USA > North Carolina > History of North Carolina: The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 1584 1783, Volume I > Part 8
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Settlers pushing across the wide expanse of Albemarle Sound, slowly penetrated the wilderness to the southward. The way was probably opened by English pioneers from Al- bemarle, but the first settlers south of the Albemarle Sound of whom we have any record were French Protestants. The drastic measures of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, soon to culminate in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, were al-
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ready driving many of these industrious people from France to seek new homes in England and in English colonies. They possessed the qualities necessary to make good colonists, and the Lords Proprietors were eager to induce them to settle in Carolina. Doubtless with this object in view, in 1683, they had the Fundamental Constitutions, one clause of which guaran- teed religious freedom, translated into French. Large num- bers of Huguenots, in their search for religious freedom, as is well known, settled in South Carolina, while others found their way to North Carolina. The first Huguenot colonists in North Carolina came about 1690 from Virginia and settled on Pamlico River. Their enterprise quickly attracted the atten- tion of the Lords Proprietors who, in 1694, instructed Gov- ernor Archdale to erect in that region as many counties as he thought necessary "for ye better regulating and ye en- couragemt of ye people." Accordingly the region from Albe- marle Sound to Cape Fear was erected into the county of Archdale although none of the vast wilderness south of Pam- lico River was yet inhabited by white men. As the settle- ment on the Pamlico grew in importance, the colonial authori- ties thought it advisable to extend to it still further encour- agement. In 1696, therefore, the Palatine's Court ordered that the region extending from Albemarle Sound to Neuse River be erected into the county of Bath and given the privi- lege of sending two representatives to the General Assembly. About this time, too, a pestilence among the Indians decimated the tribes along the Pamlico and still further opened up that region to settlers who continued to arrive from Albemarle, from Virginia, and from Europe.
Among the last were a "great many French Protestants" who came under the auspices of the king "depending upon the Royal assurance which was given for their encouraging the Exercise of the Protestant Religion and the benefit of the laws of England." In 1704, on a bluff overlooking Pam- lico River, they selected a fine site for a town which a year later they incorporated under the name of Bath. In 1709, when Bath was only five years old, William Gordon, a missionary, wrote that it "consists of about twelve houses, being the only town in the whole province. They have a small collection of books for a library, which were carried over by the Reverend Doctor Bray, and some land is laid out for a
glebe ; * * in all probability it will be the centre of trade, as having the advantage of a better inlet for shipping, and surrounded with most pleasant savannas, very useful for stocks of cattle." In spite of these fancied advantages, Bath,
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though at times the home of wealth and culture, never be- came anything more than a sleepy little village and derives its chief distinction from the unimportant fact that it was the first town in the province. The settlers on the Pamlico, however, prospered and their good reports induced others to join them. They declared, in 1704, that they had "at vast labour and expense recovered and improved great quantities of land thereabouts"; and this boast was borne out by the Council which, in December 1705, "taking into their serious consideration" the fact that Bath County had "grown popu- lous and [was] daily increasing," divided it into three pre- cincts, and conferred upon each of them the right to send two representatives to the General Assembly. One of these precincts embraced that portion of Bath County south of Pamlico River "including all the Inhabitants of News."
The earliest settlers on the Neuse, like those on the Pam- lico, were Huguenots. For the most part, they came from Mannakintown, a French settlement in Virginia a few miles above the falls of the James, founded in 1699 by Claude Phil- lipe de Richebourg. They had not prospered there "be- cause," as Lawson says, "at their first coming over, they took their Measures of Living, from Europe; which was all wrong; for the small Quantities of ten, fifteen, and twenty Acres to a Family did not hold out according to their way of Reckoning, by Reason they made very little or no Fodder; and the Winter there being much harder than with us, their Cattle failed; chiefly, because the English took up and sur- veyed all the Land round about them; so that they were hemmed in on all Hands from providing more Land for them- selves or their Children."2 The mildness of the climate in North Carolina, the ease with which lands could be entered there, and the favorable reports of their brethren on the Pam- lico lured many of them, including Richebourg himself, away from the James to seek new homes on the Neuse and the Trent. They brought with them the thrift, the industry, and the skill for which their race had been noted in the Old World, and the colony soon felt the effects of their presence. John Lawson, who visited their settlements in 1708, wrote of them: "They are much taken with the Pleasantness of that Coun- try, and, indeed, are a very industrious People. * *
The French are good Neighbours amongst us, and give Ex- amples of Industry, which is much wanted in this Country. " 3
