The Peace of Ryswick restored to France all the places on Hudson’s Bay of which she had possession at the commencement of the war. With the exception of the eastern portion of Newfoundland, she retained the whole line of coast, with the adjacent islands, from Maine to beyond Labrador and Hudson’s Bay, besides Canada and the valley of the Mississippi; the boundaries, however, not being defined, remained subjects of dispute. The boundary between New France and New York was especially difficult of adjustment, each nation claiming the extensive intervening territory occupied by the Five Nations.

In the year 1700, the jealousy of the Five Nations having been excited by the claim of Bellamont to build forts in their territory, they began to suspect the British intentions towards them; and Callieres, the successor of Frontenac in Canada, taking advantage of their state of feeling, offered them either peace with the French, or a war of extermination. They chose the former, and sent envoys to Montreal, “to weep,” according to their phraseology, “for the French who had died in the war.” A grand treaty of peace was formally signed between the French and their Christianised Indian allies, and these their ancient, formidable enemies—each nation testifying its solemn assent by its symbol, that of the Senecas and Onondagas being a spider; the Cayugas a calumet; the Oneidas a forked stick; the Mohawks a bear; the Hurons a beaver; the Abenakis a deer; and the Ottawas a hare. Peace was also established between the French allies and the Sioux, which was to extend beyond the Mississippi. The hold which the French had upon these nations being through the Jesuit missionaries, a law was passed the same year in New York for the “hanging of every Popish priest who should voluntarily enter the province.”

Peace being established with England, the French, in 1698, renewed their endeavours, which the war had interrupted, to plant a settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi; and Lemoine D’Iberville, who had already signalised himself on the shores of Hudson’s Bay and Newfoundland, was selected for the enterprise. By birth he was a Canadian, one of the seven sons of Charles Lemoine, an early emigrant from Normandy; and with his two brothers, Sauvolle and Bienville, and 200 colonists and a few women and children, in two frigates and two tenders, D’Iberville sailed for the mouth of the Mississippi, which, as yet, had never been entered from the sea.

Unlike the enterprise of La Salle, good fortune attended that of Lemoine D’Iberville from the commencement. Cordially and honourably received by the governor of St. Domingo, his expedition was there increased by a larger vessel, and in January, 1699, he anchored in the Bay of Pensacola; but his landing was forbidden by a fort erected here by Spaniards, lately come from Vera Cruz, and under the guns of which lay two Spanish ships. Spain still claimed the whole range of the Gulf of Mexico.

Sailing westward, D’Iberville cast anchor south-east of Mobile, and landed February 2nd on Ship Island, where, the larger vessel having returned to St. Domingo, the people erected huts while he explored the opposite shore, the Bay of Biloxi, and the mouth of the river Pascagoula. On the 27th of the same month, D’Iberville, his brother Bienville, forty-eight men, and Athanase, a Franciscan, who had been one of the companions of the unfortunate La Salle, set forth in search of the mouth of the Mississippi. Floating trees and muddy waters led them to the obscure outlet of the great Father of Rivers, which they ascended to a village of the Bayagoulas, a tribe occupying the western bank, just below Red River, and with whom was found to be faithfully preserved that letter written by Tonti, and committed to their care in 1684; which circumstance was the joyful assurance to them that they had found the Mississippi.^[22]

Returning from this point, D’Iberville, quitting the great river by the Manshac Pass to the eastward, sailed through the Lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain, so called from two of the French ministers, and arrived safely at Ship Island. Preferring the shores of the Bay of Biloxi to the low lands of the Mississippi, a fort was erected there, the four bastions and twelve cannon of which were to maintain the French authority over the territory, extending from about the Rio del Norte to the confines of Pensacola; after which, D’Iberville set sail for France, leaving his brothers Sauvolle and Bienville in command of the fort, around which the huts of the settlers had clustered.

Though the fear of Spanish interference with this first French settlement in Mississippi was soon removed by the transfer of the Spanish throne to a branch of the Bourbons, still no great success could be looked for; the soil was arid sand, and the heat of the burning sun made the settlers remember with longing the invigorating climate of Canada. Nevertheless their settlement was not without its agreeable circumstances, among which were the visits of missionaries from their stations among remote tribes, and who, floating down the great river in their birch-bark canoes, came to visit them. “Already,” says Bancroft, “a line of communication existed between Quebec and the Gulf of Mexico. The boundless southern region, made a part of the French empire by lilies carved on the trees and crosses erected on the bluffs, and occupied by French missionaries and forest rangers, was annexed to the command of the governor of Biloxi.”

