15 The Glorious Revolution and its Aftermath Maryland

Sixteen eighty-eight was the year of the Glorious Revolution in England, the year when Great Britain experienced the last of its great political upheavals of the turbulent seventeenth century. The Stuart king, the Catholic James II, was deposed in that year and the monarchy secured to the impeccably Protestant William and Mary of Orange. This year of upheaval signaled the troubled and oppressed colonies to seize the opportunity of Britain’s distraction at home to try to secure their own freedom.

By ironic coincidence, Lord Baltimore sent William Joseph as deputy governor to run the Maryland colony in late 1688, and Joseph opened the Assembly only nine days after James II had been deposed by William and Mary. In his opening address—delivered considerably before news of the Glorious Revolution reached America—Joseph proved himself to be an extreme advocate of divine and feudal right to rule. He declared: “The power by which we are assembled here is undoubtedly derived from God, to the King, and from the King to his Excellency the Lord Proprietary, and from his said Lordship to us.”

When news came of the change of regimes in England, people angrily remembered that Joseph had, in the fall of 1688, insisted on the colony’s giving thanks for the birth of a Catholic heir to the throne. Agitation also arose in the colony because Lord Baltimore’s courier, coming to order the colony to proclaim allegiance to William and Mary, died en route and left Maryland in unresolved ferment. All the latent anti-Catholicism of the Protestant masses in the colony rose to the surface, aided by the fact that the proprietor was Catholic and the privileged oligarchy in Maryland largely so—the appointed Council, for example, had a Catholic majority. Was a Catholic plot under way? Would the proprietary refuse to acknowledge William and Mary and join James II in his plans for war against his successor? James soon landed in Ireland with French troops, and the colonists well remembered that James’ proconsul in Ireland was Richard Talbot, Duke of Tyrconnel, a relative and close friend of Lord Baltimore. Rumors swept all the American colonies, not only Maryland: the French colonies were about to march on the English colonies in alliance with James; Catholic subversives were planning to help them; and Catholics and Indians were conspiring together to massacre Protestants. It is understandable that the agitation would be most severe in Maryland, where the proprietor was Catholic and the bulk of the people Protestant.

In April 1689 there was formed “an Association in arms for the defense of the Protestant Religion, and for asserting the right of King William and Queen Mary to the Province of Maryland and all the English Dominions.” Leading the association was John Coode, the old revolutionary who had been freed for his part in the Fendall revolt of 1681. Coode had married a daughter of his old confrere, Thomas Gerrard. Other leaders included many eminent men in the colony: Nehemiah Blakiston, collector of the customs; another son-in-law of Gerrard, Kenelm Chesseldine, Speaker of the House of Burgesses; and Colonel Henry Fowles of the militia. When rumors spread that the Catholics were arming themselves in the statehouse at St. Marys, Coode, at the head of several hundred armed men, marched on the capital. On August 1, Joseph and the Council surrendered to the Coode rebels. Coode and the Assembly petitioned William and Mary to end the proprietary regime and finally, in 1691, the new king agreed.

Coode and his followers engaged in violent anti-Catholic propaganda in the course of their revolutionary agitation. However, Coode’s close association with Catholics and his ancient opposition to the proprietary lead to the conclusion that, at least on Coode’s part, the anti-Catholic agitation was but a convenient point d’appui for his aim of ridding Maryland of the tyrannical and feudal proprietary. In Coode’s own history of the rebellion, he stressed the “injustice and tyranny under which we groan... the absolute authority exercised over us in the seizure of their persons, forfeiture and loss of their goods.”

While the Coode rebellion succeeded in overturning the proprietary, the success was only temporary. Aside from the fact that the structure of land tenure remained the same, the proprietor was only displaced for a short period of years. When the third Lord Baltimore died in 1715, the Crown granted the proprietorship once again to the Baltimore family, which had converted from Catholic to Protestant. In the meanwhile, the Crown continued to turn over part of the collected quitrents to the proprietary.

What did change was the religious complexion of the government and society in Maryland. The old tradition of religious toleration in Maryland was abandoned, taxes immediately began to be levied in 1692 for the establishment of the Anglican church, and any further immigration of Catholics into the colony was prohibited under severe penalties. Furthermore, the public celebration of the mass was outlawed. The capital city was summarily shifted from St. Marys, the center of Catholicism in the colony, to Protestant Providence, now renamed Annapolis. (So much was St. Marys strictly a governmental city that it now rapidly diminished to the virtual status of a ghost town.)

