1729.]

SEPARATION OF THE CAROLINAS.

by

105

not been issued; in the colony the strife of parties, which had begun to show itself before Nicholson left, had become threatening. The Proprietors assumed the right of appointing a Governor, and Purchase of named Colonel Samuel Horsey for that office; if other offi- the province cers were appointed by the Crown, they claimed that the nom- Crown. inations should be submitted to them for their approval. But the contest was too unequal to be long sustained on their part, and they offered to surrender their proprietary interest for a pecuniary consideration. The prayer was granted, and in 1729 both the northern and southern colonies were purchased by the Crown-including territory and arrearages of quit rents for twenty-two thousand five hundred pounds sterling. To this agreement, however, Lord Carteret was not a party. A one-eighth interest in the property was retained by him, which about twenty years later was set apart from the rest by giving him all the territory from 34° 35' to the boundary line of Virginia, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

governors.

From the date of the purchase of the colony by the Crown, North and South Carolina became in law, as they had long been in fact, two separate provinces. Thenceforward there was no pretence of the authority of a governor-generalship to be exercised over the northern colony by the governor of the southern, an authority which, for many years, had been merely nominal, or only exerted at times by special order of the Proprietors for some special purpose. The last proprietary Governor of North Carolina was Sir Richard Ev- North erhard, who had displaced George Burrington. Burrington, Carolina in his turn, as the first royal Governor, displaced Everhard. The years of the official tenure of these men were marked by little else than their personal quarrels. Burrington was evidently a ruffian of a low order, and was indicted by the grand jury for an assault upon Everhard while he was Governor. The indictment gives many of the terms of obloquy and defiance which Burrington publicly hurled at his opponent: that "he was no more fit to be governor than a hog"; that he was a "calve's head;" that "I (the said George. himself meaning) will scalp your damned thick skull (the said Sir Richard's head meaning)"; and other equally "scandalous, opprobrious, and malicious words," which even then seem to have been considered as hardly compatible with the dignity of an ex-governor. was nevertheless reappointed when the province passed to the Crown, for his family, it is supposed, was in favor at Court. As royal Governor his conduct was so outrageous that he thought it prudent to leave the province, and he was murdered not long after, in a drunken brawl in London. Gabriel Johnston, who was appointed in 1734 as Governor of North Carolina, remained in office for the next twenty

years.

He

Johnson re

It was a singular testimony to the estimation in which Robert Johnson was held, both in England and in South Carolina, apppointed that the Governor whom revolution had deposed should be South sent back with a royal comCarolina. mission, and that his return

Governor of

Johnson's Return.

brought with him six Cherokee chiefs returning from England. So important was the friendship of that powerful nation held to be by the government, that almost its first act after the purchase of the colony was to send an embassy, under Sir Alexander Cumming, to

1730.]

CONDITION OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

107 these Indians. Six of their chiefs he had taken back with him to England, a sight of the Tower of London and the King on his throne being thought then as certain to soothe the savage breast, and induce the warrior to turn his tomahawk into a reaping-hook, as it is now believed these pleasant consequences come from a sight of the Capitol at Washington and of a President in the White House. These fallacious hopes were not, indeed, of long duration. Beyond the Cherokee and Choctaw countries were the French on the Gulf and the Mississippi; and whether in trade or in war, the Indians knew too well how important their position was between the rival powers. There were, however, more immediate dangers requiring the presence of a governor in South Carolina. Johnson's report, a few months after entering upon the duties of his office, was that no taxes had been collected, and not a court of justice had been held in the province for four years, not, in other words, since Nicholson's departure. To restore harmony and order where discord and anarchy reigned was the work to which he addressed himself, with a large measure of success, for the four remaining years of his life.

province.

But it was no easy task. In no other colony was there so mixed a population, including English, French, Scotch, Irish, and Spanish, unused for years to much restraint from either law or gospel, Condition and too ignorant to be safely left to be a law to themselves. of the There were from six to seven thousand of these white people, and in addition to them about twenty-two thousand African slaves. This heterogeneous population lived, for the most part, upon isolated plantations of large tracts of land; here the labor of the slaves was chiefly devoted to the production of a single staple, rice, though to this the cultivation of indigo was soon added. The laboring whites were indented servants, and, with labor degraded and cheapened by slavery, their condition was quite hopeless. To their servitude there came in time an end, but the degradation of their class has been perpetuated in the "poor whites," who are even yet a distinctive feature in the society of South Carolina and Georgia. The colony, moreover, was overwhelmed with debt, and the repeated issue of bills of credit had borne its legitimate fruit in the depreciation of the value of currency. That value was necessarily brought to the test of exchange on England, and it required about this period seven hundred and fifty pounds of South Carolina currency to buy a bill on London for one hundred pounds. It had been the policy of the Proprietors to escape the burden of a great public debt by limiting the issue of these bills of credit; the people, on the other hand, both to provide a 1 Papers in State Paper Office, London. Coll. of Hist. Soc. of S. C., vol. i.

2 The condition of the currrency in the several colonies in 1748, as measured by the rate

revenue for the support of government and to check the increase of slaves, had insisted that a heavy duty should be levied upon their importation. Unhappily, in the struggle of parties both measures were nullified, either of which would have been a blessing to the commonwealth.

The establishment of the royal government under Johnson, however, gave a new impulse to the energies of the colonists, and fresh interest was aroused in England in the domain south of Carolina, the only region along the Atlantic coast now unoccupied by Europeans. The Governor was ordered to lay out eleven new townships on the banks of several rivers, to be divided into small farms as an inducement to the emigration of poor but industrious persons. The project was defeated, at least in the southern part of the province, by the preoccupation of the lands in large tracts by planters, who found an abundant supply of labor in the increasing importation of slaves. But this southward movement of the Carolinians was soon checked by a project to plant a new colony on the further side of the Savannah

River.

of exchange on London, is tabulated in Douglass's Summary, Historical and Political, etc., of the British Settlements in North America, as follows:

MASSACHUSETTS A ROYAL PROVINCE. THE TROUBLES OF RHODE ISLAND. - ARBITRARY INTERFERENCE OF LORD BELLOMONT. - ADMINISTRATION OF DUDLEY. - INDIAN HOSTILITIES. ATTACKS ON DEERFIELD AND OTHER PLACES. WAR IN MAINE.CAPTURE OF PORT ROYAL. - - MASSACHUSETTS EARLY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. INOCULATION FOR SMALL-POx. GOVERNOR SHUTE IN MASSACHUSETTS AND NEW HAMPSHIRE. THE ROYAL PREROGATIVE IN FORESTS. FINANCIAL POLICY OF THE COLONIES. - BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND THE "NEW ENGLAND COURANT." SETTLEMENTS IN NEW HAMPSHIRE AND MAINE.

Province.

THE charter which was brought back by Sir Williams Phips converted Massachusetts into a royal province. The first Par- Massachuliament which assembled in the reign of William, manifest- setts a Royal ed a willingness to pass a bill restoring to the colony its original charter, but this intention was defeated by the Court. The partial discontent which met Phips in the colony when he returned as