2 History of Carolina (ed. 1718), p. 114.
3 Ibid., p. 83.
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In 1710, the Neuse River settlement was strengthened by the arrival of a colony of German and Swiss immigrants. This colony, in one important respect, differed widely from the other settlements then in North Carolina. All the other settlements were the outcome of individual initiative and en- terprise; this one was the result of organized effort. It was composed chiefly of natives of that region along the Rhine known as the Palatinate, whence the name Palatines by which they are generally called. Their story is a tragic one. Prot- estants in religion, they were under the dominion of an irre- sponsible Roman Catholic prince who subjected them to many forms of religious persecution. Their country was the battle- ground of Europe and in the barbarous and sanguinary wars of the seventeenth century was frequently overrun and devas- tated by hostile armies. To these misfortunes were added the burdens of exorbitant taxes and tolls which swept the greater part of their earnings into the coffers of their rulers. These conditions produced such widespread misery and hopeless poverty, that at the beginning of the eighteenth century many of them determined to seek relief by emigration.
In this determination, they met with encouragement from England. Queen Anne, who looked upon herself as the guar- dian of the Protestants of Europe, eagerly extended both pro- tection and assistance to all Protestants who sought safety in her dominions. In this policy she received the support of the British nation, and Parliament, in 1709, passed a bill pro- viding for the naturalization of foreign Protestants. Gener- ous as this policy was, it was not altogether free from the taint of selfishness. England needed just such industrious and thrifty people as the German Protestants for the devel- opment of her colonial empire. For many years, therefore, those who were interested in colonial enterprises carried on in Germany a widespread propaganda for the purpose of in- ducing emigration to America. More than fifty books, pam- phlets and broadsides relating to Pennsylvania alone were circulated in Germany. Among those whose attention this propaganda attracted was Rev. Joshua Kocherthal, a Luther- an clergyman at Landau in the Palatinate, who, in 1703, went to England, to seek relief for his own congregation. There he seems to have conferred with the Lords Proprietors of Carolina for after his return to Germany he published, in 1706, a glowing account of their province in which he pointed out its advantages as a home for his countrymen. His book aroused such general interest among the Protestants of Ger- many that by 1709 it had reached its fourth edition. Stimu-
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lated by Kocherthal's publication, and secretly encouraged by the British government, the Palatines and other German Protestants in large numbers abandoned their native land to seek new homes in England, or beyond the Atlantic. Follow- ing the passage of the naturalization act in 1709, more than 10,000 of them landed in England. They came in such great numbers that the facilities provided for taking care of them proved utterly inadequate. Several months passed before plans could be perfected for their ultimate disposition. Nu- merous schemes, embracing settlements in England; Ireland, the Canary Islands, and America, were suggested, but of them all, colonization in America seemed the most feasible.
