USA > South Carolina > The history of South Carolina under the proprietary government, 1670-1719, V.2 > Part 11
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grave Morton, the leading dissenter in the colony, was one of the commissioners, the act provided that the mas- ter of the school was to be of the Church of England and to conform to the same. He was to be capable to teach the learned languages, -that is to say, Latin and Greek tongues. - and to catechise and instruct the youth in the principles of the Christian religion as professed in the Church of England. The commissioners were to pre- scribe rules for the government of the school. Any per- son giving $20 might nominate one scholar to be taught
free for five years. It was provided that in consideration of the schoolmaster's being allowed the use of the lands and dwelling-houses, and the salary of £100 per annum, twelve scholars should be taught free, besides one for any person contributing £20. For any other scholar the master was to be paid at the rate of £4 current money per annum. If the number of scholars became more than one man could well manage, the commissioners might appoint an usher at a salary not exceeding £50 per annum, and 30s, for every scholar under his charge besides the free scholars. And because. said the act, it is neces- sary to give encouragement to a fit person who will un- dertake to teach the youth of the province to write, and also the principles of vulgar arithmetic and merchant's accounts, it was provided that a fit person should be appointed to teach those branches, and also the art of navigation and surveying and other useful and practical parts of the mathematics, and for his encouragement was to be paid at the same rate as the usher. Schools might also be established in each of the other parishes. the schoolmasters of which were to have £10 per annum. and 012 current money were allowed for the building of a parish school.
Another most important measure of this time was the pas-
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sage of "An act for the more effectual preventing the spreading of contagious distempers." 1 In 1698 an act had forbidden vessels to pass to the east of Sullivan's Island one mile, under penalty of being fired on by the gunner and paying a fine, and the pilot was required to ascertain from the captain if any contagious disorders were on board. under penalty of €50.2 This subject was now again taken up, and in the act mentioned a quarantine law was put in operation. A health officer was appointed, one Gilbert Guttery, who was empowered and required to board all vessels as soon as they came over the bar of Charles Town, and to make strict inquiry into the health of the place from which such vessel last came, and of all persons on board, and of the causes of death of any who had died during the voyage. He was empowered to send any person on board ashore to the pest-house on Sullivan's Island ; and in case of death by malignant disorders hav- ing occurred during the voyage, to order the vessel to lie off Sullivan's Island for twenty days. The act was con- fined to the port of Charles Town. but the Governor might extend its provisions to other ports.
"An act for the better observation of the Lord's Day. commonly called Sunday, " 3 illustrates the influence of the puritanical spirit of the times, even upon the people of the Church of England in Carolina. " Whereas," it said, " there is nothing more acceptable to God than the true and sincere service and worship of him, according to his holy will, and that the holy keeping of the Lord's Day
1 Statutes of So. Ca., vol. II, 382.
Quarantine measures were first adopted in America as follows: Massachusetts in 1615. South Carolina in 1698, Pennsylvania in 1699, Rhode Island in 1711. New Hampshire in 1714, and New York in 1745. Supplement to Encyclopedia Britannica, title " Quarantine."