A hundred settlers, with a missionary at their head, had already established themselves upon that beautiful strait between Lakes Erie and St. Clair which La Salle, on his first journey, had marked out as an advantageous post. A fort was built, and Detroit became a flourishing settlement, as did also Kaskaskia and Cahokia, two missionary stations on the eastern bank of the Mississippi. The ambition of forming a vast and powerful French American empire was now becoming stronger even than the idea of a Jesuit Theocracy.

Whilst the little settlement was establishing itself at Biloxi, a scheme was formed in London to claim for England the territory granted in 1630, to Robert Heath, under the name of Carolana. William III. had taken Father Hennepin into his pay, who now pretended to have been the first who descended the Mississippi. He had lately published his narrative in London, and added to his former account that of his pretended voyage. On the plea, therefore, of this priority of claim, an English expedition was fitted out under Coxe, a physician of London and a proprietary of New Jersey, who had bought up the old patent of Carolana, and now, with two armed English vessels, set out to explore the mouth of the Mississippi. Bienville, who had been intrusted by his brother D’Iberville to pursue the exploration of the country, was on his return to Biloxi, about fifty miles above the mouth of the river, when, to his great surprise, meeting one of Coxe’s vessels, he resorted to an expedient which soon removed the intruder. He pretended that this river was not the Mississippi, and that the country was under the French supremacy, on which the English captain, instantly turning his ships about, hastened back. The reach of the river where this occurrence took place is called the English Turn to this day. Thus ended the English attempt to establish a claim to the old Carolana; and though William III. declared that he would leap over “twenty stumbling-blocks rather than not effect it,” England never gained any permanent establishment on the Mississippi.

Coxe’s vessels had brought out a number of French Huguenot emigrants, who were landed in Carolina; and these soon after desiring to remove to Louisiana, where their nationality might be preserved, wrote to Sauvolle for this purpose. Sauvolle communicated with the French government, asking merely, on their behalf, liberty of conscience. The reply of the king was characteristic: “He had not driven Protestants from France to make a republic of them in America.”

D’Iberville returned towards the end of the year with sixty Canadians, and early the following, set out to select a situation for a new settlement. While building a fort about fifty miles above the mouth of the river, he was visited by the aged Tonti, the former companion of La Salle, who had come down the Illinois with seven attendants for that purpose. D’Iberville and his brother Bienville, in company with Tonti, now ascended the Great River as far as the country occupied by the Natchez, by whom they were well received; and here, upon a high bluff, a settlement was marked out under the name of Rosalie, now called Natchez.

In May, D’Iberville again returned to France, and Bienville, pursuing his explorations, crossed the Red River to Natchitoches. Gold and mineral wealth were again the great objects of search, but nothing was met with save swampy forests and dismal solitudes; nor could any report of gold be obtained from the natives. La Sueur, in pursuit of this bootless quest, spent the summer and autumn of the same year in ascending the Mississippi as far as the falls of St. Anthony, and then entering the St. Peter’s, reached the prairies of Missouri, and spent the winter among the Towas, that he might in spring take possession of a copper mine.

The settlers of Biloxi, mere hireling adventurers, were not the men to weather through the early hardships of a colony. Whilst France was urging them to search for the precious metals, the fevers incident to such a soil and climate were sweeping them rapidly away. Sauvolle was an early victim; and the command then fell upon the young and adventurous Bienville. When D’Iberville returned from France in 1703, he found but 150 alive, and soon after the colony was removed to the western bank of the Mobile; and this, the first European settlement in the present state of Alabama, continued to be the head-quarters of the colony for the next twenty years. D’Iberville, attacked soon after by yellow fever, escaped narrowly with his life to France, and died at Havanna in 1706. “When he left Louisiana, it was little more than a wilderness, containing about thirty families. The colonists were unwise in their objects. Their scanty number was scattered on discoveries, or among the Indians in quest of furs. There was no quiet agricultural industry. The coast of Biloxi was sandy as the deserts of Lybia; the fort on the delta of the Mississippi was at the mercy of the rising waters; and the buzzing and sting of musquitoes, the hissing of the snakes, the croaking of the frogs, the cries of alligators, seemed to claim the country still as the inheritance of reptiles; whilst, at Mobile, the sighing of the pines and the hopeless character of the barrens warned the emigrants to seek homes more inland.”^[23]

