France and England to seek such relief as the breezes of Charleston harbour could afford.295 As a rule, the planters had houses in Charleston and dwelt there the year round, making occasional visits to their plantations, but leaving them in the meanwhile to be managed by overseers. Thus the slaves, while set to much harder labour than in Virginia, were in the main left subject to the uncurbed tyranny of underlings, which is apt to be a very harsh kind of tyranny. The diminutions in their numbers, whether due to hardship or to whatever cause, were repaired by fresh importations from Africa, so that there was much less improvement in their quality than under the milder patriarchal system. The dog that is used to kicks is prone to snarl and bite, and the slaves of South Carolina were an object of dread to their masters, all the more so because of their overwhelming numbers. Nothing can indicate more forcibly the social difference between the two Carolinas than the different ratios of their black to their white population. About 1760 the inhabitants of North Carolina were reckoned at 200,000, of whom one fourth were slaves; those of South Carolina at 150,000, of whom nearly or quite three fourths were slaves. In the former case the typical picture is that of a few black men raising tobacco and corn on the small plantation where the master lives; in the latter case it is that of an immense gang toiling in a rice swamp under the lash of an overseer. Care should always be taken not to exaggerate such contrasts, but after making all allowances the nature of the difference is here, I think, correctly indicated.
In 1740, while war was going on between Spain and England, there was a brief but startling insurrection of slaves in South Carolina. It was suspected that Spanish emissaries were concerned in it. However that may have been, the occasion of such a war might well seem to the negroes to furnish a good opportunity. Under the lead of a fellow named Cato the insurgents gathered near Stono Inlet and began an indiscriminate massacre of men, women, children. The alarm was quickly given and the affair was soon brought to an end, though not until too many lives had been lost. The news arrived in Wilton while the people were attending church. It was the custom of the planters to carry rifles and pistols, and very little time was lost before Captain Bee led forth a well-equipped body of militia in quest of the rebels. They were overtaken in a large field, all in hilarious disorder, celebrating their bloody achievement with potations of rum; in which plight they were soon dispersed with slaughter, and their ringleaders were summarily hanged.296
The habit of carrying fire-arms to church was part of a general system of patrol which grew out of the dread in which the planters lived. The chief business of the patrol was to visit all the plantations within its district at least once a fortnight and search the negro quarters for concealed weapons or stolen goods.297 The patrolmen also hunted fugitives, and were authorized to flog stray negroes wherever found. The ordinary death penalty for the black man was hanging. Burning at the stake was not unknown, but, as I have already mentioned, there is one instance of such an execution in Massachusetts, and there are several in New York, so that it cannot be cited as illustrating any peculiarity of the South Carolina type of slavery. The most hideous instance of cruelty recorded of South Carolina is that of a slave who for the murder of an overseer was left to starve in a cage suspended to the bough of a tree, where insects swarmed over his naked flesh and birds had picked his eyes out before the mercy of death overtook him.298 That such atrocities must have been condemned by public opinion is shown by the act of 1740, prescribing a fine of £700 current money for the wilful murder of a slave by his master or any other white man; £350 for killing him in a sudden heat of passion, or by undue correction; and £100 for inflicting mutilation or cruel punishment.299
The circumstance that most of the great planters had houses in Charleston went along with the brisk foreign trade to make it a very important town, according to the American standards of those days. In 1776, with its population of 15,000 souls, it ranked as the fifth city of the United States. Charleston had a theatre, while concerts, balls, and dinner parties gave animation to its social life. It was a general custom with the planters to send their children to Europe for an education, and it was said that a knowledge of the world thus acquired gave to society in South Carolina a somewhat less provincial aspect than it wore in other parts of English America.300 The sharpest contrast, however, was with its next neighbour. As South Carolina may have been in some respects the most cosmopolitan of the colonies south of Pennsylvania, so on the other hand North Carolina was certainly the most sequestered and provincial. As I observed at the beginning of this chapter, for the development of the frontier or backwoods phase of American life two conditions were requisite: first, the struggle with the wilderness; secondly, isolation from European influences. This combination of conditions was not realized in the case of the first settlers of Virginia and Maryland, of the Puritans in New England, or the Dutch in New Netherland, or the Quakers in Pennsylvania. In all these cases there was more or less struggle with the wilderness, but the contact with European influences was never broken. With North Carolina it was different; the direct trade with England was from the outset much less than that of the other colonies. For a time its chief seaport was Norfolk in Virginia; European ideas reached it chiefly through slow overland journeys; and it was practically a part of Virginia’s backwoods. On the other hand, South Carolina, focussing all its activities in the single seaport of Charleston, was eminently accessible to European influences. Its life was not that of a wilderness frontier, like its northern neighbour. But its military position, with reference to the whole Atlantic seaboard, was that of an English march or frontier against the Spaniards in Florida and the West Indies.