2 Ibid., 152,
3 Tbid .. $96. 2 1
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is a principal part of the true service of God which in many places of the Province is so much prophaned and neglected by disorderly persons," it was therefore en- acted that all persons whatsoever should on every Lord's Day apply themselves to the observation of the same, by exercising themselves thereon in the duties of piety and true religion, publicly and privately ; and, having no rea- sonable or lawful excuse, should resort to their parish church or some meeting or assembly of religious worship allowed by the laws of the province, and there abide orderly and soberly during the time of prayer and preach- ing on pain and forfeiture for every neglect the sum of five shillings current money of the province. No trades- man, artificer, workman, laborer, or other person should do any worldly labor or work of the ordinary callings upon that day (works of necessity or charity only ex- cepted), under a like forfeiture. Goods publicly sold on Sunday were forfeited. No person was allowed to travel on Sunday by land or by water except it be to go to the place of worship and to return again, or to visit and relieve the sick, or unless belated the night before, and then to travel no further than to some convenient inn or place of shelter for that day, or upon some extraordinary occasion, for which a person should be allowed to do so under the hand of some Justice of the Peace. No sports or pastimes were allowed. No public house was allowed to entertain any guests on
the Lord's Day except lodgers or strangers. For the better keeping of good order, the churchwardens and constables were required once in the forenoon and onee in the afternoon. in time of divine service, to walk through the town and to suppress all offences against the act. If any master or overseer should cause or encourage a ser- vant or slave to work on the Lord's Day, he should for- feit the sum of five shillings for every offence. Nothing
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in the act, however, was to extend to the prohibiting of dressing of meats in families or public houses, nor to the buying and selling of milk before nine o'clock in the morning, or after four o'clock in the afternoon.
Two important measures in regard to the administra- tion of justice were enacted. One was " An act for settling the titles of the inhabitants of this Province to their posses- sions in their estates within the same. and for limitations of actions, and for avoiding suits at law."1 By this act all pos- sessions or titles to lands for seven years without lawful interruption were made good against all claims whatso- ever, and the times for bringing actions of all kinds were limited. The other was "An act for the better securing the payment of debts due from any person inhabiting and resid- ing beyond the sea or elsewhere without the limits of this Province," etc .? This act, known as the Foreign Attach- ment Act, was a revision of the first act upon the subject passed in 1691 under Sothell's administration, and pro- vided means of seizing an absent or absconding debtor's property, and subjecting it to the payment of creditors. It remained the law upon the subject until the adoption of the new code of procedure in 1872.
The poor laws of the province were revised and re- modelled. The vestries of the several parishes were em- powered yearly to nominate two or more overseers, who. with the wardens of the parishes, were charged with the ordering and relieving of the poor, out of such money and fines as should be given for their use, which, if not suffi- cient, was to be supplied by assessments, which the ves- tries were authorized to make. The main features of this det were taken from the English poor laws.3
Another very important measure was "An act for up-
1 Statutes of So. C., vol. II, 583. 2 Ibid., 588. 3 Įbid .. 593-006.
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pointing an agent to solicit the affairs of this Province in the Kingdom of Great Britain. " 1 By this act the important policy which prevailed in most of the colonies of maintain- ing an agent in London to watch and guard the interests of the province before the Proprietors and the Board of Trade was adopted in Carolina ; and the agency thus established became of great consequence in the subsequent history of the province, especially during the approach- ing revolution, and continued scarcely less so under the Royal Government after the overthrow of that of the Proprietors.
The Board of Trade in England were pressing more and more the enforcement of the navigation laws in the colonies, and especially in Carolina, and watching for in- fringements of them as causes upon which could be based a forfeiture of the charter. Rice and naval stores, the principal exports of the colony, were among the enumer- ated articles which were forbidden to be shipped for sale except to England. On the other hand, bounties were offered to the importers of pitch, tar, turpentine, and other naval stores. It was deemed of great importance therefore to have an agent in England to watch the inter- ests of the colony, to procure a continuance of the bounty, and, if possible, to procure also permission for Carolina to export naval stores and rice to Spain, Portugal, Africa, and other places in America and the West India Islands. By this act the Hon. Abel Kethellby,2 of the Inner Temple, who had been made a Landgrave, was appointed agent. His instructions were to procure first the continuance of the bounty, and so earnest was the Assembly in regard to this matter, that he was charged not to let his solicitation for a free exportation of rice interfere with the bounty on the naval stores. A committee, consisting of Charles 1 Statutes of So. Ca., vol. II, 600.
