Conceived in Liberty (25 page)

Several Popish priests and zealous Papists make it their constant business (under pretense of visiting the sick...) to seduce, delude, and persuade divers of His Majesty’s good Protestant subjects to the Romish faith, by which means sundry... have been withdrawn from the Protestant religion, by law established, and from the due and natural obedience they owe to his said Majesty and laws, whereby the party, so reconciled and withdrawn, as well as their procurers and counsellors, have justly incurred the penalty and forfeitures of high treason.

Not only were the priests and their possible dying converts subject to severe penalty, but also anyone who knew of such offenses and did not inform the authorities.

In 1704 a truly comprehensive act was passed for the persecution of Catholics. Catholics were prohibited from practicing their religion, and priests from exercising their office. A reward of 100 pounds was offered to any informer giving evidence against a priest saying mass, and the penalty for a convicted priest was life imprisonment. It was life imprisonment as well for any Catholic found guilty of running a school or educating a child. Children were encouraged to inform on their parents “to the end that the Protestant children of Popish parents may not... want of fitting maintenence.... Be it enacted... that if any such parent in order to the compelling such... Protestant child to change... religion, shall refuse to allow such child a fitting maintenance suitable to the degree and ability of such parent... then upon complaint thereof... it shall be lawful... to make such order....”

Fortunately, however, Queen Anne, less intolerant than her Anglican minions in Maryland, decided to
allow
private family practice of the Catholic religion. As a result, Catholic services remained partially underground by being held in family chapels on planters’ estates, with other Catholic families of the area invited as “guests.”

Benedict Calvert, the fourth Lord Baltimore, had taken the precaution of converting to the Protestant faith, and so when his father and he both died in 1715, the Calverts were handed back the proprietary title, which now went to Charles Calvert, fifth Lord Baltimore. The resumption of the now Protestant proprietary by no means slackened the pace of persecution. The Anglicans were worried about continuing conversions from their faith and Governor John Hart ordered the surveillance of Catholic priests; any suspected of visiting the homes of dying persons were forced to take the Test Oath. Refusal to swear to the Test Oath meant imprisonment. In 1716 a law decreed that any officeholder caught in any “Popish assembly” and participating in the celebration of the mass would forfeit his office. And finally, in 1718 the Catholics of Maryland were disfranchised through making the Test Oath a requirement for voting.

One amusing byproduct of the anti-Catholic hysteria among the Maryland Anglicans was the apparent existence of a plot by Governor Hart and some leading Anglican clergymen to spread the rumor that young Lord Baltimore and his guardian Lord Guilford were secret Catholics. They thereby hoped to persuade the Crown to turn the proprietary over to Hart himself. The man who reported the plot to the bishop of London was himself a leading Anglican minister in the colony, the Reverend Jacob Henderson. Henderson in turn was accused of being soft on Catholics, an accusation he indignantly denied.

The oppressive poll tax for support of the newly established Anglican church was made payable in a fixed rate in tobacco, which was then the medium of exchange in Maryland. Gresham’s law operated here as in currency, and since the law did not specify the quality of tobacco, payment was always made in the very poorest and most unmarketable grades. As a result, Maryland’s established clergymen were continually impoverished and only the poorest quality of them settled in the colony.

The North Carolinians, inspired by the Glorious Revolution, seized the opportunity to rid themselves, once and for all, of the tyranny of Seth Sothel. An uprising in 1689, led by Thomas Pollock and other leading colonists, resulted in the arrest of Sothel and his banishment from the province for a year. Sothel was removed permanently from the governorship. He then hied himself to the sister colony of South Carolina, where he was also one-eighth proprietor. The proprietary appointed Colonel Philip Ludwell the new governor of Albemarle, now called North Carolina. Ludwell, Virginia’s leading Berkeleyan, was instructed to redress the grievances
of the colonists arising from the Sothel regime. Captain John Gibbs, who had apparently been chosen by the Council as governor to succeed Sothel, tried to maintain the revolutionary impetus, and in 1690 launched an armed rebellion against Ludwell. But the conciliatory policy had done its work and Gibbs’ rebellion lacked popular support. Gibbs and his band were defeated and fled to Virginia. Gibbs and Ludwell both went to London to put their cases before the proprietary and Gibbs, as might have been expected, was repudiated.

