Conceived in Liberty (111 page)

Finally, in 1758, an armed crowd of Lord Carteret’s subject tenants forced Francis Corbin, one of his leading agents, to give bond that he would surrender all the excessive fees that he had collected. But Corbin, on his release, not only failed to comply with the agreement, but arrested four of his adversaries. The infuriated settlers rode to the Enfield jail and freed the prisoners. Insurrection then spread throughout the Granville District. Francis Corbin was forced to flee the region. The Assembly urged prosecution of the rioters, but Governor Arthur Dobbs denounced the fraudulent exactions of the Earl of Granville’s agents and expressed his sympathy with the people. The rioters therefore remained at liberty and Granville District was virtually rid of its proprietary incubus. Furthermore, after Granville’s death in 1763, his son neglected the proprietary and in a few years closed the land office, with the result that newcomers were able to settle and to refuse to pay either taxes or quitrents on their land.

It took a year and a half, from mid-1729 to early 1731, for the Crown to send out its first royal governor, and in that period all government virtually dissolved in North Carolina. No one paid any attention to Everard’s proprietary appointment; the General Court, as well as many precinct courts, simply ceased to meet. The Council was suspended and the Assembly had virtually no meetings. Laws were not enforced; taxes, quitrents, and other public revenues went uncollected. In the midst of this virtual state of anarchism, Edmund Porter, judge of the royal admiralty court, tried to aggrandize himself over the populace, causing great discontent in the colony, while Everard made arbitrary arrests and tried to extract exorbitant fees.

As a royal colony, North Carolina government did not change greatly, but much of the confusion and many of the land restrictions imposed by the proprietary disappeared. Immigration now greatly increased and settlement expanded in the south and middle of the coastal areas. These new settlers included groups of Highland Scots in the Cape Fear area, who started emigrating from Scotland in force after the Jacobite rebellion was crushed in 1745.

Royal governor of North Carolina for nearly two decades (1734–52), Gabriel Johnston soon found himself in two basic quarrels with the Assembly. One quarrel, over the perennial land question, began at the opening of his administration: in the course of imposing land reform against the blank patents, Johnston decided to employ the quitrent weapon. As a corollary, he demanded that all quitrents be paid in sterling or in paper money, of which the value would be fixed by governor and Council. He also demanded payment of the backlog of arrears. This policy managed to alienate all the landowners in the colony, large and small, and the Assembly refused to agree to the change. The aroused settlers of Bertie and Edgecombe districts protested to the governor that their poor estates had been honestly purchased and settled with difficulty and that they had believed the lands were their own with the exception of a small quitrent. But now Johnston proposed to increase the quitrents and speedily collect the arrears; if he persisted the settlers would go elsewhere, where they could own the fruits of their own labor. Indeed, in 1737, some five hundred people from Bertie and Edgecombe rose up in arms to free a settler who they mistakenly thought had been harassed for failure to pay quitrents. The Assembly tried to arrest Johnston’s officials for seizing
lands and property for payment of quitrents, whereupon Johnston dissolved the Assembly.

Finally the Crown, in 1741, decided largely in favor of the landowners, upholding the principle of the blank patents and previous usage regarding paying quitrents in depreciated commodities. And so, Governor Johnston finally met complete defeat in his attempt to burden the province with heavy quitrents. Whereas in the first few years of his rule he had collected over 4,000 pounds of back quitrents, payments were increasingly in arrears and little was collected thereafter. As a result, the salaries of the government officials paid from quitrents went also in arrears; in 1746, Johnston complained that his salary was eight years overdue. At the governor’s death in 1752, arrears of his salary totaled over 13,000 pounds.

The other important dispute of the Johnston administration stemmed from an inherent flaw of democracy—unequal representation as the distribution of population changes. In 1715, representation in the North Carolina Assembly was established at four for each county in Albemarle, and two for each of the other counties. At that time this allocation reflected the distribution of population in the province. But as time went on, the population expanded in the southern part of the colony, and the fixed quota became more and more inequitable. Johnston tried to rectify this condition but, at the same time, moved against democratic aspects of the 1715 structure, which gave the vote to all freemen of the colony, and which provided for the election of a new Assembly every two years. In 1735, Johnston, under royal instruction, induced the Assembly to impose a freehold property requirement for voting. In addition, the Crown, in 1737, disallowed the biennial act, leaving the governor free to call or to dissolve the Assembly at will.