The contrast above indicated applies only to lowland South Carolina, the only part with which the earlier decades of the eighteenth century are concerned. At that time the highlands of both Carolinas remained in the possession of the Cherokees, so that they have nothing to do with my comparison. At a later time that whole highland region became a wilderness frontier, the scene of the civilized white man’s backwoods life. All the way, indeed, from Pennsylvania to Georgia, along the Appalachian chain, there was a strong similarity of conditions and of life, in marked contrast with the divergencies along the coast region, in stepping from Pennsylvania into Maryland, thence into Virginia, and so on; but that life along the coast which approached most nearly to the life of the interior wilderness was to be seen about Albemarle and Pamlico sounds.
The mention of Georgia serves to introduce the statement that, with the growth of civilization on the South Carolina coast, the need for a buffer against the Spaniards began to be more and more strongly felt. We have seen how the vexatious Yamassee war of 1715 was brought on by Spanish intrigues. After the overthrow of the Yamassees the troubles did not entirely cease. For some years the Indians continued to be a source of annoyance, and in their misdeeds the secret hand of Spain was discernible. The multitude of slaves, too, in regions accessible to Spanish influence, greatly increased the danger.
In 1732 the state of affairs on the South Carolina frontier attracted the attention of a gallant English soldier whose name deserves a very high place among the heroes of early American history. James Oglethorpe, an officer who in youth had served with distinction under Prince Eugene against the Turks,301 conceived the plan of freeing the insolvent debtors who crowded English prisons by carrying them over to America and establishing a colony which might serve as a strong military outpost against the Spaniards. The scheme was an opportune one, as the South Sea Bubble and other wild projects had ruined hundreds of English families. The land between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers, with the strip starting between their two main sources and running westward to the Pacific Ocean,302 was made over to a board of trustees, and was named Georgia, in honour of the king, George II. The charter created a kind of proprietary government, but with powers less plenary and extensive than had been granted to the proprietors of Maryland, Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Oglethorpe was appointed governor; German Protestants and Highlanders from Scotland were brought over in large numbers; and a few people from New England joined in the enterprise, and founded the town of Sunbury. All laws were to be made by the trustees, and the settlers were at first to have no representative assembly and no voice in making the government. But this despotic arrangement was merely temporary and provisional; it was intended that after the lapse of one-and-twenty years the colony should be held to have come of age, and should choose its own government. Military drill was to be rigidly enforced. Slave-labour was absolutely prohibited, as was also the sale of intoxicating liquors; so that Maine cannot rightfully claim the doubtful honour of having been the first American commonwealth to try the experiment of a “Maine Law.” Such were the beginnings of Georgia, and in the Spanish war of 1739 it quite justified the foresight of its founder. The valour of the Highlanders and the admirable generalship of Oglethorpe were an efficient bulwark for the older colonies. In 1742 the Spaniards were at last decisively defeated at Frederica, and from that time forth until the Revolution the frontier was more quiet. But proprietary government in Georgia fared no better than in the Carolinas. In 1752, one year before the coming of age, the government by trustees was abandoned. Georgia was made a crown colony, and a representative government was introduced simultaneously with negro slavery and Jamaica rum.