Only a small minority of the colony were Anglicans. The Puritans, leaders in the rebellion against the proprietary, were naturally chagrined to be confronted with an established church, but they were appeased when assured in 1702 of freedom of worship, which extended even to Quakers. This limited toleration was established despite the strenuous efforts of the head of the Anglican church in Maryland, Dr. Thomas Bray. Bray had persuaded the Assembly to pass a bill outlawing all forms of worship but the Anglican form in the colony, but fortunately this extreme provision was disallowed by the Crown. Also irritating was the fact that the Anglican ministers were paid by a new poll tax, which was most heavy on the poor. The spirit of Crown toleration, however, did not spread to the Catholics, against whom William pursued his long-time vendetta. The spirit of the government of the time may be seen from a 1704 incident, in which two Catholic priests were arrested for saying mass. They were refused the benefit of counsel; the chapel of St. Marys, venerated by Catholics as the first church in Maryland, was closed down as “scandalous and offensive to the government”; and Governor John Seymour delivered to the priests the following diatribe:

It is the unhappy temper of you and all your tribe to grow insolent upon civility and never know how to use it... if the necessary laws that are made were let loose, they are sufficient to crush you, and which (if your arrogant principles have not blinded you) you must need to dread. You might, methinks, be content to live quietly as you may, and let the exercise of your superstitious vanities be confined to yourselves, without proclaiming them at public times and in public places, unless you expect by your gaudy shows and serpentine policy to amuse the multitude and beguile the unthinking weakest part of them—an act of deceit well known to be amongst you.... In plain and few words, if you intend to live here, let me hear no more of these things; for if I do... be assured I’ll chastise you.... I’ll remove the evil by sending you where you will be dealt with as you deserve.... Pray take notice I am an English Protestant gentleman and can never equivocate.

The House of Delegates was so pleased by this tirade that they formally commended the governor for protecting “Her Majesty’s Protestant subjects here against the insolence and growth of Popery....”

Anti-Catholic hysteria surged through England and the colonies, in the course of a lengthy war waged by England against Catholic France, and of attempts by the Stuart pretender to return to the throne. The crackdown on Catholics was pursued zealously in Maryland. No Catholic was permitted to buy real estate or to practice as a lawyer. Loyalty oaths were to be forced upon all Catholics, and any who refused would be incapable of inheriting land or holding office. The oaths were deliberately worded in such a way that no conscientious Catholic could swear to them. The Test Oath, as required by an Act of 1699, compelled the oath-taker to swear: “I do believe that in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper there is not any transubstantiation.... And that the invocation or adoration of the Virgin Mary or any other saints, and the sacrifice of the Mass as they are now used in the Church of Rome, are superstitious and idolatrous.” If a Catholic widow had married a Protestant, her children could be forcibly seized by the state and placed under Protestant guardians. Catholics were also assessed at rates for emergency tax levies double those of everyone else. A special duty was also levied on all Irish “papist” servants coming into the colony: the duty was doubled in 1717. Catholic priests were in 1698 even prevented by proclamation of the governor (as urged by the House of Delegates) from visiting the sick and dying during a plague. The proclamation ranted:

Several Popish priests and zealous Papists make it their constant business (under pretense of visiting the sick...) to seduce, delude, and persuade divers of His Majesty’s good Protestant subjects to the Romish faith, by which means sundry... have been withdrawn from the Protestant religion, by law established, and from the due and natural obedience they owe to his said Majesty and laws, whereby the party, so reconciled and withdrawn, as well as their procurers and counsellors, have justly incurred the penalty and forfeitures of high treason.

Not only were the priests and their possible dying converts subject to severe penalty, but also anyone who knew of such offenses and did not inform the authorities.

In 1704 a truly comprehensive act was passed for the persecution of Catholics. Catholics were prohibited from practicing their religion, and priests from exercising their office. A reward of 100 pounds was offered to any informer giving evidence against a priest saying mass, and the penalty for a convicted priest was life imprisonment. It was life imprisonment as well for any Catholic found guilty of running a school or educating a child. Children were encouraged to inform on their parents “to the end that the Protestant children of Popish parents may not... want of fitting maintenence.... Be it enacted... that if any such parent in order to the compelling such... Protestant child to change... religion, shall refuse to allow such child a fitting maintenance suitable to the degree and ability of such parent... then upon complaint thereof... it shall be lawful... to make such order....”