As part of his campaign against the Assembly and its overweighting of Albemarle representatives, Johnston moved the seat of government—haphazard as it was, since public records were kept in private houses—from Edenton in the north to New Bern in the south. The geographical struggle culminated in 1746, when Johnston called an Assembly to meet in the extreme south, at Wilmington on the Cape Fear River. The Albemarle representatives—a majority of the Assembly—boycotted the meeting, robbing it of a quorum according to the old act of 1715, but the rump Assembly equalized the representation to two members per county and established the capital at New Bern.

This trick threw down a direct challenge to Albemarle, which responded by refusing to send representatives or to recognize any act of the New Bern government. Moreover, the people of Albemarle refused to pay taxes, refused to accept the new central government’s money, and refused to serve as jurors or recognize the decisions of the General Court. Anyone in prison was set free by the public. The approach to anarchism was not quite complete, however, since the local county courts continued to function. In the meanwhile, the burden of supporting the government was declared too heavy for the south,
and taxes ceased to be paid throughout the province of North Carolina. In this way, an approach to anarchism came again to North Carolina and especially to ever-individualistic Albemarle. Government only fully returned in 1754, when the Crown finally decided in favor of the northern counties and the old form of representation.

The 1740s and 1750s also saw the Ulster Scot influx into and settlement of the western, Piedmont area of North Carolina, many of the Scots settling on the Granville claim. Generally, the Scots were settler-farmers rather than slave-owning plantation holders.

South Carolina distinguished itself in the eighteenth century for being the first Southern colony to develop a great agricultural staple other than tobacco. First grown in South Carolina in 1694, rice very rapidly became the staple of the colony, with the port of Charleston the center of the rice trade. So successful was the expansion of rice grown on large plantations in the coastal swamps, that Britain added it to the “enumerated list” of commodities as early as the Navigation Act of 1704. By 1722, South Carolina was exporting nine million pounds of rice per year, and by 1750, the total had increased to twenty-seven million.

By midcentury, South Carolina had begun to grow another staple crop, which rose swiftly to second rank beneath rice. This was indigo dye, introduced successfully into the colony in 1744 by Elizah Lukas, who later married Chief Justice Charles Pinckney. Also grown on lowland swamps, indigo proved a natural seasonal complement to rice; and large plantations intensively staffed with Negro slaves proved to be ideal for combining the two products. By the mid-1750s indigo production in the colony was in high gear, and 500,000 pounds were being exported annually.

The rice and indigo plantations differed significantly from the tobacco plantations of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay area. The former were smaller, more concentrated, and more intensively cultivated, that is, they required considerably more slaves per acre. Hence, the proportion of Negro slaves to whites became considerably higher in South Carolina. In 1750, the Southern colonies had the following ratio of Negroes to whites:

As we can see, the tobacco colonies had considerably fewer Negroes than
whites, whereas Negro slaves outnumbered whites in South Carolina by a good margin.

South Carolina cultivation, taking place in swampland, was also much unhealthier than the tobacco growing of the upper South. The plantation owners, more fortunate than their slaves, could escape the malarial climate and did so, choosing to live in mansions in Charleston rather than on their estates. This contrasted to the decentralized plantation life of the great Virginia landlords. Another and more important reason for the intensive growth of Charleston was the shallowness of the rivers, which prevented ships from going directly to the plantation wharves as in the upper South. Hence, a central port became economically necessary.

Rice and indigo cultivation became economic only through the large-scale use of slaves; but indigo needed an additional subsidy to become profitable. Great Britain in 1748 granted a bounty of six pence for each pound of indigo exported to England.