The social condition of colonial Georgia does not present many distinctive or striking features. In 1770 the population numbered about 50,000, of which perhaps one half were slaves. There was no town life. Rice and indigo were the principal crops, and there was a large export of lumber. Near Savannah there were a few extensive plantations, with fine houses, after the Virginia pattern; but most of the estates were small, and their owners poor. The Church of England was supported by the government, but the clergy had little influence. The condition of the slaves differed but slightly, if at all, from their condition in South Carolina. There were a good many “mean whites,” and there was, perhaps, more crime and lawlessness than in the older colonies. The roads were mere Indian trails, and there were neither schools, nor mails, nor any kind of literature. Colonial Georgia, in short, with many of the characteristics of a “wild West,” stood in relation to South Carolina somewhat as North Carolina to Virginia. It was essentially a frontier community, though the activity of Savannah as a seaport somewhat qualified the situation.
A comparative survey of Old Virginia’s neighbours shows how extremely loose and inaccurate is the common habit of alluding to the old Cavalier society of England as if it were characteristic of the southern states in general. Equally loose and ignorant is the habit of alluding to Puritanism as if it were peculiar to New England. In point of fact the Cavalier society was reproduced nowhere save on Chesapeake Bay. On the other hand, the English or Independent phase of Puritanism was by no means confined to the New England colonies. Three fourths of the people of Maryland were Puritans; English Puritanism, with the closely kindred French Calvinism, swayed South Carolina; and in our concluding chapter we shall see how the Scotch or Presbyterian phase of Puritanism extended throughout the whole length of the Appalachian region, from Pennsylvania to Georgia, and has exercised in the southwest an influence always great and often predominant. In the South to-day there is much more Puritanism surviving than in New England.
But before we join in the westward progress from tidewater to the peaks of the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky range, we must look back upon the ocean for a moment and see how it came to be infested with buccaneers and pirates, and what effects they wrought upon our coasts.
At no other time in the world’s history has the business of piracy thriven so greatly as in the seventeenth century and the first part of the eighteenth. Its golden age may be said to have extended from about 1650 to about 1720. In ancient times the seafaring was too limited in its area to admit of such wholesale operations as went on after the broad Atlantic had become a highway between the Old World and the New. No doubt those Cretan and Cilician pirates who were suppressed by the great Pompey were terrible fellows. After the destruction of Carthage they controlled the Mediterranean from the coast of Judæa to the Pillars of Hercules, and captured the cargoes of Egyptian grain till at times Rome seemed threatened with famine. Roman commanders one after another went down before them, until at length, in the year B. C. 67, Pompey was appointed dictator over the Mediterranean and all its coasts for fifty miles inland. The dimensions of his task are indicated by the fact that in the course of that year he captured 3,000 vessels, hung or crucified 10,000 pirates, and made prisoners of 20,000 more, whom he hustled off to hard labour in places far from the sound of surf. Nevertheless those ancient pirates worked on a much smaller scale than the buccaneers of America. In the Indian Ocean adjacent stretches of the Pacific there has always been much piracy until the recent days when French and English ships have patrolled those waters. The fame of the Chinese and Malays as sea robbers is well established. So too with those vile communities north of Sahara which we used to call the Barbary States, their eminence in crime is unsurpassed. From the fifteenth century to the first years of the nineteenth, piracy was one of their chief sources of revenue; their ships were a terror to the coasts of Europe, and for devilish atrocity scarcely any human annals are so black as those of Morocco and Algiers. But as these Mussulman pirates and those of eastern Asia were as busily at work in the seventeenth century as at any other time, their case does not impair my statement that the age of the buccaneers was the Golden Age of piracy. The deeds done in American waters greatly swelled, if they did not more than double, the volume of maritime robbery already existing.