Fortunately, however, Queen Anne, less intolerant than her Anglican minions in Maryland, decided to allow private family practice of the Catholic religion. As a result, Catholic services remained partially underground by being held in family chapels on planters’ estates, with other Catholic families of the area invited as “guests.”

Benedict Calvert, the fourth Lord Baltimore, had taken the precaution of converting to the Protestant faith, and so when his father and he both died in 1715, the Calverts were handed back the proprietary title, which now went to Charles Calvert, fifth Lord Baltimore. The resumption of the now Protestant proprietary by no means slackened the pace of persecution. The Anglicans were worried about continuing conversions from their faith and Governor John Hart ordered the surveillance of Catholic priests; any suspected of visiting the homes of dying persons were forced to take the Test Oath. Refusal to swear to the Test Oath meant imprisonment. In 1716 a law decreed that any officeholder caught in any “Popish assembly” and participating in the celebration of the mass would forfeit his office. And finally, in 1718 the Catholics of Maryland were disfranchised through making the Test Oath a requirement for voting.

One amusing byproduct of the anti-Catholic hysteria among the Maryland Anglicans was the apparent existence of a plot by Governor Hart and some leading Anglican clergymen to spread the rumor that young Lord Baltimore and his guardian Lord Guilford were secret Catholics. They thereby hoped to persuade the Crown to turn the proprietary over to Hart himself. The man who reported the plot to the bishop of London was himself a leading Anglican minister in the colony, the Reverend Jacob Henderson. Henderson in turn was accused of being soft on Catholics, an accusation he indignantly denied.

The oppressive poll tax for support of the newly established Anglican church was made payable in a fixed rate in tobacco, which was then the medium of exchange in Maryland. Gresham’s law operated here as in currency, and since the law did not specify the quality of tobacco, payment was always made in the very poorest and most unmarketable grades. As a result, Maryland’s established clergymen were continually impoverished and only the poorest quality of them settled in the colony.

The Carolinas

The North Carolinians, inspired by the Glorious Revolution, seized the opportunity to rid themselves, once and for all, of the tyranny of Seth Sothel. An uprising in 1689, led by Thomas Pollock and other leading colonists, resulted in the arrest of Sothel and his banishment from the province for a year. Sothel was removed permanently from the governorship. He then hied himself to the sister colony of South Carolina, where he was also one-eighth proprietor. The proprietary appointed Colonel Philip Ludwell the new governor of Albemarle, now called North Carolina. Ludwell, Virginia’s leading Berkeleyan, was instructed to redress the grievances of the colonists arising from the Sothel regime. Captain John Gibbs, who had apparently been chosen by the Council as governor to succeed Sothel, tried to maintain the revolutionary impetus, and in 1690 launched an armed rebellion against Ludwell. But the conciliatory policy had done its work and Gibbs’ rebellion lacked popular support. Gibbs and his band were defeated and fled to Virginia. Gibbs and Ludwell both went to London to put their cases before the proprietary and Gibbs, as might have been expected, was repudiated.

Though growing rapidly, South Carolina had a population of something over 3,100 in 1690, still by far the smallest of the Southern colonies. This colony too was racked by strife and accumulated grievances. Like its fellow colony Albemarle, Charleston colony suffered from the crippling restrictions on its tobacco and intercoastal trade inflicted by the Navigation Acts. It also bitterly resisted repeated attempts by the proprietors—if anything more determined than in Albemarle, for less settler resistance was expected farther south—to impose Shaftesbury’s grandiose feudal proposals on the colony. In addition, South Carolina suffered from the demand that quitrents be paid at the far higher rate in coin instead of in commodities. In 1682, the proprietary suddenly decreed that all quitrents must be paid in English money, thus eliminating the option to pay in commodities, and it tightened enforcement of the levy. The aroused Assembly protested that the people had been “extremely hard dealt with,” but the proprietors retorted that their regulations had been designed to counteract those who “instilled fancies” into the heads of the people in order to avoid payment of quitrents.

