William Penn in Pennsylvania: North Carolina and Southern

The whole State of North Carolina did not, at that time, contain quite four thousand inhabitants. They carried on a feeble trade in tobacco, maize and fat cattle, with the merchants of New England, whose little vessels brought in exchange those articles of foreign production which the settlers could not otherwise procure. English cupidity envied them their privileges, and the navigation laws of 1672 were put in force. An agent of the government appeared, who demanded a penny for every pound of tobacco sent to New England. The colonists resisted the levy. The tax-gatherer was rude, and had frequent personal collisions with the people. On one occasion he attempted to drive away a steer in satisfaction of a demand for the tax on the tobacco of a planter, which had just been shipped for Boston, when the sturdy wife of the yeoman beat him off with a mop-stick, and saved the animal from the tax-gatherer.

Finally, the exasperated people, led by John Culpepper, a refugee from the Southern or Carteret county colony, seized the governor and the public funds; imprisoned him and six of his councillors; called a new representative Assembly, and appointed a chief magistrate and judges. That was in December, 1677. For two years the colonists conducted the affairs of their government without any foreign control. Meanwhile Culpepper, whom the royalists denounced as an "ill man," one who merited "hanging for endeavoring to set the people to plunder the rich," conscious of his integrity, went boldly to England to plead the cause of the colonists. There he was arrested, just as he was re-embarking for America, on a charge of treason, for which he was tried and acquitted. Returning to North Carolina, he was appointed surveyor-general of the province; and in 1680 he was employed in laying out the city of Charleston in South Carolina.

The Northern colony now enjoyed repose for awhile, until the arrival of Seth Sothel as governor. He had purchased the share of Clarendon in the soil of the provinces, and was sent to administer government there. On his voyage he was captured by Algerine pirates, but escaped, and reached North Carolina in 1683. Avaricious, extortionate, cruel, without the abilities of a statesman and mean-spirited--"the dark shades of his character not relieved by a single virtue"--he sought the government with the hope of winning a fortune thereby. His advent disturbed the public tranquillity. He plundered the people, cheated the proprietors, and on all occasions seems to have prostituted his delegated power to purposes of private gain. After enduring his misrule for about six weeks, the people rose in rebellion, seized the governor, and were about to send him to England to answer their accusations before the proprietors, when he asked to be tried by the colonial Assembly. That body were evidently more merciful than his associates in England would have been, for they found him guilty and sentenced him to only one year's banishment and perpetual disqualification for the office of governor. Sothel then withdrew to the Southern colony, where we shall meet him presently.

Sothel's successor, Philip Ludwell, was an energetic and honest man. By the exercise of wisdom and justice, he soon restored order and good feeling in the colony. He was succeeded by other honorable men, among them the good John Archdale, a member of the Society of Friends, who came in 1695 as governor of the two colonies. His administration was a blessing. The people of North Carolina, over whom he ruled, were almost as free in their opinions and actions, as the air they breathed. There were few restraints of any kind, legal or moral, yet the people were generally enemies to violence, and gentle-tempered. They were widely scattered, with not a city or town, and scarcely a hamlet in their sylvan domain. There were no roads but bridle-paths from house to house, and these were indicated by notches cut in trees. There was no settled minister of the gospel among them until 1703. The first church erected in North Carolina appeared in 1705. No building for a court-house was constructed until 1722; and it was not until 1754--about a hundred years after the first permanent settlement was made in the region of the Chowan--that a printing-press was set up in the province.