If we look into mediæval history for examples to compare with those already cited, we may observe that the Scandinavian Vikings, such men as sailed with Rolf and Guthorm and Swegen Forkbeard, are sometimes spoken of as pirates. If such a classification of them were correct, we should be obliged to assign the Golden Age of piracy to the ninth and tenth centuries, for surely all other slayings and plunderings done by seafaring men shrink into insignificance beside the operations of those mighty warriors of the North. But it is neither a just nor a correct use of language that would count as pirates a race of men who simply made war like all their contemporaries, only more effectively. The warfare of the Vikings was that of barbarous heathen, but it was not criminal unless it is a crime to be born a barbarian. The moral difference between killing the enemy in battle and murdering your neighbour is plain enough. If there is any word which implies thorough and downright criminality, it is pirate. In the old English law the pirate was declared an enemy to the human race, with whom no faith need be kept. “As therefore,” says Blackstone, “he has renounced all the benefits of society and government, and has reduced himself afresh to the savage state of nature by declaring war against all mankind, all mankind must declare war against him, and every community hath a right by the rule of self-defence to inflict that punishment upon him which every individual would in a state of nature have been otherwise entitled to do for any invasion of his person or property.”303 Pirates taken at sea were commonly hung from the yard-arm without the formality of a trial, and on land neither church nor shrine could serve them as sanctuary. It was also well understood that they were not included in the benefit of a general declaration of pardon or amnesty.
The pirate thus elaborately outlawed was anybody who participated in violent robbery on the high seas, or in criminal plunder along their coasts. The details of such crimes were apt to be full of cruelty. The capture of a merchant ship with more or less bloodshed was usually involved, and such bloodshed was wholesale murder. If provisions were less than ample, the survivors were thrown overboard, or set ashore on some lonely island and left to starve, and this often happened. Murders from sheer wantonness were not uncommon, and the sack of a coast town or village was attended with nameless horrors. On the whole we cannot wonder that public opinion should have branded the skippers and crews who did such things as the very worst of criminals. One can see that in old trials for piracy, as in trials for witchcraft, the dread and detestation were often so great as to outweigh the ordinary English presumption that an accused person must have the benefit of the doubt until proved guilty. Desire to extirpate the crime became a stronger feeling than reluctance to punish the innocent. The slightest suspicion of complicity with pirates brought with it extreme peril.
When we thus recall what the crime of piracy really was, we cannot fail to see how reprehensible is the language sometimes applied, by writers who should know better, to the noble sailors who in the days of Queen Elizabeth saved England from the Spanish Inquisition.304 Had it not been for the group of devoted men among whom Sir Francis Drake was foremost, there was imminent danger three hundred years ago that human freedom might perish from off the face of the earth. The name of Drake is one that should never be uttered without reverence, especially by Americans, since it is clear that but for him our history would not have begun in the days of Elizabeth’s successor. His character was far loftier than that of Nelson, the only other sea warrior whose achievements have equalled his. His performances never transgressed the bounds of legitimate warfare as it was conducted in the sixteenth century. Among his contemporaries he was exceptionally humane, for he would not permit the wanton destruction of life or property. To use language which even remotely alludes to such a man as a pirate is to show sad confusion of ideas. As for Elizabeth’s other great captains,—such as Raleigh, Cavendish, Hawkins, Gilbert, Grenville, Frobisher, Winter, and the Howards,—few of them rose to the moral stature of Drake, but they were very far above the level of freebooters. It seems ridiculous that it should be necessary to say so. Their business was warfare, not robbery.
It is nevertheless undeniable that naval warfare in the days of Elizabeth stood on a lower moral plane than naval warfare in the days of Victoria, and things were done without hesitation then that would not be tolerated now. Wars are ugly things at best, but civilized people have learned how to worry through them without inflicting quite so much misery as formerly. Three centuries ago not only were the usages more harsh than now, but the methods of conducting maritime warfare contained a feature out of which, under favouring circumstances, piracy afterward grew. There can be no doubt that the seventeenth century was the golden age of pirates because it came immediately after the age of Elizabeth. The circumstances of the struggle of the Netherlands and England against the greatest military power in the world made it necessary for the former to rely largely, and the latter almost exclusively, upon naval operations. Dutch ships on the Indian Ocean and English ships off the American coasts effectually cut the Spaniard’s sinews of war. Now in that age ocean navigation was still in its infancy, and the work of creating great and permanent navies was only beginning. Government was glad to have individuals join in the work of building and equipping ships of war, and it was accordingly natural that individuals should expect to reimburse themselves for the heavy risk and expense by taking a share in the spoils of victory. In this way privateering came into existence, and it played a much more extensive part in maritime warfare than it now does. The navy was but incompletely nationalized. Into expeditions that were strictly military in purpose there entered some of the elements of a commercial speculation, and as we read them with our modern ideas we detect the smack of buccaneering.