As regards the condition of the American provinces belonging to the once powerful Spain, it will be sufficient to state that they shared in a great measure the condition of the parent-country. Spain had now no navy, and “foreigners, by means of loans and mortgages, gained more than seven-eighths of the wealth from America, and furnished more than nine-tenths of the merchandise shipped for the colonies. Spanish commerce and manufactures had almost ceased to exist; and its dynasty had become extinct.” A Bourbon was on the throne, and the liberties of the Netherlands being endangered, William III. declared war both against France and Spain.

In the war which commenced with the eighteenth century, the English colonists had for enemies, not alone the French of Canada, but the Spaniards of Florida also. The Spanish settlements in the neighbourhood of St. Augustine were not very extensive, it is true; and that of Pensacola was of later date. The tribes of Appalachees, inhabiting what is now called Middle Florida, and who had received some rudiments of civilisation from Spanish missionaries, were employed in agriculture, and as herdsmen. The powerful tribes of the confederated Creek Indians occupied the territory south and south-west of the Savannah and the Alleganies, bordering on the English settlements of South Carolina, and forming now the State of Georgia. The country south-west of the Alleganies was occupied by the equally formidable Cherokees, who claimed as their hunting-ground the whole country as far as the Kenhawa and the Ohio; between these and the English settlements of the two Carolinas, was the territory of Yamasees, the Catawbas, and the Tuscaroras.

The governor of South Carolina at this time was James Moore, successor to Joseph Blake, “a needy and ambitious man,” who had enriched himself by kidnapping Indians and selling them as slaves. The hope of Indian and Spanish captives induced this man, as soon as the news of the war reached Carolina, to undertake an expedition against St. Augustine. The town was very soon taken, but the garrison retired to the fort, which was strong and well built; and before this could be attacked the assailants had to send for heavy artillery from Jamaica. In the meantime an Indian runner was sent with the tidings to Bienville at Mobile, who communicated the intelligence to the Spanish viceroy at Havanna, and two Spanish ships of war were immediately despatched to St. Augustine, at the sight of which Moore abandoned his vessels and fled by land. This expedition burdened Carolina with debt, and caused the issue of her first paper money.

Again, at the close of 1705, Moore, at the head of fifty white volunteers and about 1,000 Indian allies of the Creek nation, marched through the forests which De Soto had traversed, and surprised the settlements near St. Mark’s, where, surrounded by their herds of cattle, the semi-civilised Indians lived in peaceful allegiance to the Spanish. It was the middle of December, when the unexpected invaders came down upon the quiet villagers; and though they could not take the fort, they plundered the villages, burning and robbing the churches. A barefoot friar, the only white man, came forward to beg for mercy; but about 100 women and children, and fifty warriors were seized as slaves. The fort, however, could not be taken, and the Indian chief purchased peace with the plate of his church and ten horse-loads of provisions. Two thousand of these Indians removed to the banks of the Altamaha, under the jurisdiction of Carolina, and their country was given up to the Lower Creek Indians, allies of the English. A century and a quarter afterwards, when General Jackson expelled the Indians from this territory, traces were found of these Spanish missionary villages, overgrown with forest.^[24] Thus did the English power extend itself to the Gulf of Mexico, and obtain a claim to that region which soon after became the province of Georgia.

The following year Charleston was invaded by a French and Spanish squadron. But though the town was suffering at the time from yellow fever, the colonists, aided by the Huguenots, who fought for their old quarrel, bravely defended the place and repelled the invaders with great loss. D’Iberville was at Havanna preparing for a new attack on Charleston, when he died.

The consequences of the European war were terrible in Massachusetts. The broken eastern tribes settled in two villages, Becancour and St. Francis, were encouraged by the Jesuits priests to make continual inroads on the English; and now that peace existed between the Five Nations and the French, the whole force of Canada was directed against the New England frontiers.

In vain had a congress of chiefs assured Governor Dudley at Casco, that “the sun was not further from the earth than were their thoughts from war with the English;” six weeks afterwards, led on by the French, war-parties ranged over the whole country, carrying terror and devastation wherever they came.

