USA > South Carolina > The history of South Carolina under the proprietary government, 1670-1719, V.2 > Part 23
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and. on the 15th of January, 1723, he ordered that the sum above mentioned should be paid over to Trott and his wife, and thereupon they should convey the shares to Danson. Danson died during the litigation. and his widow, refusing to pay the amount decreed. was com- mitted to prison until she did so. The two shares were, on the 29th of October. 1724. ordered to be sold. This was done on the 16th of February. 1725, whereupon they were purchased by one Hugh Watson for #900 for both proprietorships. Watson bought, however, only as trustee. and afterwards conveyed one of the proprietorships to Henry Bertie. and the other to James Bertie. Mary Danson. the widow. after having been confined in prison nearly two years because of her refusal to pay as ordered. appealed from the decree of Lord Chancellor Macclesfield to the House of Lords, before which tribunal she was represented by the celebrated lawyers Talbot and Finch. The appeal delayed the settlement of this province four years, when. at last. the plucky widow won her cause. and the decree of Macclesfield was reversed. Nicholas Trott. of London, was now also dead, the long litigation was at last compromised. and the House of Lords. by a decree, carried out a settlement which had been agreed upon. By this decree. upon Mary Danson's repaying to Henry Bertie the money he had paid for the Berkeley share. he. Bertie, together with Elizabeth Moor, the surviving heir at law of Amy. were required to execute a conveyance of the share to Mary Danson. The money thus paid by Mary Danson. it was further decreed, should be refunded her by Ann Trott out of the assets of Nicholas Trott's estate. What consideration Amy's heirs derived from the settlement does not appear : they seem to have lost not only all benefit of the services he rendered the Pro- prietors at the Carolina Coffee House by drumming for
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colonists. but the money he expended there as well. Mary Danson must finally have reconveyed the share to Henry Bertie, as in the act of surrender he is treated as the owner, and paid a share of the purchase money. The appeal as to James Bertie was dismissed, and his title to the Clarendon-Sothell share thus confirmed.
Nothing definitely could be done in regard to the civil and political condition of the province until the title to these shares had been finally adjudicated. In the mean- while, the Proprietors, having issued caceats against the appointment of a Governor or grants of any offices with- out notice to their Lordships, matters were so arranged in 1721 by his Majesty's act of grace upon his return, that the Proprietors acquiesced in the provisional Governor's appointment until the complaints of the colonists were inquired into and settled.1 The Proprietors continued, however. from time to time, to assert their rights under the charter. In 1725 they appointed Robert Wright Chief Justice, Thomas Kimberley Attorney General. James Stanway Naval officer. Thomas Lowndes Provost Marshal, and Edward Bertie Secretary: 2 at the same time they asked the Royal Government to appoint Colonel Samuel Hersey Governor, offering to make him a Landgrave. annexing thereto four baronies of 12.000 acres each.3 The next year Thomas Lowndes purchased of the heirs of John Price. deceased. his landgraveship with five baronies of 12,000 acres of land each, but surrendered the patent and accepted in lieu four single baronies.+
The Proprietors made another effort to recover their government. On the 26th of June, 1726, they petitioned the King that the provisional Governor might be com- manded to assist them in obtaining their just dues and
1 Coll. Hist. Soc. of So. ('m., vol. I. 172. 2 Ibid., 105, 199. : Ibil. + Ibid .. 174.
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rights ; that he be directed to continue the officers ap- pointed by them in their employment ; that they might have the power to appoint other officers; that the pro- visional Governor might be instructed to eject those from - the Proprietors' lands who. after deposing their Governor. had committed various excesses thereon, cutting timber, etc. They concluded by praying that the petitioners might be restored to their ancient inheritance.1 Two years after this. however. March 5. 1727-28. they had given up hope of restoration and petitioned the King praying him to accept an absolute and entire surrender of their interest in the province in consideration of the sum of £25.000. just one-tenth of what they had hoped to have received from the South Sea company. Later. they again memorialize the King, stating that about twelve months before they had proposed to surrender to his Majesty all interest in the province for the sum of £25,000 : that they had laid their letter before the Attor- ney and Solicitor Generals, and that a conveyance was then proposed with a covenant that they should consent to an act of Parliament. They express their disappointment and surprise to learn that the surrender could not be made without an act first obtained for the purpose.2 The decree of the House of Lords in the case of Dunson v. Trott had now. however, removed all difficulty on the score of conflicting titles, and an act was passed to carry out the agreement.
