Conceived in Liberty (26 page)

A major grievance soon became Randolph himself, who had arrived in 1699 to enforce vigorously the neglected Navigation Laws and the suppression of popular but illegal trade. Randolph wrote to the Crown of his horror at the pervasive commerce, including trade with the Dutch, all with simply “no regard to the acts of trade.” The institution of royal admiralty courts appointed by the Crown for vigorous enforcement also angered the colonists greatly. Indeed, the South Carolina Assembly, under severe pressure by the people, tried to pass laws in 1700 and 1701—all of course vetoed—to restrict the activities of the royal customs officials.

In North Carolina, the Archdale reforms also lowered the quitrents. Ludwell had attempted to do so, but had for his efforts been angrily removed from office by the proprietary. Soon attempts to collect a penny per acre were abandoned and the rate came to be set generally at two shillings per hundred acres, with payment accepted in commodities. For some land the quitrents were far less. Quitrents continued to be collected, at least partially, for the remainder of the proprietary term. Enforcement, however, was often evaded, and the quitrents were generally absorbed in salaries to local officials, so that the return to the proprietors was small.

From their beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, the Carolina counties had been conspicuous and notable havens of religious liberty. Here they contrasted to other American colonies, including their Spanish neighbors to the south. North Carolina, indeed, had been founded by independent settlers escaping religious and political discrimination in Virginia. The proprietary had announced from the first its intention to establish the Church of England in the Carolinas, but driven by desire to profit by encouraging settlers in the colony, had never put this plan into effect. Into this relatively free haven, then, came numerous dissenting groups, including the much persecuted Quakers and Huguenots, and the Anglicans were in a considerable minority. In fact, even the Anglicans in South Carolina believed strongly in self-government on a congregational
level and insisted eventually on appointing their own ministers. In this, they were influenced by the decentralizing spirit of the Presbyterian majority of the colony. And as for North Carolina with its preponderance of Quakers, there had not even been a single Anglican church or priest in the colony, so little was there of an Anglican establishment in the Carolinas.

But this happy condition—this approach to separation of church and state—was not destined to last. Instead, at the turn of the eighteenth century, the Anglican Old Guard moved purposefully and aggressively to fasten a state church upon the only Southern colonies that had yet escaped this incubus. This was a particularly bitter pill for the dissenting majority that had enjoyed religious freedom.

The Anglican aggression was ignited by events in England where, about 1700, a renewed wave of Anglican repression under Queen Anne’s regime was launched against the Dissenters. The peace accord with the Dissenters that had emerged from the Glorious Revolution and been embodied in the Toleration Act of 1689 was now rudely shattered. One of the leaders of a campaign dedicated to the extermination of the Dissenters within one generation was Lord Granville, who also happened to be the palatine of Carolina—that proprietor entrusted with colonial affairs. In 1704, Lord Granville instructed the new governor of South Carolina, Sir Nathaniel Johnson, a veteran supporter of the Stuarts and the Colleton regime, to secure the establishment of the church in the Carolinas.

Johnson was confronted, in South Carolina, with an Assembly majority of Dissenters. To drive through an establishment bill, therefore, he had to resort to trickery and fraud. First, very early in the 1704 session when many members were absent, Johnson rushed through an act excluding all non-Anglicans from the Assembly. This measure was at least temporarily needed, in order to drive through an establishment bill without fear of the Dissenter majority; and the latter was accomplished by the fall of 1704. The bill established the Anglican church and imposed taxation on the public for its support. Many Anglicans opposed this tyrannical seizure; one, the Reverend Edward Marston, was deprived of his salary, deposed from his office, and almost arrested by the new Assembly.

The understandably bitter dissenting colonists appealed the tyrannical law to the proprietor, who of course rejected the appeal. But the Crown and the Board of Trade were persuaded to nullify the two laws. The Crown did not want an establishment so severe on the rights of Dissenters that the growth and the commerce of the colony with England would be repressed. Even the bishop of London, whose diocese included the Carolinas, sided with the protesting colonists. The act of establishment, however, was disallowed because it was too liberal: it allowed the laymen of a parish to remove a minister, thus striking at the principle of hierarchical control of the church by the state.

