Settlers in North Carolina

The grant alluded to was made to several of the rapacious courtiers of Charles the Second, the most of them men past middle-life in age, and possessed of the easy virtue which distinguished the reign of that monarch. They begged the domain of the king under the pretence of "a pious zeal for the propagation of the gospel" among the heathen. Their real object was to rob the "heathen" of their lands, and to accumulate riches and honor for themselves. These grantees were the covetous and time-serving Earl of Clarendon, the historian and the Prime Minister; Monk, who, for his conspicuous and treacherous services in the restoration of Charles to the throne of his father, had been created Duke of Albemarle; Lord Craven, who is supposed to have been the husband of the Queen of Bohemia; Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, afterward Earl of Shaftesbury; Sir John Colleton, a corrupt loyalist who had played false to Cromwell; Lord John Berkley and his younger brother, Sir William, who was then governor of Virginia; and the "passionate, ignorant and not too honest" Sir George Carteret, proprietor of New Jersey. It is said that when these petitioners appeared before Charles in the garden at Hampton Court and presented their memorial so full of pious pretensions, the monarch, after looking each in the face for a moment, with a merry twinkle of his eye, burst into loud laughter, in which his audience joined involuntarily. Then taking up a little shaggy spaniel, with large, meek eyes, and holding it at arms length before them, he said: "Good friends, here is a model of piety and sincerity which might be whole-some for you to copy." Then tossing the little pet to Clarendon, he said: "There, Hyde, is a worthy prelate; make him archbishop of the domain which I shall give you." He granted the prayer of the petitioners, and in March, 1663, he gave them a charter for the territory which had been given to Sir Robert Heath. By the terms of that charter, the proprietors were made absolute sovereigns of the domain, returning to their king only a bare allegiance. Charles, with grim satire, introduced into the preamble of the charter the statement that the petitioners, "excited with a laudable and pious zeal for the propagation of the Gospel, have begged a certain country in the parts of America not yet cultivated and planted, and only inhabited by some barbarous people who have no knowledge of God." The title of "Carolina," in honor of the king, was given to this vast domain.

We have observed that some non-conformists from Virginia were settled on the banks of the Chowan ten years before the charter was granted. How extensive was the settlement at the latter period, we do not know. The plantations were mostly on the northern bank of the Chowan, and had become so conspicuous that in the autumn of 1663 the new proprietors authorized Governor Berkeley, of Virginia, to extend his jurisdiction over them. He organized a separate government instead, under the title of the Albemarle County Colony, so named in honor of Monk. He appointed William Drummond, a Presbyterian emigrant from Scotland to Virginia, and a republican at heart, governor, and gave to the colonists every freedom which they could reasonably desire. Here was presented the anomaly of a colony founded under the direction and control of rigid churchmen and royalists who were filling the prisons of England with men like John Bunyan, composed of non-conformists as rigid as these, and republicans as staunch as Sidney. And they were left to grow into an independent state with very little hindrance.

Two years later some English emigrants came from Barbadoes, purchased from the Indians a tract of land on the Cape Fear River, thirty-two miles square, including the domain abandoned by the New Englanders, and near the site of Wilmington founded a settlement. They treated the few New Englanders who had remained very kindly, and harmony prevailed. This settlement was soon organized into a political community under the title of the Clarcndon County Colony, in honor of the historian. Sir John Yea mans, an impoverished baronet who had settled in Barbadoes to improve his fortune, was appointed governor of the new colony, with a jurisdiction extending from Cape Fear to the St. John's River. The poverty of the soil prevented a rapid growth of the settlement, yet the industry of the inhabitants made them prosperous. Finding themselves in the bosom of a vast pine forest, the settlers turned their labor into the manufacture of boards, shingles and staves, and the gathering of turpentine, for all of which they found a ready and profitable sale in the West Indies. The settlement became permanent; and so, with the organization of the two colonies, the foundation of the commonwealth of North Carolina was laid.