To this agreement Lord Carteret was not a party. Though he had paid little attention to his duties as Palatine or even as a Proprietor, he did not desire to part with his right or interest in the province. and declined to set any determinate value upon an estate likely to become of great value to his family. Lord Carteret's refusal to
1 Coll. Hist. Soc. of So. Ca., vol. 1, 173. 2 Ibid., 175.
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join in the surrender did not, however, prevent its con- summation by the remaining Proprietors. The act of Parliament provided that the seven-eighths shares of the surrendering Proprietors - to wit, of Henry Duke of Beaufort. William Lord Craven, James Bertie, Henry" Bertie, Sir John Colleton, Archibald Hutcheson, who held in trust for John Cotton the share of Maurice Ashley. deceased, and of Joseph Blake, now come of age, of which Samuel Wragg was agent - should be vested and settled upon Edward Bertie of Gray's Inn, Samuel Hersey of the parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Field, Henry Smith of Cay- ersham, and Alexius Clayton of the Middle Temple. in trust ; that upon the payment to these trustees of the sum of £17,500, they should surrender and convey to the King these shares; and that thereupon the same become vested in his Majesty. The act also provided for the purchase on the part of the Crown of seven-eighths of the quit-rents due from the colonists to the Proprietors for the additional sum of £5000.
While the Royal Government had availed itself of the revolution of the people of South Carolina in 1719, and had accepted their overthrow of the Proprietors' rule, the title to the lands in the province had remained for - ten years in their Lordships - the eight Proprietors. Upon this surrender of the charter by seven of them. under the act of Parliament authorizing and accepting it, the title to the lands became vested in the King as to seven-eighths ; but as Lord Carteret refused to join in the surrender, the remaining eighth share or interest still continned in him, the King and his Lordship thus becoming tenants in common of the lands of the prov- inces, both of North as well as of South Carolina. This anomalous condition of things continued until 1744. and was only put to an end by a change scarcely less anoma-
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lous. On the 17th of September of that year, an indent- ure was entered into between his Majesty the King of the one part, and the Right Hon. John Lord Carteret of the other, whereby his Lordship, in consideration of the allot- ment to him of all that part of North Carolina lying next to the province of Virginia and extending to a line drawn from a point six and one-half miles southward of Chiek- macomack Inlet westward, which tract embraced more than half of the province of North Carolina, released his interest in all the remainder of the territory embraced in the charter of Charles IT. It was expressly stipulated, however. in this indenture that his Lordship abandoned all right or title to political power under that charter.1
The full legal title to all of South Carolina thus did not entirely revert and become vested in the King of England during the life of his Majesty. King George the First. This was not accomplished until in the reign of his successor. King George the Second.
I Colonial Records of No. Ca., vol. IV, 655, 663.