2 This name is so spelled in this statute. Elsewhere it is spelled Kettleby.
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Hart, Arthur Middleton. and Samuel Eveleigh, Esqs., Mr. William Gibbons, and Henry Wigginton, Esq., was ap- pointed to put the act into execution, and to correspond with the agent from time to time, sending him instruc- tions. The agent was to be paid £150 current money as an encouragement to undertake the agency. and £150 more as soon as an act of Parliament should be passed for a longer continuance of the bounty to the importers of naval stores to England from this province. He was to receive £500 as soon as an act of Parliament should be passed permitting a free exportation of rice from the prov- ince to Spain. Portugal, and all places in Africa and America, both continent and islands, and a proportional sum for as many of these places to which he could procure an allowance of such exportation. Two years after, the allowance of the agent was made £200 currency annually. and the committee of correspondence was reduced to three, - Hon. Samuel Eveleigh, Colonel William Rhett, and Arthur Middleton, Esq.
It will be remembered that during Governor Ludwell's administration the Proprietors had disallowed the enaet- ment of a habeas corpus act upon the ground that it was not necessary to reenact any statute of England, as such statute applied to this colony proprio vigore under the charter.1 That theory was now abandoned. and under Craven the habeas corpus act of King Charles the Second was formally reenacted.2 Then followed the adoption of Trott's great work, - a general codification of the English statutes, applicable to the condition of the new country, and a compilation of all colonial acts then in force.
This was for the time a stupendous work. There had been before this several instances of compilation of colo- nial statutes in other provinces, a brief mention of which
1 Ante, p. 247. 2 Statutes of So. Ca., vol. II, 999.
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in this connection will not be without interest here.1 In Massachusetts. Nathan Ward had compiled the perpetual laws enacted by the General Court as early as 1641. His work was entitled the " Body of Liberties," sometimes called ·· Liberties." or " Book of Liberties." There were also several revisions by the Plymouth Colony General Court -- 1636, 1658. and 1671. In Virginia, the laws in force in 1662 were collected out of the Assembly Records, digested into one volume, and revised and confirmed by the Gen- eral Assembly, and in 1684 a complete collection of all the laws in force, with an Alphabetical Table annexed, was made. In 1673 was published the book of General Laws for the people within the jurisdiction of Connecti- cut, collected out of the Records of the General Court. then lately revised with emendations and additions estab- lished and published by the General Court of Connecticut holden at Hartford in October, 1672. In New York there had been a collection of the laws from 1691 to 1694. and in 1710 the laws as they were enacted by the Gov- ernor's Council and General Assembly from 1691 to 1709 were compiled and published. Following Trott's collec- tion of the laws of South Carolina in 1712, which we are now considering, the laws of Pennsylvania, collected into one volume, were published by the order of the Governor and Assembly of the province in 1714: there was a collation of the laws of New Hampshire in 1716 ; and a partial collection of the laws of New Jersey was made in 1717. These works were all compilations, or col- lations as they were sometimes termed, of the colonial
! These instances are compiled from The Charlemagne Tover Collec- tion of Colonial Lors, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1990. The author is also indebted for information upon this subject to Hon. Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, to Mr. W. P. U'pham, Newtonville, Mass,, and to Mr. William Brook-Rawle of Philadelphia, Pa.
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statutes and laws in force in the respective provinces at the time of their collection, and were made either by private individuals or by enactments of the colonial legis- latures. And such was a part of Trott's work -that relating to the compilation of the laws of the province : but far the most important was the codification of the English statutes, to which we can find no other like and contemporaneous work in America. This work was more than a compilation. It was a codification embodied in a single act. The act was entitled " An act to put in force in this Province the several statutes of the Kingdom of Eng- land or South Britain therein particularly mentioned." 1 It comprised an actual revision of the whole body of the statutory law of England, and the selection from it of such statutes not only as were then applicable to the condition of the colony at the time. but which would become so on its further development. The statutes se- lected. and modified when needful, were one hundred and sixty-seven in number, covering one hundred and eighty pages royal octavo of the second volume of the Statutes at Large. Strange to say, the preamble to this most impor- tant act, which is unusually brief, gives no intimation of the magnitude of the measure and assigns the most in- adequate reasons for its enactment. The occasion for the act stated is that " many statute laws of the Kingdom of England or South Britain by reason of the different way of agriculture and the differing production of the earth of this Province from that of England are alto- gether useless, and many others (which otherwise are very apt and good) either by reason of their limitation to particular places or because in themselves they are only executive by such nominal offices as are not in nor suitable for the constitution of this government are thereby