A favorable opportunity for transporting a colony of the Palatines to America was offered by the presence in London of Franz Ludwig Michel and Christopher de Graffenried, rep- resentatives of a Swiss syndicate of Bern which had been or- ganized to plant a Swiss colony in America. De Graffenried, who was the scion of a noble German family of Bern, had ex- cellent connections in England through whom he succeeded in interesting English capitalists in his scheme. Even the queen agreed to contribute £4,000 to his enterprise in consideration of his taking 100 families of Palatines to America. In what part of America should he plant his colony? During one of his sojourns in England some years earlier, De Graffenried's interest in America had been aroused by the Duke of Albe- marle, one of the Proprietors of Carolina, who had discoursed to him on "the beauty, goodness, and riches of English Amer- ica," and now that he was about to seek "a more considerable fortune in those far-off countries," his thoughts, naturally turned to the province in which the duke had been especially interested. He was confirmed in this determination by in- formation received from John Lawson, surveyor-general of Carolina, who was then in London supervising the publica- tion of his "New Voyage to Carolina." The Lords Propri- etors themselves had shown an interest in the Palatines as possible colonists, even proposing to settle all of them be- tween fifteen and forty-five years of age in their province if the queen would defray the expenses of their transportation; and they now offered De Graffenried "very favorable condi- tions and privileges." De Graffenried, accordingly, deter- mined upon Carolina and purchased in that province 17,500 acres of land to be located south of the Neuse River.
In making his preparations, De Graffenried acted prompt- ly and prudently. From the thousands of Palatines, eager for the enterprise, he chose only "young people, healthy and
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laborious and of all kinds of avocations and handicrafts," in number about 650. Tools, equipment, and ships were all se- lected with great care. The colony was placed under the direction of "three persons, notables from Carolina, who happened then to be in London and who had lived already several years in Carolina." They were John Lawson, the surveyor-general, Christopher Gale, the receiver-general, and another colonial official. Twelve assistants, "both sensible and able," were appointed from among the colonists themselves. In all his plans and preparations, De Graffenried had the ad- vice and approval of a royal commission which passed on his contracts, inspected his transports, and were supposed in other ways to look after the interests of the Palatines. When all was ready, the colonists went aboard their ships at Graves- end and after suitable religious ceremonies weighed anchor for the New World, leaving De Graffenried in England to await the arrival of his colony from Bern.
The Palatines sailed in January, 1710. Misfortune dogged their tracks. The royal commissioners, to whom their inter- ests had been entrusted, had shamefully neglected their duty. The transports were badly overcrowded. The food supply was inadequate in quantity and in quality. The cost of trans- portation had been reduced to the lowest possible amount and the ship's captain paid in advance for each passenger; the death of a passenger, therefore, meant a financial gain to the ship-owners. Even nature seemed to conspire against the wel- fare of the Palatines. A few days out of port, they were overtaken by a storm which threatened them with destruction. Contrary winds tossed them about on the Atlantic for thir- teen weeks. Crowded into poorly ventilated quarters, reduced to a salt diet to which they were not accustomed, attacked and plundered by a French man-of-war, the wretched Pala- tines suffered many of the horrors of the middle-passage. Throughout their long voyage, disease was their constant companion and death a daily visitor. More than half of them perished at sea and many others succumbed after landing. Thus, as De Graffenried says, "that colony was shattered be- fore it had settled."
Sailing up the James River, the survivors of the colony landed in Virginia, where they were well received, and re- mained there long enough to recover somewhat from the ef- fects of. their voyage. Then, under the guidance of John Lawson, they set out overland for Carolina. Lawson who had been entrusted with the task of locating the settlement chose a point on the tongue of land between the Neuse and
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Trent rivers, near the site of the present city of New Bern. No preparations had been made to receive the Palatines. They found themselves in a wilderness, during the hot and unhealthy season, without shelter and with an inadequate sup- ply of food. The experiences of their first summer in Amer- ica were paralleled only by those of their voyage across the Atlantic. Reduced to the direst poverty, they were com- pelled, "to sell all their clothes and movables to the neigh- boring inhabitants in order to sustain their life." When De Graffenried arrived in September, he found them in a wretched condition, "sickness, want and desperation having reached their very climax."