There were slave plots and insurrections in many American colonies, but the especial brutality toward and the high concentration of slaves made South Carolina the focal point for slave rebellion. As early as 1702, the South Carolina Assembly reprimanded the constables of Charleston for negligence in controlling the slaves, reprimanded a William Harvey of the city for allowing “cabals of Negroes at his house,” and listened to the saga of a Negro slave who had threatened his master with a general slave revolt in the colony. In the spring of 1711, the South Carolinians were terrified by an uprising of several armed Negroes. Led by a slave named Sebastian, they plundered the plantations of their oppressors. Presumably, the fear came not from the few marauders but from the apprehension that they might light the spark of a general slave revolution in the colony. Governor Robert Gibbes lamented to the Assembly: “How insolent and mischievous the Negroes are become,” and recommended some exemplary form of punishment as well as a possible improvement in the slaves’ subsistence standard. In 1713, a slave plot in the Goose Creek section was betrayed and stamped out, the Assembly rewarding the Negro informer with a gift of five pounds sterling.

A plan for a massive slave revolt, goaded by an economic depression, was uncovered in 1720, and a considerable number of Negroes were arrested, burned, hanged, or banished. A report to the king the following year declared in horror that the “black slaves... have lately attempted and were very near succeeding in a new revolution which would probably have been attended by the utter extirpation of all Your Majesty’s subjects in this province....”

In 1729, a severe epidemic of influenza decimated the ranks of the South Carolina Negroes. Perhaps goaded by this extra burden, the slaves planned another massive revolt the following year. But the Negroes differed over tactics—some urging each group of slaves to destroy its own master, others urging a united uprising against all the masters. In the meanwhile, the plans were uncovered and the leader placed in irons.

Slave troubles continued during the early 1730s in South Carolina. Large-scale meetings of groups of slaves were reported in 1733 and a wave of “robberies and insolence” spread in the colony. A slave rebellion was feared and a dozen slaves were arrested on suspicion in Charleston. The same year, several runaway slaves committed robberies and the governor offered the very large reward of twenty pounds a head for each slave captured. In 1731 and 1732, some runaway slaves were shot and several other Negroes killed or executed.

Furthermore, the colony fretted over the flight of some slaves to freedom in the Spanish town of St. Augustine in Florida. Indeed, the war of England upon Spain led the embittered Spaniards to offer freedom to the slaves of the English. The official policy of welcome to Negro refugees began in the fall of 1733, when the Spanish Crown announced that all fugitive slaves reaching Florida would be permitted to remain there as free men. In 1738, a group of liberated Negroes was established in a town north of St. Augustine, and the policy of welcome to fugitives was again proclaimed.

The attractiveness of St. Augustine, coupled with a severe famine in 1737, led the Negroes to a series of uprisings. In the latter year, three slaves were arrested for a “conspiracy against the peace of this government.” Complaints mounted of flight by slaves, individuals and groups, to the haven of St. Augustine. Indeed, a virtual state of guerrilla warfare erupted, with much assassination of masters and uncovering of slave conspiracies. In late 1738, a group of South Carolina slaves rebelled and fought their way through English America to reach freedom in Florida. In early 1739, a great slave plot was uncovered for massive armed uprising and flight to Florida. But slave flights continued and one group was joined by two whites. In April, the South Carolina legislature passed a bill for more effective suppression of slave revolts, but this did not stop a revolt by about twenty slaves, led by one Jimmy, at Stono (twenty miles southwest of Charleston) on September 9. The rebels raided an arsenal, killing two guards, appropriated considerable arms and ammunition, and made their way south. The embittered slaves burned several buildings and killed all whites in their path, except an innkeeper named Wallace, who was known to be “a good man and kind to his slaves.” The Jimmy rebellion ignited a spark among the slaves. Joined by fifty or sixty more, the band cried out “liberty” and marched around with drums beating and flags flying. A troop of militia confronted the Negroes. Though the forces were equal in number, the whites were better trained and better armed and routed the slaves. The captured Negroes were immediately shot or hanged by the infuriated whites and the others were hunted down for months. Twenty of the slaves were beaten in another lengthy skirmish, but ten Negroes managed to escape to freedom. Negro and Indian slaves who informed on the refugees were rewarded very handsomely by the government.