1 Statutes of So. Ca., vol. II, 101.
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become impracticable here." With this very unsatisfac- tory explanation of the occasion of the work, the act provided that the statutes or parts of statutes of the kingdom of England enumerated in an elaborate table annexed. consisting of statutes from the time of the great charter in the ninth year of King Henry the Third, which was itself specifically mentioned, to the eighth year of Queen Anne, should be of the same force in the province as if they had been enacted in the same. The text of the enumerated statutes was given in full and included in the enactment. It was also provided in the same act that all and every part of the common law of England. when the same was not altered by the enumerated acts or inconsist- ent with the particular constitutions and customs and laws of the province, and excepting such as had relation to ancient tenures which were taken away by acts of Parliament of 12 Charles II, c. 24. doing away with the court of Wards and Liveries and Tenures in capite and by knight's service, was to be of full force in the province. There was also excepted that part of the common law which related to matters ecclesiastical which were incon- sistent with or repugnant to the settlement of the Church of England in the province as there established. The Governor with his Council were constituted a Court of Chancery, with the same powers as those exercised by the Lord Chancellor, or Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of Great Britain, in England. The Courts of Record in the province were to have the powers of the King's or Queen's courts. All the statute laws of England not enumerated in the act (such only excepted which related to her Majesty's customs and acts of trade and navigation) were declared impracticable. It was provided that noth- ing in these acts should be construed to take away or abridge the liberty of conscience, or any other liberty in
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matters ecclesiastical, from any of the inhabitants of the province, but that the same should still be enjoyed according to the powers and privileges granted to the true and absolute Lords Proprietors by their charter from the Crown. and the several acts of Assembly of the province then in force.
A remarkable circumstance in connection with this act is the undue haste in which a measure of such great im- portance was hurried through the legislature. It appears by the journal that it was read in the Assembly for the first time on Wednesday, the 20th of November, 1712, and immediately passed by that body with some amendments. It is not mentioned by whom this act was introduced. It was sent at once to the Governor and Council. That body hesitated to act so inconsiderately upon so grave and .important a measure, and returned it with a message on the 28th, saying : -
" We take it to be a bill of that consequence that it will require your, as well as our diligent care to over- look all the statutes, that we may know whether all or any part of them are adapted to the nature and constitu- tion of the government of the province. We give to you as our advice and opinion that the best way for both Houses to be satisfied in a case of this consequence will be to commit the bill to a committee of both Houses to ex- amine the said statutes in which we shall readily join with you in appointing a committee to join a committee of yours." This suggestion of the Governor and Council was at first accepted by the House, and a committee appointed to examine the bill and the several English statutes with instructions to report at the next session of the General Assembly; or if in case that Assembly should sit no more, the committee were to report to the next sit- ting of the succeeding General Assembly. What occurred to change this course of proceeding, and to demand im-
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mediate action upon the bill, is not disclosed in the journal, nor is there any other contemporaneous statement. The entries in the journal merely show that the bill was read a second time on December 5th, and a third time on the 11th, and that it was ratified on the 12th. The committee probably shrank from so arduous a labor as the revision of these statutes, or perhaps felt themselves incompetent to the task, and determined to accept Trott's work as it stood. It is. perhaps, after all as well that they did so. Their crude attempts to amend may have rather marred than improved a compilation which has remained the groundwork of all subsequent general legislation in South Carolina for nearly two centuries.