Though growing rapidly, South Carolina had a population of something over 3,100 in 1690, still by far the smallest of the Southern colonies. This colony too was racked by strife and accumulated grievances. Like its fellow colony Albemarle, Charleston colony suffered from the crippling restrictions on its tobacco and intercoastal trade inflicted by the Navigation Acts. It also bitterly resisted repeated attempts by the proprietors—if anything more determined than in Albemarle, for less settler resistance was expected farther south—to impose Shaftesbury’s grandiose feudal proposals on the colony. In addition, South Carolina suffered from the demand that quitrents be paid at the far higher rate in coin instead of in commodities. In 1682, the proprietary suddenly decreed that all quitrents must be paid in English money, thus eliminating the option to pay in commodities, and it tightened enforcement of the levy. The aroused Assembly protested that the people had been “extremely hard dealt with,” but the proprietors retorted that their regulations had been designed to counteract those who “instilled fancies” into the heads of the people in order to avoid payment of quitrents.

Further problems were caused by the practice of kidnapping Indians to use for slaves and thus make economically viable the tobacco plantations, a procedure that naturally stimulated retaliatory attacks by the Indians. Conflicts unique to this colony arose from the unwillingness of the English settlers to allow the substantial number of new Huguenot immigrants to vote, and from a fear of a Spanish invasion into what the Spaniards regarded as their imperial territory. The Huguenots were French Protestant refugees from the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

James Colleton, a brother of one of the proprietors and given 48,000 acres in the colony, arrived in South Carolina to become governor in 1687. He immediately alienated the colonists by preventing them from sailing on an expedition of war against the Spanish headquarters at St. Augustine, Florida. Colleton came to the colony determined to impose his will, and particularly to stop the widespread evasion of the hated Navigation Laws and quitrents. He insisted on enforcing these edicts to the hilt, and even on attempting to collect arrears of quitrents. Particularly bitter for the colonists was Colleton’s expulsion, upon arriving at the colony, of all the menbers of the Assembly who opposed the restrictive laws and taxes. All this incurred the growing rage and resentment of the colony and especially
of the Assembly. Finally, in 1689 the alarmed proprietors instructed Colleton to suspend all further sessions of the legislature. This tyrannical act further fanned the flames of incipient rebellion, spurred by the fact that the South Carolinian laws had to be renewed every two years to remain in effect, and that a biennial term was now expiring. The final straw occurred in the spring of 1690, when Colleton imposed the despotism of martial law upon the colony. This embraced such actions as imposing a very heavy fine on a minister for delivering a sermon displeasing to the government. In addition, Colleton used his powers of martial law to grant himself a privileged monopoly of trade with the Indians.

Revolution, as we have pointed out, is a time of rapid change, and this often means sharp changes in a person’s values and his views of institutions. Seth Sothel, the former governor of North Carolina who was deposed the year before, had arrived in South Carolina to see a similar revolutionary process brewing against the tyranny of the governor in Charleston. Sothel had apparently learned his lesson; his views changed, and he became the leader of the people’s opposition to Colleton. When Colleton inflicted the final act of repression in imposing martial law, Sothel led a revolutionary coup against the governor. Declaring himself governor, Sothel reconvened the suppressed Assembly and banished Colleton from the colony. Sothel’s action was ignited by a petition signed by over four hundred of the leading citizens. The petition detailed the grievances of the people of the colony, including: the attempts to impose several variants of proposals found in Locke’s
Fundamental Constitutions;
the imposition of martial law; the governor’s monopolization of the Indian trade; arbitrary arrests; expulsion for any excess of freedom of speech, even by a councillor; and attempts to enforce higher quitrents.