De Graffenried sailed in June with a colony of 100 Swit- zers, and after "a happy voyage," landed in Virginia on September 10th. Bad news from his Palatines was awaiting him and he pushed on to their relief with as little delay as possible. His hopes, however, of obtaining speedy succour for them were doomed to disappointment. He had expected help from the colonial authorities, in accordance with a prom- ise which the Lords Proprietors had given him, but he found political conditions in North Carolina in such a turmoil that nothing could be obtained from that source. Provisions were scarce in North Carolina and flour that he had ordered from Pennsylvania and Virginia was slow in coming. Consequently, not only was he unable to relieve the distress of his Palatines ; he could not even provide for the needs of his Switzers, who, like the Palatines, were soon "obliged to sell their clothes and implements in order to get the necessary victuals from the neighboring inhabitants and keep themselves from starva- tion." Finally, after a period of intense anxiety and suffer- ing, grain, pork, salt, butter, and vegetables were secured in sufficient quantities for the immediate needs of the colony.
In the meantime De Graffenried had taken steps to bring some order out of the chaos which he had found upon his arrival. He had the land surveyed and the colonists settled on their several tracts. Encouraged by his presence, they went to work with a will, cleared the forests, built cabins, erected water-mills for grinding grain, and laid out a town. This town was placed on the point of land between the Nense and the Trent. It was laid off in the form of a cross with one arm extending from river to river and the other from the extremity of the point back indefinitely. De Graffenried planned to erect a church at each of the four corners. Above the town, he threw across the peninsular a line of fortifica- tions as a protection against the Indians. In honor of his na- Vol. I-6
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tive city, De Graffenried named the town New Bern. Pros- pects for the future of New Bern seemed so favorable that people in Pennsylvania and Virginia invested in lots there. Indeed, such was the improvement in the situation that De Graffenried boasted that his colonists "within eighteen months [had] managed to build homes and make themselves so comfortable, that they made more progress in that length of time than the English inhabitants in several years." "There was," he adds, "a fine appearance of a happy state of things," when suddenly, without warning, the colony was overwhelmed by the greatest of all its misfortunes. In Sep- tember, 1711, the most disastrous Indian war in the history of North Carolina broke out and raged with intermittent vio- lence for two years. The losses and suffering fell heaviest upon the settlers along the Neuse. Their cattle were killed or driven off, their crops destroyed, their homes burned; many of the settlers themselves fell victims to the merciless cruelty of the savages. The rest were reduced to such desperation and despair that they determined to abandon the settlement, and De Graffenried went to Virginia to arrange for their re- moval to a new location on the Potomac. His negotiations failed and the scheme came to naught. De Graffenried him- self, broken in fortune and in spirit, now abandoned his ef- forts and returned to Europe. The Palatines never recov- ered from the losses they had sustained and soon ceased to exist as a distinct German settlement. Scattered throughout the southeastern section of North Carolina, they were ulti- mately absorbed in the English population; even their names lost their German forms to conform to the English spelling.
By 1710, settlements extended from the Virginia line on the north to the Neuse River on the south, and up and down the Roanoke, the Pamlico, and the Neuse for twenty and thirty miles inland. The French and Germans were not the only ones who came, for many Virginians were abandoning the older colony for the new, and not a few adventurers were find- ing their way hither directly from the mother country. For the most part, the Virginians and the English did not follow the French and Germans to the outskirts of the settlements, but entered lands in Albemarle which was rapidly filling up with a sturdy people. While it is impossible to estimate the population of the colony accurately, there is ample evidence of its steady growth. In 1694, for instance, the total number of tithables in the colony as reported to the General Court was 787, which meant a population of about 3,500; eight years later the tithables of Chowan precinct alone were 283, i. e., a
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total population of about 1,400; and in 1708 the population of Pasquotank was more than 1,300. In 1690, the vanguard of the French colony had just entered the unbroken wilderness along the Pamlico; in 1704, the settlement on the Pamlico had grown so populous that it contained 200 children who had never received the rite of baptism. Further evidence is found in the complaints of the Virginia authorities that North Caro- lina was draining the Old Dominion of her population. The president of the Virginia Council wrote in 1708, that "many of our poorer sort of Inhabitants daily remove into our neigh- boring Colonies, especially to North Carolina which is the reason the number of our Inhabitants doth not increase pro- portionally to what might be expected"; and the Virginia Council explaining this situation said: "the chief cause of
this Removal is want of Land to plant and cultivate * * * this has occasioned many families of old Inhabitants whose former plantations are worn out as well as great number of young people & servants just free to seek for settlements in the province of North Carolina where Land is to be had on much easier terms than here, & not a few have obtained grants from that Government of the very same [amount of] land which they would have taken up from this, if liberty had been given for it."