CHAPTER XXXI
FROM the accession of James the Second the Royal Government had sought occasion or opportunity to set aside the viceregal powers of the Proprietors and to resume the immediate control of public affairs. not only in Carolina, but in all of the Proprietary colonies. Especially did it seek to do so in this province. The agitation of the question had been pressed by Edward Randolph. Col- lector of the Roval customs. and the Board of Trade and Plantations had been constantly on the alert to find some ground of forfeiture of the Proprietors' charter. They had seized upon the occasion of the Church act of 1704 to advise its suppression. and the Whig House of Lords had declared it forfeited because of Lord Gran- ville's policy in endeavoring to secure Tory influence in the colony by means of the sacramental test. Then upon the breaking out of the Indian wars they had encouraged Boone and Berresford in their appeals to be taken under the Royal protection. The law officers of the Crown had twice been called upon to institute proceedings to have the charter declared forfeited. But that instrument had recklessly given the most extraordinary powers, and it was found a very difficult task to point out wherein its authority had been exceeded. except in the one instance in which the Royal Government seemed as little inclined to act as the Proprietors themselves; and that was in the violation of the provision of the charter by which laws could only be enacted " by and with the advice, assent, and
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approbation of the freemen" of the province. When his Majesty received the address of the inhabitants praying to be taken under his immediate government without ob- jection or rebuke. the Proprietors must have realized that their power and influence no longer existed. His Majesty's government was, nevertheless, setting a most dangerous precedent when. instead of taking the initiative and frankly and boldly resuming the government, which it may well be doubted if ever the King had the right to delegate. it weakly encouraged the people to rise against the Proprietors, and accepted their overthrow not as of Royal authority. but as the result of revolution.
The Proprietary Government covered the period of the first fifty years of the province of South Carolina. During this time the colony had been planted and grad- ually formed and developed into a community organized socially and politically. The Roval Government, upon assuming its immediate administration, found it a state with a well-digested body of laws; with the institution of African slavery under a formulated code, upon which was based the beginning at least of a social order of its own ; with a staple of food and commerce, the production of which in America was limited almost entirely to its own territory, and along with the cultivation of which negro slaves were improving and multiplying, and their masters laying the foundation of fortunes. It found the colonists, in spite of the calamities of war, pestilence, and flood, and notwithstanding the representations of their agents in London, a bold, self-reliant, and prospering people.
The several causes to which we alluded in the intro- ductory chapter to this work- to wit, (1) the position of the colony as an outpost : (2) the inevitable contest between the rights of the colonists under the charter, on
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the one hand, and the pretensions of the Proprietors under the Fundamental Constitutions, on the other; (3) the introduction of African slavery, and the suitableness of the climate to the negro race, together with the find- ing of an article of food which could be successfully cultivated by negro labor for foreign as well as home consumption ; and (4) the consequent formation of a social order based upon the institution of African sla- very following the system brought from Barbadoes -- had all tended to the formation of the character and controlled the development of the people of Carolina.
The planting of the colony on the Ashley, i.e. the St. George's Bay of the Spaniards, had been a direct chal- lenge to war; for, while acknowledging in a general way the right of England to her possessions in America, Spain had never agreed to a settlement of the line be- tween her territory of Florida and that of Carolina claimed by Great Britain : and when King Charles the Second by his second charter extended his territorial claim from "the River St. Matthias which bordereth upon the coast of Florida and within one and thirty degrees of northern latitude" - the limit of his first grant - to a point "as far as the degrees of twenty-nine inclusive northern latitude," thus including in his grant the Spanish post of St. Augustine itself, he entailed a condition of war upon any colony which might be estab- lished under its claims. The Spaniards at St. Augustine at once accepted the challenge and made war upon the colony on the Ashley from its very inception. France, also. advancing her claims to the territory eastward of the Mississippi and northward of Mobile, was disputing the westward limits of Carolina. The Indian tribes, with whom the Spaniards and French alike coalesced with greater facility than did the English colonists, presented
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the ready means of continual, though unavowed, hostility. and circumscribed the advance of the colony not only by open warfare, but by the dread of the lurking savage.
