sent abroad also largely of wheat, and flour, and Indian corn. A number of furnaces and forges were in successful operation, notwithstanding the effort of the British Government to cripple this industry by offering a bounty on the importation of English iron a measure met by the Maryland Legislature by granting a hundred acres of land to any one establishing a furnace or a forge. There were manufactories also of woollen and of linen, and tanners, shoemakers, and smiths were encouraged by an export duty on the raw material of their trades. One third of the people, however, were slaves, and their unskilled labor was inevitably forced into the over-production of a single staple. Baltimore was laid out in 1729, on lands belonging to Charles Carroll, and Frederick was founded sixteen years later. Other towns were projected, but were of slow growth where they grew at all; for, as in lower Virginia, large plantations and slavery enforced a rural population and a restricted industry. CHAPTER IV. THE CAROLINAS. A GOVERNOR MOORE'S MILITARY EXPEDITIONS AND THEIR RESULTS. TROUBLES Moore's St. expedition. THE unfortunate expedition of Governor Moore of South Carolina against St. Augustine, related in another chapter,1 had conse- Effects of quences of more moment than belonged to it as a merely Augustine military disaster. It fastened a public debt of £6,000 upon a colony of only about five thousand people, created by the first issue of paper currency, in that province, in the usual form of bills of credit: and this was followed, in due time, by the inevitable depreciation and consequent distress which, sooner or later, always attended that desperate expedient in every one of the colonies. The creation of this debt was a question of grave difference of opinion among the people, and this divided them into two parties, whose hostility grew more bitter from year to year, as new occasions and new opportunities arose to widen the breach and strengthen either one side or the other. An administration that entailed such results as the issue of ambition or imbecility, might well be called an unmitigated evil, had not Moore, after his return from Florida, undertaken that other and more. fortunate enterprise, by which a new southern frontier was gained at the expense of the Spaniards, and more territory thern lusecured for future colonization. But even this service did dians. little to reconcile the opposition. Moore was accused, and probably with justice, of serving his own private ends on this expedition, by Campaign against the holding his Indian prisoners as slaves on his plantation, and in exporting them for sale to the West Indies. It was not forgotten that he had, not long before, dissolved an Assembly for withstanding his attempt to get the whole trade with the Indians into his own hands, that he might, it was said, the more easily kidnap or buy the savages for that foreign slave-market. Perhaps he was not so bad as he was painted; but so little harmony was there, at any time, between him and the representatives of the people, that Charleston was for several days given over to riot when the question of raising funds to meet the expense of the unsuccessful expedition against St. Augustine came before the Assembly. Sir Nathan as governor. This confusion was still worse confounded when Sir Nathaniel Johnson was appointed to office in Moore's place, at the aciel Johnson cession of Queen Anne. Of this man Johnson, John Archdale, the former Quaker Governor and a Proprietor, said, that he "by a Chimical Wit, Zeal and Art, transmuted or turn'd this Civil Difference into a Religious Controversy." It was a religious controversy, however, only so far as religious differences could be used to compass a political end. The official party, the friends and servants of the Lords Proprietors, were of the Established Church; their opponents, who were largely country people, were dissenters. Dissent, however, was with many of them more a matter of tradition than conviction. The generation then native of the soil, and living upon isolated plantations, had grown up in ignorance, destitute of schools and of churches, but inheriting a feeling that no church at all was better than the Church of England. Many, it is said, went farther than this, and had lost all religious faith. Ostensibly to punish these unbelievers, Johnson's first Assembly passed an act depriving of their civil rights all who blasphemed the Trinity, or questioned the Divine authority of the Bible, and condemning them to three years' imprisonment. Acts of the Assembly against dis. senters. It is hardly credible that there could be many in the province obnoxious to this law. Infidelity is not often an intellectual conviction or assertion with the merely ignorant; they cling rather to a religious belief of some sort, though their faith may be little better than an unreasoning superstition. If, however, the act of the Assembly was meant as a blow at the opposition party, it evidently failed of its purpose, and was therefore speedily followed up by another, which was more effectual. This law required that any citizen chosen as a member of the Assembly should conform to the religion of the Church of England, and should partake of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper in accordance with the rules of that 1 Archdale's New Description, etc. Republished in Carroll's Hist. Coll. of S. C., vol. ii. 1704.] TROUBLES UNDER GOVERNOR JOHNSON. 83 church. The act was passed by a single vote; the election to the Assembly of many of the majority was disputed as carried by corrupt and arbitrary measures; yet, by this law, every dissenter in the colony was virtually disfranchised, and the popular party - which embraced all the dissenters, and far outnumbered their opponents was left completely at the mercy of the minority who represented the Lords Proprietors, and who governed the colony, not for the good of the people, but for their own profit. Action of The disfranchised party sent an agent - John Asheto England to represent their grievances to the Proprietors. He escaped with some difficulty, when his errand became known, from Carolina; and he might as well have remained there, so far as any redress awaited him in London. Archdale, in his place at the Board of Proprietors, maintained the rights of the colonists with the same the Propriezeal and integrity that he had shown when their governor. But the majority was against him, and Lord Granville, the "Palatine," cut short the debate by exclaiming: "Sir, you are of one opinion, I am of another; our lives may not be long enough to end the controversy. I am for the bills, and this is the party I will head and support." tors. Granville was a bigoted churchman, and cared much more for the religious than the political aspect of the question. A proposal to build a parish church in each county of the province, and to compel the people to worship therein, would with him condone a multitude of political sins, even if, in his estimation, the political purposes concealed beneath the religious pretense were sins at all. The Governor received the assurance that the Lords Proprietors approved of the "unwearied and steady zeal" with which he had prosecuted a "great and pious work" for "the honor and worship of Almighty God." With this success the zeal of Johnson and his party was redoubled. Churches were to be built and pastors provided, and lest this last duty should be neglected, the ecclesiastical government of the colonial church, which rightfully belonged to the Bishop of London, was vested in a commission of twenty laymen to be appointed by the Governor. The quarrel, in this aspect of it, was essentially the same as that which, about the same period, agitated Virginia, and ousted three governors successively from their seats. the dissent The dissenters, who were about two thirds of the population, had been contending chiefly, thus far, for the right of keeping Successful in the Assembly; they were now forced to contend also for protests of the right of keeping out of the parish church, if it so pleased ers. them. A new agent-Joseph Boone was sent to England, but this time to look for redress in higher quarters than from the Proprietors. The appeal was made directly to the House of Lords. That body condemned in terms positive and emphatic the act relating to religious worship, and that which excluded dissenters from the Assembly; and they referred the petition of the complainants to the Queen, with a prayer that their wrongs might be righted, and that those persons should be punished who were guilty of so flagrant and oppressive a misuse of power. Anne responded by declaring the objectionable laws to be null and void, and forthwith ordered the law officers of the Crown to take immediate steps for the revocation of the charter. The issue of a writ of quo warranto and the proceedings under it were never, as we have so often seen in the case of other provinces, |