It was winter, a season favourable to Indian warfare, and the snow lay deep on the ground, when Hertelle de Rouville, with 200 French, and 142 Indians, surprised the little town of Deerfield in the dead of night, being able to pass the palisades which defended the place, owing to the depth of the snow. Our readers are sufficiently familiar already with the horrors of Indian warfare; we will not, therefore, go through the terrible details. The village, with the exception of the church and one dwelling-house, was set on fire and wholly destroyed; but few of the inhabitants escaped; forty-seven were killed, and 120 carried into captivity. Among these latter were the Rev. John Williams, the minister of the place, his wife and five children, two being among the murdered. Eunice, the wife, who was in delicate health, carried her Bible with her and endeavoured to find comfort in its pages for her companions in affliction; on the second day of their terrible march, however, being unable to keep up with the party, she was struck dead with the tomahawk. Her body, left at the foot of a hill, was found by some of the remnant of Deerfield, and reverently interred in the burial-ground of that place. Her husband was afterwards laid by her side, and their grave stones long marked the spot. The youngest daughter, but seven years old at the time of this domestic tragedy, was adopted into a family of praying Indians near Montreal, and became so deeply attached to her new friends that nothing could induce her to leave them. She afterwards became the wife of a chief, and in later years visited her family and friends, then restored to Deerfield, in her Indian dress; but though every inducement was used to prolong her stay, and a fast was held in the village, with prayer for her deliverance, she returned, after a few days, to her own wigwam and the love of her own Mohawk children.^[25]

Terror and dismay spread through New England; and the veteran Benjamin Church, roused by these horrors, rode seventy miles to offer his services to Dudley, governor of Massachusetts, on behalf of his suffering fellow-citizens. Accordingly, at the head of 500 soldiers, he ascended the Penobscot and St. Croix rivers, and destroyed several Indian towns and took many prisoners.

In 1705, Vaudreuil, then governor of Canada, proposed to Dudley a treaty of neutrality, and an exchange of prisoners took place, at which time John Williams and his family, with the exception of the one child we have mentioned, together with the other inhabitants of Deerfield, were restored.

War, however, soon broke out again. In 1707, Rhode Island and New Hampshire, having raised the means by the issue of bills of credit, joined New England in an enterprise against Acadia. A thousand men, therefore, under Colonel March, entered the river in an English frigate, and landed before the town of Port Royal. Not being able to take the fort for want of cannon, they burned the town, killed the cattle, and destroyed the harvests by cutting the dams in the river and overflowing the land. From Port Royal they advanced along the coast, committing all the depredations in their power. The next year, the French retaliated. Hertelle de Rouville, descending the Merrimac, reached the devoted village of Haverhill, not far from Boston. We have already related the sorrows of this place, and the heroism of some of its inhabitants, and again similar scenes were witnessed. Haverhill stood in the midst of the primeval forest, near the Merrimac, and a new meeting-house, the pride of the place, stood in the centre of the village. On the night of the 29th of August, the inhabitants resigned themselves to repose, unconscious that in the neighbouring forest lay the savage Hertelle de Rouville and his men, and who, an hour before daybreak, having solemnly prayed, rushed into the village, bearing with them the terrors and horrors of Indian warfare. The village was set on fire. Benjamin Rolfe, the minister, and his wife and children, were cruelly murdered, as well as about fifty others, while the same number were carried away captive. Many instances of the heroism of the women are related. Mrs. Swan defended her house, her husband and family, with an iron spit three yards long. The wife of John Johnson, who had fled to the garden with her child in her arms, after the murder of her husband in the house, contrived, as she fell mortally wounded, to hide the infant, which was found alive at her breast when the massacre was over. Mary Wainwright, whose husband was among the first killed, unbarred her house-door, apparently willingly, at the bidding of the savage enemy, and asking them civilly what they wanted, and being told money, went out, as she said, to bring it to them, and gathering up all her children, save one, succeeded in escaping.^[26]

In the midst of the outrage, rapine, and bloodshed, a brave man, named Davis, was heard shouting, as if to multitudes of people, “Come on! come on! we will have-them!” And the enemy, believing that a large body of troops was advancing, made a hasty retreat soon after sunrise, carrying with them a number of prisoners, several of whom however, were rescued by Samuel Ayer, a bold village champion, and a few others, who pursued them, though Ayer himself perished in the enterprise. A mound in the village grave yard marks to this day the resting-place of the unhappy victims.

