Government for the Carolinas Framed

We have observed that it was designed to establish a great empire in the region of the Carolinas. It was deemed proper to devise a scheme of government commensurate with that grand idea. To Sir Ashley Cooper, and the philosopher John Locke, was entrusted the task of framing a constitution. Cooper was then about forty-seven years of age, and in the full maturity of his genius and power. He was of an old and wealthy family, and connected with some of the most distinguished members of the English aristocracy. He was now a royalist of the strictest pattern. A few years later (1672), he was elevated to the peerage as Earl of Shaftesbury, and made Lord High Chancellor of England. Locke was much younger-only thirty-four-but was a more profound thinker than Cooper, and was already famous as a philosopher. He was a tutor of Cooper's son. His views of government were consonant with those of his friend, the statesman and courtier. Neither of these men was fitted for the task of framing an acceptable constitution for the government of a free people, and the magnificent scheme which they prepared, with the title of "Fundamental Constitutions," was entirely inconsistent with the condition and circumstances of the American colonists. It was the production chiefly of the brain and hand of Locke, it is believed, and was perfected in 1669. For purposes of settlement, the proposed constitution provided for dividing the vast domain into counties, each to contain four hundred and eighty thousand acres. These lands were to be distributed in five equal parts, one-fifth to remain the inalienable property of the proprietors; another fifth the inalienable property of two orders of nobility, namely, landgraves or earls, and caciques or barons, one of the former and two of the latter belonging to each county; and the remaining three-fifths to belong to "the peoples," that is to say, farmers and lords of manors, the latter having no prescriptive legislative powers, but exercising judicial functions on their respective domains, in baronial courts. The number of the nobility was not to be increased nor diminished, the places of those who should not leave heirs, to be supplied by election. It gave to every freeman of Carolina absolute power over his negro slaves; and tenants, cultivating small quantities of land, were not only to be denied political franchises of any kind, but were serfs of the soil, and under the jurisdiction of their lord, without appeal; and all their children were to endure the same social degradation "to all generations."

When that elaborate constitution, which provided for titles, and classes, and aristocratic distinctions in America, was submitted to the people of the Carolinas, they rejected it as absurd in its details. They had made judicious laws for their own government, were satisfied with their workings, and resolved to have nothing to do with the scheme of the proprietors. Under their own laws they built up flourishing colonies, inseparable in interests and aims, and so they remained over sixty years, when they were dismembered and formed the separate colonies of North and South Carolina.