The first immigrants had not yet settled on the Ashley when the Spaniards appeared. giving them notice that the colony must fight for its existence. In 1686 they de- stroyed the settlement under Lord Cardross. and ravaged the country nearly to the fortifications of the town. Then had followed, twenty years later. the combined in- vasion of the French and Spaniards, which had been so successfully repulsed by Sir Nathaniel Johnson. Then the Indians. instigated by the French and Spaniards, had risen upon the colonists ; but these risings the colonists had put down. on the one hand driving the Apalachis to the walls of St. Augustine, and on the other. going to the assistance of their neighbors in North Carolina, had expelled the Tuscaroras from that province. Then in 1715 had occurred the great Indian War which for a time threatened the utter ruin and devastation of the colony. But this insurrection, with but little and feeble assistance from North Carolina and Virginia, they had ultimately suppressed. The colony had thus been in a constant state of warfare, and had found able military leaders in Sir Nathaniel Johnson. Colonel Daniel. Colonel Rhett, Colonel Barnwell, the Moores, - James and his two sons, James and Maurice, -and Colonel Chicken. The Indian troubles had immediately been followed by the blockade of the harbor of Charles Town by the pirates, and the gallant and successful expeditions against them by Rhett and Governor Robert Johnson. These wars and conflicts had given the strong military turn to the colonists of which we have spoken, and had devel- oped in them a resolute and independent spirit. This military turn, the institution of slavery had tended also
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to develop; and military organization had become an institution not only of defence against foreign invaders and hostile Indians, but also of domestic police rendered necessary by the constant importation of negroes as sav- age. if less warlike than the Indians themselves.
The attempt to impose Locke's Fundamental Consti- tutions upon the colony without "the advice assent and approbation of the freemen" of the province had raised the question of the constitutional powers of the Proprie- tors. From the very outset, when their Lordships had attempted to evade the provisions of their charter. re- quiring the concurrence of the freemen in the enactment of laws, by granting lands only to those who would be sworn to submission to them and to their scheme of government, and from the time when Will Owen " cen- sured the legality" of the first election held in the province, the people of Carolina had been learning the great political lesson of government by a written con- stitution. It was this principle - the essential differ- ence between the constitution of tradition and precedent of England and the lex scriptu of America - that was forced upon their attention by the effort of the Proprie- tors to impose that preposterous system of laws upon the colony. Thus it came to pass that the first political ques- tion asked and debated in Carolina was: " What is written in the law ? how readest thou ? " And that question has continued to be asked and repeated in all the history of the province and State. The revolution of 1719 was upon the terms of the charter : that of 1776 in South Carolina was to a considerable extent upon the " Additional Instruction" to the Governors of South Carolina, directing the control of the House of Commons in the disposition of its public funds. the Roval instructions to the Governors having su- perseded the charter as the constitution of the province.
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The assertion of the right of nullification in 1832, and of secession in 1860. were severally upon the construction of the Constitution of the United States. In the discussion of the right to impose the Fundamental Constitutions. and again in resisting the Church act of 1704, the people were learning to contend for a strict construction of the Royal charter, the constitution of the province, as alike binding upon Proprietors and colonists. 1
As we have before observed, though the extraordinary body of laws proposed by Shaftesbury and Locke were never constitutionally adopted, and so were never legally of force, yet the appointment of Landgraves and Caciques, empty. paltry titles though they were. sought alike by Puritans and churchmen, and the laying out of seigniories, baronies. and manors, doubtless gave an aristocratic temper to the government of the colony, which tendency was greatly increased by the prosperous implanting of the institution of African slavery, thus at once affording a peasant class in the place of the "leet men" of the Fundamental Constitutions, who never came. The cli- mate agreed with the negroes, who could live in the swamps, which were fatal to the white man. and yet was not as enervating as that of the negroes' native land, nor as that of the tropical islands from which many of them were brought. But the institution. possibly, would not have taken such vigorous root in the soil had there not been found an article of commerce which could be suc- cessfully cultivated by its labor.
Before the cultivation of rice in Carolina, Portugal. which was a great consumer of that article of food. had been supplied from Italy. It was the opportunity of this market that had greatly induced the people of Carolina to devote their attention to the production of this article