“Such,” says Bancroft, “were the sorrows of that generation.” And the reader may say, in the words of Peter Schuyler, in his remonstrance to the Marquis de Vaudreuil: “My heart swells with indignation when I think that a war between Christian princes, bound to the exactest laws of honour and generosity, which their noble ancestors have illustrated by brilliant examples, is degenerating into a savage and boundless butchery!”

The atrocities of this warfare inspired the English colonists with still deeper abhorrence of the French missionaries, and led to the design of exterminating the Indians, which otherwise might not have been entertained. As it was not possible to carry on regular warfare with the Indians, who shifted their abodes at the approach of the enemy, a bounty of ten pounds for every Indian scalp was offered to the regular troops, and to volunteers the sum was doubled, while as much as fifty pounds per scalp was promised to parties who should gratuitously scour the forests for Indians, that the whole land might be cleared of them, as countries were in the old times cleared of wild beasts.

In the meantime Nicholson led a great force against Port Royal, and succeeded in taking the place, the garrison being compelled by famine to surrender. The name was changed to Annapolis, in honour of Queen Anne, and it has remained in the hands of the English ever since. It was on the occasion of this victory that the brave Peter Schuyler hastened to London with his five Iroquois sachems, as we have already related, to induce the British government to prosecute the war thus fortunately commenced against Canada. The witty and dissipated St. John, afterwards Viscount Bolingbroke, entered warmly into this scheme, and a fleet of fifteen ships of war and forty transports was placed under the command of Sir Hovenden Walker, while the brother of Mrs. Masham, “honest Jack Hill,” as he was called by his bottle companions, was placed at the head of seven veteran regiments of Marlborough’s army and a battalion of marines.

On June 25, the fleet arrived at Boston, where supplies and colonial forces were taken on board. An army from Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, Palatine emigrants, and about 600 Iroquois, assembled at Albany, preparatory to an attack on Montreal; whilst in the west, the English having strengthened themselves by an alliance with the Fox Indians, sought to expel the French from Detroit, their settlement in Michigan.^[27]

Nor were the French on their part negligent; by means of the Jesuit missionaries, treaties were renewed with the natives; the fortifications of Quebec and Montreal were strengthened, and the people were so resolute and determined, that women even laboured voluntarily for the common defence. The whole of New France was ready for the enemy many weeks before he appeared. At length, after unaccountable and inexcusable delay, the English squadron ascended the St. Lawrence, Sir Hovenden Walker puzzling his brain the while how his ships were to be secured during the coming winter, when the rivers would be frozen, and concluding to “secure them on the dry ground in frames and cradles till the thaw.” Thus forgetting the present in the future, they slowly proceeded, and, on a dark and stormy night, through the stupidity of Admiral Walker, who though warned of danger, would not believe it, eight transports were wrecked and near 1,000 men drowned.

A council of war the next morning declared it impossible to proceed. There is something like fatuity in the reasoning of the admiral: “Had we,” says he, “reached Quebec, 1,000 or 1,200 men must have been left to perish of cold and hunger; by the loss of a part, Providence has saved all the rest:” and the fleet, turning about, sailed direct for England, having sent back the colonial transports. Nor did the admiral wait to attack the French post in Newfoundland, as his orders required, so great was his impatience to remove, not only from this inhospitable climate, but from the colonists whom he had come to serve, and of whom he related that “their interestedness, ill-nature, sourness, hypocrisy and canting were insupportable.”

This ignoble retreat caused great disappointment and displeasure at New York; nor was the expedition against Detroit more successful. This little fort, “the most beautiful spot in Canada,” was defended by Du Buisson and only twenty men. Summoning, however, his Indian allies, who were all strongly attached to their Jesuit teachers, they rallied round the fort, each nation under its own ensign, and thus, by one spokesman, addressed the commandant: “Father, behold thy children compass thee round! We will, if need be, gladly die for our father—only take care of our wives and our children, and spread a little grass over our bodies to defend them from the flies!” The English allies of the Fox nation were now in their turn besieged, and being compelled to surrender, were either murdered or distributed among the confederates as slaves.