If both edicts of the Crown had been immediately obeyed, the Assembly, now including a dissenting majority, would have never passed a new
act establishing the Anglican church. Hence, Governor Johnson’s new Assembly of 1706, completely excluding Dissenters, rushed through a new establishment act without the provision for lay removal of ministers. Lay members, however, were permitted to select their ministers. Tax funds were appropriated for churches and ministerial salaries; and church repairs were to be paid from assessments on all the inhabitants of the parish. The dissenting Assemblymen were only readmitted after the establishment bill was safely passed.

The Dissenters were naturally angry at their treatment. Though they were no longer excluded from the Assembly, any repeal of the state church would be blocked by the governor’s veto. The Dissenters rioted at length during 1707, the riots being led by a political club headed by prominent Dissenters. Included in these rebellious protests was a new phenomenon: a
woman’s
political club.

The Dissenters were also embittered because one of their great leaders, Landgrave Thomas Smith, was being persecuted by the Johnson regime. For criticizing the Assembly in a private letter, Smith was ordered arrested; when he escaped, the Assembly sought to disqualify Smith from public office for life. But, in this affair at least, the Dissenters had their revenge. Now Speaker of a Dissenter-controlled Assembly, Smith had the satisfaction of arresting former Speaker Colonel Risbee, the reputed author of the exclusion act, for disrespectful words spoken in private against the new Assembly. Finally, the Dissenters also gained the temporary satisfaction of forcing the proprietors to remove the hated Johnson from office in 1708.

The drive for a state church occurred at the same time in North Carolina, which was at least formally ruled by the South Carolina governor. The northern colony, true to its tradition, was even more dissenting and rebellious than its southern neighbor. North Carolina’s troubles began with the appointment of Henderson Walker, a zealous Anglican, as deputy governor in 1699. Walker, deeply disturbed that North Carolina had successfully gone forty years “without priests or altar,” maneuvered through the Assembly the Vestry Act of 1701, which imposed a state church on North Carolina, including a poll tax on the colonists for support of the Anglican clergymen. The act was disallowed by the proprietary for not going far enough in paying the clergy—but the fight had just begun.

Lord Granville’s instructions to the governor of South Carolina, Sir Nathaniel Johnson, to secure whatever legislation was necessary to impose a state church on the Carolinas, led Johnson to replace Walker as deputy governor of North Carolina with Colonel Robert Daniel. Daniel could not hope to drive the establishment through the North Carolina Assembly, however, as it had a comfortable Quaker majority. The zealous Daniel therefore decided to attain his goal by expelling the Quakers from the Assembly, and used as his weapon a dubious legal application of the new Test Oath of allegiance to Queen Anne, required of all public officials in England. This oath excluded Quakers, who by their religion could only “affirm” and could not
swear to oaths. The expulsion of the Quaker assemblymen left the high-church party with a small majority and this party now drove through the new Vestry Act—establishing the church—as well as an act imposing the Test Oath for all public officials (including assemblymen) in the future. The embittered Quakers were able to pressure Governor Johnson to remove Daniel in 1705, but the damage had been done. Despite the establishment, however, Anglican zeal was so weak in freewheeling North Carolina that not until 1732 did the colony see a regular Anglican minister.

The new deputy governor, welcomed by the Quakers for his supposedly liberal views, was Thomas Cary, a Charleston merchant and son-in-law of the great Archdale. But Cary betrayed his supporters by repressing the Quakers even more ardently than had his predecessors. Cary not only expelled the Quakers from the Assembly, but also levied a heavy fine on anyone presuming to enter office without taking the Test Oath. Furthermore, Cary further weakened the Assembly by having an act passed fining anyone daring to promote actively his own election to any office.

The numerous body of North Carolina Quakers finally sent John Porter (a non-Quaker) to England in 1707 to plead their case with the lord proprietors. Two of the proprietors, John Archdale and John Danson, were Quakers, and they persuaded the others of the justice of the Quaker case. The proprietors abolished the Test Oath, deposed Cary, suspended Governor Johnson’s authority over North Carolina, and authorized the Council of North Carolina to select its own president, who would assume the full duties as governor.

The Council then selected as president William Glover, who governed North Carolina in Cary’s stead, but the Anglican Glover betrayed the Quakers in his turn by still insisting on enforcement of the Test Oath. John Porter and the infuriated Quakers now formed an alliance with the double-turncoat Cary to try to oust Glover from his rule. The election to the Assembly of 1708 was won by the Cary-Porter forces, who disregarded Glover’s insistence on the Test Oath, declared Cary governor, voided all the laws of the Glover regime, and appointed many Quakers to office. Leader of the Cary forces in the Assembly was the Speaker, the powerful Edward Moseley, a wealthy planter and devout Anglican, who nevertheless steadfastly supported religious freedom and opposed any establishment. Glover, however, refused to recognize the legality of this democratic upheaval and fled to Virginia still claiming the governorship.