Sothel was allowed to continue his rule for only one year. In the fall of 1691, the proprietors ousted Sothel from office and charged him with high treason. Although Sothel was a one-eighth proprietor of the colony, it was also true that he had organized a revolution against the authority appointed by the proprietary as a whole. Sothel fled back to Albemarle, where his term of banishment was over, and where he soon died in poverty and obscurity. Especially notable in Sothel’s brief term in office was his stimulating the Assembly to pass significantly liberalizing laws. In particular, the French, Swiss, and other non-English immigrants were granted rights equal to those of the English settlers, and severe punishment was decreed for anyone who killed a slave. Other new laws, on the other hand, were repressive: requiring licenses of all retailers of liquor, regulating ship’s pilots, and regulating the Indian trade. The proprietors, on removing Sothel, unfortunately also nullified the laws of his administration.

The ultimate failure of the revolution did not, of course, end the grievances underlying the unrest in the Carolinas. Grudgingly, the proprietary finally issued a general amnesty. For a while the proprietary tried the unsuccessful experiment of uniting the two Carolinas, appointing
Philip Ludwell as governor of both colonies. The proprietors tried to force the North Carolinian colonists to send their representatives to the distant Charleston Assembly. This plan was quickly abandoned, and each of the Carolinas was governed by a deputy governor of its own, with the main governor stationed in South Carolina. Each colony also retained its own Assembly, and therefore essentially its own separate government. As in other liberalizing moves, the proprietors promised to abandon their attempts to impose the dicta contained in the Shaftesbury-Locke
Fundamental Constitutions;
it was now acknowledged that the Carolinas were to be governed by the original charter. In addition, the proprietary removed all obstacles to freedom of trade with the Indians. It also vetoed an act of the Ludwell administration that harassed the rural Huguenots by requiring a uniform hour for all Sunday church services in the colony. Another constructive measure during the Ludwell term was that permitting quitrents to be paid in commodities.

John Archdale, an English Quaker who had become one of the eight proprietors by purchasing the share of Sir John Berkeley, became governor of the Carolinas in 1695. He assumed office with the intent of allaying the grievances of the colonies. His term lasted for only one year, but that year saw a significant liberalization in the Carolina colonies. In the South, peace was made with the Indians; in particular, the practice of whites kidnapping and enslaving the natives was ended. Furthermore, the quitrent burden was significantly lightened, including cessation of the attempt to collect the arrears. From the 1690s on, the main grievance concerning the quitrent had been the threat hanging over the colonists from the huge arrears of uncollected claims. Also, quitrents were made payable in commodities as well as in money. From that point on, the quitrent of one penny per acre was scarcely enforced in the proprietary colony, and the expected revenue accruing to the proprietary dwindled to a negligible sum, not nearly enough to pay the expenses of the local officials. Furthermore, Archdale reshuffled the South Carolina Council to give the Dissenters the majority, and also decreed that with rare exceptions the proprietors could not annul laws without the Assembly’s consent. The liberal reforms continued the following year, during the administration of Archdale’s successor, the Dissenter Joseph Blake, also a one-eighth proprietor. Blake’s Act of 1697 admitted into full civil rights the important Huguenot population of South Carolina as well as other aliens, and guaranteed religious liberty to all Christians except Catholics. This was an important reform in a colony where the large majority of people were Dissenters of one hue or another from the Church of England. Not until 1704, however, were the alien-born permitted to vote in South Carolina.

The Archdale and Blake reforms hardly eliminated the basic conflicts in the colony. Thus, in 1698 the proprietary reneged on its promise—given in the wake of the Sothel rebellion against Colleton—to forget about the
Fundamental Constitutions
and a new variant of this thoroughly disliked proposal was introduced again and continued to be introduced until 1705.

In 1699, indeed, the South Carolina Assembly saw fit to address a list of grievances to the proprietary. The list included violations of the requirement of consent to all laws by the Assembly, and the accumulation of vast landed estates in the hands of a few privileged persons. The Assembly asked that no land tract be granted over the size of 1,000 acres. Even the king’s collector of customs, the Tory Edward Randolph, warned the Crown in 1699 that “there are but few settled inhabitants in this province, the Lords [proprietors] having taken up vast tracts for their own use... where the land is most commodious for settlement, which prevents peopling the place....” The Assembly also objected strongly to the English tariff on South Carolina rice and naval stores (turpentine, pitch, tar)—but, as in the case of the other grievances, to no effect.