Whilst the northern states were busy with their schemes of Canadian conquest, and suffering under the horrors of Indian warfare, North Carolina, which was then broken up into factions, as we have already related, under a disputed governorship was thrown into a state of universal alarm, which cast all other considerations into the shade, by the hostilities of the Tuscaroras, by whom a plot was formed for the extermination of the whites. Their first outbreak was on the infant settlements of the already-mentioned German emigrants from the Palatinate, and to whom lands had been appropriated on the southern bank of the Roanoke, near the mouth of which was the Swiss settlement of New Berne, all lying within the country of the Tuscaroras. These Indians, alarmed and offended at the encroachments of the white man, determined to take summary vengeance; and accordingly, Graffenburg, the German superintendent, and Lawson, the colonial surveyor-general, who, with his chain in his hand, was allotting out the lands to the new-comers, were seized by sixty armed Indians, and carried up the country to the chief village of the nation, where the assembled chiefs, after a discussion of two days, condemned Lawson to be burned at the stake; Graffenburg, who represented himself as “the chief of another tribe, distinct from the English, and only recently arrived,” was allowed to return, on condition that he occupied no more Indian lands. The poor, persecuted German settlers, with the Huguenots their neighbours, were now exposed to the cruelties of more pitiless enemies even than their catholic persecutors of the Old World. For three days and nights the fierce Tuscaroras and their allies hunted their human prey through the woods, devastating the country with fire and blood until they paused from weariness.

South Carolina sent a force of 600 militia and 650 Indians, under Captain Barnwell, for their relief; and though as yet “a vast and howling wilderness” separated North from South Carolina, they boldly marched through it, and joining the troops of North Carolina, attacked the Indians intrenched in a rude fort, killed 300, and took a considerable number prisoners. The rest fled to the chief town of their nation, where they hastily constructed means of defence; but being pursued by Barnwell, were at length compelled to sue for peace. After the loss of about 1,000 warriors, the Tuscaroras abandoned their country for ever, and uniting themselves to the Iroquois, became a sixth nation in that terrible confederacy.

But the Indian war was not yet at an end. In 1715, the Yamasees, who occupied the country north-east of the Savannah river, secretly instigated a combination of all the Indians, from Florida to Cape Fear, against South Carolina. The Creeks, Apalachians, Cherokees, Catawbas and Yamasees engaged in the enterprise, the whole force of which was computed to be 6,000 fighting men. The southern tribes fell suddenly on the traders settled among them, and in a few hours ninety persons were massacred. The news was conveyed to Charleston, where the utmost alarm prevailed.

Formidable parties also penetrating the northern frontier approached Charleston; they were repulsed by the militia, but their route was marked by devastation. Charles Craven, at that time governor, adopted the most energetic measures. At the head of 1,200 men he marched towards the southern frontier, and overtook the strongest body of the enemy, at a place called Saltcatchers, when an obstinate and bloody battle was fought. The Indians were totally defeated, and the governor pressing upon them, drove them from their territory and pursued them over the Savannah river. Here they were hospitably received by the Spaniards of Florida, and long afterwards continued to make incursions into Carolina. Nearly 400 of the Carolinians were slain in this war.

These events in their consequences heightened the dissensions already existing between the colonists and the proprietaries. The legislature had applied to the company for aid and protection, which was denied; large issues of paper money were therefore resorted to as a temporary relief, the expenses of the war being estimated at £100,000. Directions were given by the proprietaries to reduce the quantity in circulation. The next step of the assembly was to appropriate the lands from which the Indians had been driven; but even this was opposed by the proprietaries, who refused the necessary sanction. Nor was their request for the recall of the chief justice Trott and the receiver-general Rhett, both of whom had made themselves extremely disliked in the province from their tyrannical measures, attended to; on the contrary, they were not only retained in office, but thanked for their services.^[28]

It almost seemed as if the proprietary government was doing all in its power to irritate the mind and alienate the affections of the colony; accordingly, in 1719, a general combination was formed for its subversion. The inhabitants bound themselves “to stand by each other for their rights and privileges, and have nothing more to do with the proprietaries.” All was done with the utmost secrecy and despatch. A deputation of the people waited on Robert Johnson, their governor, begging him “to hold the reins of government for the king.” Johnson, true to his employers, firmly rejected their offer; on which, choosing Arthur Middleton as president, they voted themselves “a convention delegated by the people,” and selected James Moore, a very popular man, as “the fittest person” for the government of the province.