The relatively liberal Cary-Porter rule lasted until 1711, when the proprietary decided to stamp out the seditious popular regime, and sent Edward Hyde, a cousin of Queen Anne, to be the new governor of North Carolina, now permanently separated from South Carolina. Hyde immediately instituted a regime of repression, allying himself completely with the Gloverite faction. All the liberal laws, as well as the court proceedings of Cary’s second administration, were nullified, and the Test Oath was reimposed on all public officials on pain of a heavy 100-pound fine for all refusals to take
it. The Quaker Assemblymen were once again expelled. In addition, a law was passed to punish severely all “seditious words” or “scurrilous libels” against the government, the government itself, of course, being the judge of what was seditious or scurrilous against itself. Moreover, Cary and Porter were indicted for various crimes and misdemeanors.

To counter this repression, Thomas Cary organized an armed rebellion against the Hyde regime. In the midst of the fighting, Governor Alexander Spottswood of Virginia sent a force of royal marines to aid Hyde, which counterrevolutionary intervention dispersed the rebellion. Cary and other leaders fled to Virginia. There he was arrested, however, and sent to England to stand trial for treason, but was released for lack of evidence. Thus the rebellion failed and the Test Oath remained in force in North Carolina.

These struggles in the Carolinas weakened the authority of the proprietary and helped make them ripe for the abolition of proprietary rule in South Carolina in 1719 and in North Carolina in 1729. By 1730, then, the Carolinas and Virginia were both royal colonies, leaving Maryland with its restored proprietary as the only proprietary colony in the South.

While these conflicts were going on, North Carolina was experiencing a rapid growth. A heavy influx of people came from Virginia, seeking more religious freedom or cheaper land free of arbitrary landed monopolies. North Carolina’s status as a refuge is shown by Virginia’s repeated accusations that it was harboring runaway slaves. Finally, the first town was laid out in North Carolina: Bath, in 1704, which promptly became the capital. Many of the immigrants were European refugees including French Protestant Huguenots and German and Swiss palatines.

Treatment of the Indians, however, grew increasingly brutal. The white settlers had participated in the Indian fur trade, they had learned from the Indians techniques of clearing the unfamiliar land, of cultivating the soil, and of growing such new crops as corn, tobacco, and potatoes. Now the whites repaid the Indians by embarking on a campaign of decimation. Proclamations stated that the Indians would be exterminated “like vermin,” and the legislature of North Carolina granted bounties for Indian scalps. Indian prisoners of war, including many children, were sold into slavery by their captors.

The crushing of Bacon’s Rebellion had left Virginia itself in the control of the despotic Governor Berkeley and his Green Spring clique. Even after Berkeley was recalled at the urging of the king’s commissioners, the Green Spring oligarchy continued to rule the colony until news arrived in the fall of 1677 of Berkeley’s death. At that point, news came of the appointment of Thomas Lord Culpeper as governor; until his arrival, Colonel Herbert Jeffreys, one of the king’s commissioners, was to continue as lieutenant governor. But Jeffreys soon fell ill; and the Council, dominated by the Green Spring faction, effectively continued its oppressive rule of the colony.

Jeffreys died at the end of 1678 and was succeeded by Sir Henry Chicherley, who at last held a fair election for the Assembly the following year. The new Assembly began to institute reforms: for example, reenacting Bacon’s laws, authorizing the freemen and housekeepers of each parish to select two men to sit with the judges in the county courts. But Chicherley, too, was old and sick and reforms were therefore not pressed forward. Finally the king forced the reluctant Lord Culpeper to sail personally for Virginia or give up his governorship, and Culpeper arrived in the spring of 1680. One of his first acts was to urge the Assembly—at the king’s instigation—to provide a “permanent” revenue for the support of the government, but the Assembly refused to turn over the crucial power of the purse into the hands of the royal governor. The Assembly, however, finally passed the bill after considerable bullying and threats by Culpeper. The governor also tried to force a fantastically uneconomic plan on agricultural Virginia: compelling every county to construct a town and warehouse near water, and coercively restricting all trade in the county to that town. Fortunately, while the Assembly passed
the law, the Crown realized the impracticality of such hothouse plans and vetoed the bill.