There had as yet been no collection of the statutory laws of the province, as had been made in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia. This want Chief Justice Trott now also supplied. He made a collection of all the statu- tory enactments he could find, and had them " digested into an exact and easy method," and " a double transcript of the same, with marginal notes, references, and tables, fitted for the press." This work was laid before the General Assem- bly, approved and adopted by it, and Trott was allowed £250 for his copy. It was also enacted " that the body of the Laws of this Province, being collected by the said Nicholas Trott, shall be forthwith transmitted, either to London, New Yorke, or Boston in New England, there to have four hundred books of the Laws printed and bound, at the charge of the publick and to be paid out of the publick Treasury of the Province, and to be transmitted at the risque of the publiek." Further, it was provided "that the said book of the Laws when printed as afore- said be and shall be taken deemed and held a good and lawful Statute Book of this Province in all Courts and upon all occasions whatsoever as the Statute Book of
.
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the Laws of Great Britain is deemed held and taken in that kingdom," etc.1 Owing, probably, to the financial difficulties of the province. the Indian wars, the troubles with the pirates. and to the revolution which soon took place. overthrowing the Proprietary Government, which revolution was brought about curiously enough in a great measure by his own tyrannical and corrupt conduct, the publication of Trott's collection was not made for more than twenty years after. The manuscript volume, how- ever, now in the Secretary of State's office in Columbia, remains a monument to his patient industry and ability. It was not printed until 1736.
Instead of the crude, fanciful, and extravagant Consti- tutions of Shaftesbury and Locke, Craven and Trott had now substituted a well-digested and tried system of law suited to the condition of the people of the colony, and fulfilling the requirement of the charter that the laws of the province should be as near as conveniently might be to the laws and customs of England.
It was, however, during this year that the unfortunate experiment was made of establishing a public bank. In 1702, in order to pay the expenses occasioned by the expe- dition to St. Augustine, the Assembly authorized the issue of stamped bills of credit to be sunk in three years by a duty on liquors, skins, and furs. This was the first paper money that appeared in the province, and was the origin of current money mentioned in various acts of Assembly, and of what was called oll currency to the end of the Royal Government. It was denominated current money to distinguish it from sterling money of England, very little of which was ever in circulation. the balance of trade being always in favor of the mother country.
The credit of this currency was at first equal to sterling
1 Statutes of So. Ca., vol. II, 602.
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and so continued for about six years, but afterwards depre- ciated. The necessities of the government continually increasing, requiring fresh supplies of a medium of value for circulation to defray the expenses incurred by. the Indian and Spanish wars and other exigencies of the colony, succeeding emissions of bills of credit took place. The first emissions were $4000 in 1706.1 and £8000 in 1707.2 But in 1712 a new and plausible project was adopted. which, however, contrary to the expectations of its friends, diminished the value of the bills. Interest was then ten per cent, and lands were increasing in value from the successful culture of rice. These circumstances suggested the idea of a land bank as an easy and practi- cable mode of obtaining money, and of supporting the credit of paper. The enormous issue of £52.000 was made in bills of credit, called bank bills, to be loaned out at interest to such of the inhabitants as could give the requisite security and agreed to pay interest annually in addition to the twelfth part of the principal. This
paper currency might be legally tendered in payment of debts. On their emission the rate of exchange and the price of produce quickly increased. In the first year it advanced to 150 and in the second year to 200 per cent. A further depreciation resulted from a further emission of £15,000 by the Assembly in 1716 to assist in defraying the expenses of the Yamassee war. In ten years after the bank was established, - 1722, - it was fixed by law at four for one.3 This bank act excited the remonstrance of the London merchants. and the Proprietors severely censured Governor Craven for its enactment.4
1 Statutes of No. Ca., vol. II, 274. 2 Ibid., 802.
3 Ibid., 880. note. 711 ; Introduction to Brevard's Digest, xi ; Ramsay's Hist. of No. Ca., vol. II. 102.
+ Hist. Sketches of No. Ca. (Rivers), 257; Hewatt's list. of So. Ca .. vol. 1, 207.
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