These summary measures were not found to be displeasing to the English crown. It was decided in London that the proprietaries had forfeited their charter, and that both North and South Carolina should be taken under the royal protection.

“In 1720, Francis Nicholson, known in the history of the northern provinces, was appointed governor; and early the following year he arrived at Charleston, where he was received with every demonstration of joy. Peace being now made between England and Spain, Nicholson was instructed to cultivate the friendship of the Indians, and also of the Spaniards of Florida. He accordingly made treaties with the Cherokees and Creeks, in which boundaries were settled, and other necessary regulations made. Having thus secured the province from without, Governor Nicholson, by the encouragement and support which he gave to literary and religious institutions, soon caused its internal affairs to assume a new aspect.”^[29]

But though South Carolina had thus changed the conditions of its own government, the change was not recognised in North Carolina till 1729, when seven-eighths of the proprietaries sold their shares to the crown for £22,000, Lord Carteret alone retaining his eighth share. At this period the two Carolinas became separate royal governments, and so remained till the Revolution.

Before leaving the subject of South Carolina, we must mention that which Hildreth very justly calls her “bad pre-eminence on the subject of slave-legislation,” and which remains a distinctive characteristic to the present time.

At the commencement of the eighteenth century, Carolina received a remonstrance from Pennsylvania on the subject of the importation of Indian slaves into that province; and in 1712, Massachusetts enacted that no further importation of Indian slaves into her province should take place under pain of forfeiture to the crown. South Carolina had a vast propensity for dealing in slaves, whether Indian or African; and the same year that Massachusetts passed her prohibitory law, South Carolina enacted her first slave-law, which premising that all her estates and plantations could only be cultivated by the labour of negro and other slaves, and that all such negroes and slaves “are of such barbarous, wild, and savage natures, as unfit them to be governed by the laws, customs, and practices of the province,” other laws shall be enacted for the good regulation of them, and “the restraining of the disorders, rapine, and inhumanity to which they are naturally prone and inclined.”

As a specimen of these enactments, which were instituted for the “good regulation” of these unhappy negroes, mulattoes, mestizoes, or Indians, we will give the following:—“Every person,” says Hildreth, “finding a slave abroad without a pass, was to arrest him and punish him on the spot ‘by moderate chastisement,’ under a penalty of 20s. for neglecting it. All negro houses were to be searched once a fortnight for arms and stolen goods. A slave guilty of petty larceny was, for the first offence, to be ‘publicly and severely whipped; the second, to have one of his ears cut off,’ or ‘branded on the forehead with a hot iron, so that the mark should remain,’ for the third offence, to ‘have his nose slit;’ for the fourth, to ‘suffer death or other punishment,’ at the discretion of the court. Any justice of peace, on complaint against any slave for any crime—from ‘chicken-stealing’ up to insurrection and murder—was to issue his warrant for the slave’s arrest; and the case was to be judged by himself, another justice, and three freeholders, whom they should summon; and if satisfactory evidence of guilt appeared, they were to sentence the culprit to death or other punishment as the case might be. If the punishment were death, the ‘kind of death’ was left to the judgment and discretion of the court; execution to be done forthwith on their warrant; the crown to be indemnified at the public charge. This summary form of procedure in the trial of slaves remains in force in South Carolina to this day; and a very similar form was also adopted, and still prevails, in North Carolina.”

Death was the punishment of any person who, by “promising freedom in another country,” induced a slave to leave the province, and the punishment also of the slave himself if taken. Any slave running away for twenty days was, for the first offence, “publicly and severely whipped;” for the second offence, the runaway was to be branded with the letter R on the right cheek; if the master omitted to do this he was fined £10. For the third offence, if absent thirty days, to be whipped, and have one of his ears cut off; the master, for omission, to be fined £20, and so on, the punishment still increasing in atrocity; whilst any captain or commander pursuing, apprehending and seizing runaway slaves, and bringing them back, dead or alive, was entitled to a premium of from £2 to £4 for each slave, and all persons wounded or disabled in such service to be compensated by the public; but if the unfortunate slave “should suffer in life or member, no person whatever shall be liable to any penalty therefor.” Any person killing his slave out of “wantonness,” “bloody-mindedness,” or “cruel intention,” to forfeit £50. No master was to allow his slaves to have their own time, nor “to plant for themselves any corn, peas, or rice, or to keep any stock of hogs, cattle, or horses.”