To this it should be added that fighting between hostile states occurred much more frequently than now without a formal declaration of war. There were times in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the hatred between the commercial rivals, Venice and Genoa, was so fierce that whenever their ships happened to meet on the Mediterranean they went to fighting at sight, yet those bloody scrimmages did not always lead to war. In the youth of Christopher Columbus it was seldom that Christian and Turkish ships met without bloodshed, on the assumption that war was the normal state of things between Crescent and Cross. So when the Dutch were contending against Philip II. the English often helped their heroic cousins by capturing Spanish ships long before war was declared between Philip and Elizabeth. Such laxity of international usage made it easy to cross the line which demarcates privateering from piracy.
It should also be remembered that the ships of neutral nations had no such protection as now. The utmost that is now permitted the belligerent ship is to search the neutral ship for weapons or other materials of war bound for an enemy’s port, and to confiscate such materials without further injury to person or property. In the sixteenth century it was allowable to confiscate the neutral ship bound for an enemy’s port, sell her cargo for prize money, and hold her crew and passengers for ransom. The milder doctrine that any kind of goods might be seized, but not the ship and her people, had been propounded but was not yet generally accepted.
All the circumstances here mentioned were favourable to the growth of piracy. At the same time the temptations were unusually strong. There was a vague widespread belief that America was a land abounding in treasure, and there were facts enough to explain such a belief. Immense quantities of gold and silver were carried across the Atlantic in Spanish ships, to say nothing of other articles of value. This treasure was used to support a war which threatened English liberty, and therefore English cruisers were right in seizing it wherever they could. But it only needed that such cruising should fall into the hands of knaves and ruffians, and that it should be kept up after Spain and England were really at peace, for this semi-mediæval warfare to develop into a gigantic carnival of robbery and murder. And so it happened.
It was toward the end of the sixteenth century, in the course of the great Elizabethan war, that the West Indies witnessed the first appearance of the marauders known as “Brethren of the Coast.” They were of various nationalities, chiefly French, English, and Dutch. They all regarded Spain as the world’s great bully that must be teased. The Spaniards had won such a reputation for tyranny and cruelty that public opinion was not shocked when they were made to swallow a dose or two of their own medicine. After peace had been declared, any foreign adventurers coming to the West Indies were liable to be molested as intruders, and their ships sometimes had to fight in self-defence. Wherefore the more unscrupulous rovers, expecting ill-treatment, used not to wait for it, but when they saw a good chance for robbing Spaniards they promptly seized it. This they called, in the witty phrase of a French captain, se dédommager par avance, or recouping one’s self beforehand.
It was not all the people of Spanish America, however, that frowned upon foreigners. Among those who came were sundry small traders of the illicit sort. Like all semi-barbarous governments, the court of Spain pursued a highly protectionist policy. The colonists were not allowed to receive European goods from any but Spanish ports, and thus the Spanish exporters were enabled to charge exorbitant prices. Many of the colonists therefore welcomed smugglers who brought European wares to exchange for cargoes of sugar or hides. To suppress this traffic, the authorities at San Domingo patrolled the coasts with small cruisers known as guardacostas, and when they caught the intruders they pitched them overboard, or strung them up to the yard-arm, without the smallest ceremony. In revenge the intruders combined into fleets and made descents upon the coasts, burning houses, plundering towns, and committing all manner of outrages. Thus there grew up in the West Indies a chronic state of hostilities quite independent of Europe. It came to be understood among the intruders that, whether their countries were at peace or war with one another, all persons coming to the West Indies were friends and allies against that universal enemy, the Spaniard. Thus these rovers took the name of “Brethren of the Coast.”