1 See The American Commonwealth (Bryce), vol. I, 413.
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of commerce. Their labor and industry were by degrees rewarded by an abundant increase of this useful and valu- able product, and they had nearly monopolized the Portu- guese market when, by an act of 3d and 4th Anne, rice was added to the "enumerated commodities," in the navigation acts, the exportation of which was restricted to Great Britain. This act required the rice of Carolina intended for Portugal and Spain to be shipped first to England and reexported to those countries. The cost of this additional freight, with the other charges of re- exportation, was estimated at one-third of its value. This cut off Carolina as a competitor with Italy and the East Indies, in the markets of southern Europe. and lost them that great trade. Thus from Christmas, 1712, to Christ- mas. 1717, there were annually imported into England from Carolina and other plantations 28,073 hundredweight of rice, and from East India, Turkey, and Italy only about 250 hundredweight. Of the amount imported from Caro- lina but 2478 hundredweight were reexported to Portu- gal, Spain, and other ports south of Cape Finisterre ; while 20,458 hundredweight were reexported to Holland. Ger- many, and other countries north of that cape; leaving 5387 hundredweight for consumption in England.1 It was in this matter that the navigation acts of Great Brit- ain, the ultimate cause of the American Revolution of 1776. pressed most hardly upon Carolina. But though deprived of what should have been the chief market of the province. yet the trade even to the northern countries of Europe, encumbered as it was with the restriction of reexportation charges, was becoming of great value. and drawing a con- siderable commerce to Charles Town. This it was that attracted the attention of the pirates to the harbor of the town which could be so easily watched from Cape Fear.
1 Colonial Records of Vo. Ca., vol. II, 124.
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The successful production of rice, and its value as an article of commerce, with the manufacture of pitch and tar in which negro labor could also be profitably em- ployed, tended greatly to the enlargement of the institu- tion of African slavery and to strengthen its hold upon the people. Indigo and cotton were vet to be found equally suited to cultivation by this labor; but during the time of the Proprietary Government, and for a number of years after. it was upon rice chiefly that negro labor could be employed with great remuneration. Carolina rice had already become esteemed as the best in the world.1 a reputation it sustains to this day.2
Disputed titles. repeated hurricanes, exhaustion of the limited areas of lands in Barbadoes, and its overcrowded population had driven many of the people of that island to Carolina. These people came with colonial experience. and brought with them their negro slaves already broken in to labor. and only wanting a soil and commodity upon which to bestow it. They brought also with their slaves a system of government and control, and customs and manners which the experience of half a century had developed. A social order in a great measure already formed was thus transferred from Barbadoes to Carolina. Unlike the first settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, each of which. as we have suggested, had to be built up from its very foundation, according to its individual circumstances and environments. the emigrants from Bar- badoes came with a colonial social system of their own. which. beginning a little later than that of Virginia, was nearly as old and as fully developed as that of Massachusetts, ready for adaptation by the new colonists from England. Communication with England at first was by way of
1 Colonial Records of No. Ca. vol. II. 424. - South Carolina's Resources, etc., 12.
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Barbadoes. and the first trade of the colony was with that island. This intercourse continued. and strongly influ- enced the Carolina colony. "The Goose Creek men." against whom Ludwell was warned, were the Barbadians Moore. Gibbes, Middleton, and others who had settled there. It was to Barbadoes that the very able, if unprin- cipled. Governor Sothell turned for a code of laws for the government of slaves, and the statute book of that island furnished the precedent for many others of this province. It was from this source, as it has appeared, that the peculiar parish system of South Carolina was derived. It was upon this basis. with the additional aristocratic tendency, encouraged by the partial establishment of the Funda- mental Constitutions, that the social order of South Caro- lina was formed.
Some remarkable men had appeared in the public affairs of the colony during the Proprietary rule. Sayle, West, Smith, Morton, and Blake were men of sober and virtuous lives, and of fair capacity in public matters. Their ad- ministrations. while subject to the inevitable inconven- iences and struggles of a new community. had been, upon the whole. wise if not brilliant. Sothell, whatever may have been his private character, however disputed his right to the government. had shown great political ability in his brief administration, particularly in his treatment of the Huguenot settlers. Sir Nathaniel Johnson, though a bigoted Tory, was a man of the highest character, and a soldier of reputation. His defence of the province. upon the occasion of the French and Spanish invasion, in 1706. forms one of the brilliant pages in South Caro- lina's history. His son Robert, afterwards to be known under the Royal Government as the "Good Governor Robert Johnson." had come only at the last struggle of the Proprietary Government, and the colony had no op-
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