Furthermore, this remarkable act, not contented with outraging humanity in the person of the slaves, proceeds to insult and blaspheme Christianity also; and “since charity and the Christian religion we profess,” says the document, “obliges us to wish well to the souls of men, and that religion may not be made a pretence to alter any man’s property and right, and that no person may neglect to baptize their negroes or slaves for fear that thereby they should be manumitted and set free, it shall be, and is hereby declared, lawful for any negro, or Indian slave, or any other slave or slaves whatsoever, to receive and profess the Christian faith, and to be thereunto baptized; but notwithstanding such slave or slaves shall receive or possess the Christian religion and be baptized, he or they shall not thereby be manumitted or set free.”^[30]

“The treaty of Utrecht, 1713,” says the same able author, “happily put an end to the war between the French and the North American colonies; and by this treaty, the fur trade of Hudson’s Bay; the whole of Newfoundland, reserving to the French some share of the fisheries; and that portion of the island of St. Kitts in the West Indies belonging to France, together with Acadia according to its ancient limits, were ceded to the English,” whose sovereignty over the Five Nations was incidentally acknowledged. But that which the English merchants esteemed a far more valuable concession was the transfer to the English South Sea Company of a contract for the annual transportation to Spanish America of not less than 4,800 negroes, or, in trade language, “Indian pieces,” originally entered into, shortly after the accession of the Bourbon dynasty, with a company of French merchants, and known as the Assiento. It being expected that immense profits would accrue from this trade, Philip V. of Spain, and Queen Anne of England, each reserved to themselves one-quarter of the stock of the company. Thus were the sovereigns of England and Spain the largest slave-merchants in the world. Harley, however, who had the good sense and the uprightness to distinguish between a base undertaking and commercial advantage, advised Queen Anne to assign her stock to the South Sea Company, and it was done.

“From the period of the Peace of Utrecht, Spain became intimately connected in her commercial relations with the destinies of the British American colonies. Like France, she was henceforth their enemy, while they, as dependencies of Great Britain, tended to strengthen the power of that kingdom; but from the same motives of policy, like France, she favoured their independence.”^[31]

The territory ceded to the English in the Bay of Fundy was now erected into a new province; the old name of Nova Scotia being restored, and which it has ever since retained. Louisiana, of which, however, no boundaries were decided, remained in the possession of the French, and they, under that name, comprehended a vast territory comprising the whole basin of the Mississippi.

In 1710, the post-office system was extended by England to America. “A chief office,” we are told by Hildreth, “was established at New York, to which letters were to be conveyed by regular packets across the Atlantic. The same act regulated the rates of postage in the plantations. A line of posts was presently established, north to the Piscataqua, and South to Philadelphia, irregularly extended, a few years afterwards, to Williamsburg in Virginia; the post leaving Philadelphia for the south as often as letters enough were lodged to pay the expense. The postal communication subsequently established with the Carolinas was still more irregular.”

In 1718, William Penn died in England, leaving his interests in Pennsylvania and Delaware to his sons, John, Thomas and Richard Penn, who continued to administer the government by deputies until the time of the Revolution, when the American Republic purchased their claims for about £100,000.

At the time of the accession of the House of Hanover to the British throne, the population of the English colonies is stated to have been as under, though this statement is considered somewhat below the truth:—

The American seas were again, at the close of the war, infested with pirates, the head-quarters of whom were the Bahama Isles and the unfrequented creeks of the coast of the Carolinas. In 1717, a celebrated pirate named Bellamy was wrecked on Cape Cod, where he perished with about 100 of his men, the five or six who escaped the sea being hung at Boston. Another, Theach, or Blackbeard as he was called, lurked in Pamlico Bay, and was supposed to be favoured by Cornbury and other governors of South Carolina; he, however, was taken by two Virginian vessels sent out by Spotswood from the Chesapeake in pursuit of him. A force from England took possession of Providence, the chief harbour of the Bahamas, fortified the place, and established a regular colony there, which was the first permanent occupation of this desolate group. A desperate body of pirates, headed by Steed Bonnet, harboured about Cape Fear. After an expense of about £10,000 he was taken, and with forty of his men hung at Charleston; and in 1723, twenty-six others, natives of Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and Virginia, were executed for the same crime at Newport. These summary measures cleared the American seas of pirates.