CHAPTER VI
THE CARY REBELLION
The reign of peace and progress which North Carolina enjoyed under Ludwell and Archdale, and their deputies, was of short duration. Henderson Walker, whose administration came to a close in 1703, bequeathed to his successors an issue that for several years divided the people into contending fac- tions, stirred up bitter strife and rebellion, and indirectly brought upon the colony the worst disaster in its history. This issue was the question of an Established Church.
From the creation of their proprietary in 1663, the Lords Proprietors had offered liberal terms, as liberality in religious matters was construed in those days, to all Protestants who should settle in Carolina. In their proposals of August, 1663, to prospective settlers at Cape Fear, they promised "in as ample manner as the undertakers shall desire, freedom and liberty of conscience in all religious or spiritual things, and to be kept inviolably with them, we having power in our char- ter so to do." A few weeks later, in a letter to Sir William Berkeley, they explained that their reason for authorizing him to appoint two governors in Albemarle was that "some persons that are for liberty of conscience may desire a gov- ernor of their own proposing." Moreover, both in the Con- cessions of 1665 and in the Fundamental Constitutions they provided toleration for all forms of Christian worship in or- der "that civil peace may be obtained amidst diversity of opinion."
On the other hand, neither the Lords Proprietors nor the settlers understood these promises to be inconsistent with the setting up of an establishment in the colony. Both of the charters of the Lords Proprietors assumed that the Church of England would be the Established Church in Carolina; and in all their plans the Lords Proprietors proceeded upon this assumption. In the Concessions of 1665, in their instructions to their governors, and in the Fundamental Constitutions, their intentions to establishi the Church are repeatedly set
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forth. The Fundamental Constitutions provide that it should be the duty of "parliament to take care for the building of churches and the public maintenance of divines, to be em- ployed in the exercise of religion according to the Church of England; which being the only true and orthodox, and the national religion of all the king's dominions, is so also of Carolina, and therefore it alone shall be allowed to receive public maintenance by grant of parliament."
The Lords Proprietors, therefore, were quite as much committed to the policy of an establishment as they were to that of religious toleration; but as they had allowed nearly two score years to pass without attempting to carry it into effect, the colonists generally had come to think of it as a dead letter. The attempt, therefore, after so many years of neglect to set up an establishment according to these provi- sions aroused a bitter and determined opposition from all classes of Dissenters. The increase of the Dissenters, espe- cially of Quakers, in numbers and influence, is the most im- portant fact in the early religious development of the colony. This growth was so great as to lead the early North Carolina historians into the error of believing that the colony was set- tled by religious refugees. As a rule the earliest settlers of North Carolina had been reared within the pale of the Church of England, and had the Church followed them into their new home they would doubtless have remained loyal to her; but forty years passed before a minister of the Established Church found his way into the Carolina wilderness, and in the mean- time the field had been occupied and zealously cultivated by others.
The first voice of a Christian preacher heard in North Car- olina was the voice of the Quaker, William Edmundson, who came hither in 1672, a worthy bearer of the Christian faith to a new land. In himself he personified the Christian vir- tues of simplicity, piety, zeal, and charity. Undaunted by the difficulties, discomforts, and dangers of his undertaking, he courageously plunged into the Carolina wilderness to carry his message to the scattered pioneers whom the Church had forgotten, and by his earnestness and eloquence won many of them to his cause. Soon after entering the province he arrived at the house of Henry Phillips who, with his wife "had been convinced of the truth in New England, and came here to live; and not having seen a Friend for seven years before, they wept for joy to see us." Phillips hastily sum- moned the neighboring planters to a meeting. Because their manners were crude and they violated the proprieties by
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