Further problems were caused by the practice of kidnapping Indians to use for slaves and thus make economically viable the tobacco plantations, a procedure that naturally stimulated retaliatory attacks by the Indians. Conflicts unique to this colony arose from the unwillingness of the English settlers to allow the substantial number of new Huguenot immigrants to vote, and from a fear of a Spanish invasion into what the Spaniards regarded as their imperial territory. The Huguenots were French Protestant refugees from the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

James Colleton, a brother of one of the proprietors and given 48,000 acres in the colony, arrived in South Carolina to become governor in 1687. He immediately alienated the colonists by preventing them from sailing on an expedition of war against the Spanish headquarters at St. Augustine, Florida. Colleton came to the colony determined to impose his will, and particularly to stop the widespread evasion of the hated Navigation Laws and quitrents. He insisted on enforcing these edicts to the hilt, and even on attempting to collect arrears of quitrents. Particularly bitter for the colonists was Colleton’s expulsion, upon arriving at the colony, of all the menbers of the Assembly who opposed the restrictive laws and taxes. All this incurred the growing rage and resentment of the colony and especially of the Assembly. Finally, in 1689 the alarmed proprietors instructed Colleton to suspend all further sessions of the legislature. This tyrannical act further fanned the flames of incipient rebellion, spurred by the fact that the South Carolinian laws had to be renewed every two years to remain in effect, and that a biennial term was now expiring. The final straw occurred in the spring of 1690, when Colleton imposed the despotism of martial law upon the colony. This embraced such actions as imposing a very heavy fine on a minister for delivering a sermon displeasing to the government. In addition, Colleton used his powers of martial law to grant himself a privileged monopoly of trade with the Indians.

Revolution, as we have pointed out, is a time of rapid change, and this often means sharp changes in a person’s values and his views of institutions. Seth Sothel, the former governor of North Carolina who was deposed the year before, had arrived in South Carolina to see a similar revolutionary process brewing against the tyranny of the governor in Charleston. Sothel had apparently learned his lesson; his views changed, and he became the leader of the people’s opposition to Colleton. When Colleton inflicted the final act of repression in imposing martial law, Sothel led a revolutionary coup against the governor. Declaring himself governor, Sothel reconvened the suppressed Assembly and banished Colleton from the colony. Sothel’s action was ignited by a petition signed by over four hundred of the leading citizens. The petition detailed the grievances of the people of the colony, including: the attempts to impose several variants of proposals found in Locke’s Fundamental Constitutions; the imposition of martial law; the governor’s monopolization of the Indian trade; arbitrary arrests; expulsion for any excess of freedom of speech, even by a councillor; and attempts to enforce higher quitrents.

Sothel was allowed to continue his rule for only one year. In the fall of 1691, the proprietors ousted Sothel from office and charged him with high treason. Although Sothel was a one-eighth proprietor of the colony, it was also true that he had organized a revolution against the authority appointed by the proprietary as a whole. Sothel fled back to Albemarle, where his term of banishment was over, and where he soon died in poverty and obscurity. Especially notable in Sothel’s brief term in office was his stimulating the Assembly to pass significantly liberalizing laws. In particular, the French, Swiss, and other non-English immigrants were granted rights equal to those of the English settlers, and severe punishment was decreed for anyone who killed a slave. Other new laws, on the other hand, were repressive: requiring licenses of all retailers of liquor, regulating ship’s pilots, and regulating the Indian trade. The proprietors, on removing Sothel, unfortunately also nullified the laws of his administration.

The ultimate failure of the revolution did not, of course, end the grievances underlying the unrest in the Carolinas. Grudgingly, the proprietary finally issued a general amnesty. For a while the proprietary tried the unsuccessful experiment of uniting the two Carolinas, appointing Philip Ludwell as governor of both colonies. The proprietors tried to force the North Carolinian colonists to send their representatives to the distant Charleston Assembly. This plan was quickly abandoned, and each of the Carolinas was governed by a deputy governor of its own, with the main governor stationed in South Carolina. Each colony also retained its own Assembly, and therefore essentially its own separate government. As in other liberalizing moves, the proprietors promised to abandon their attempts to impose the dicta contained in the Shaftesbury-Locke Fundamental Constitutions; it was now acknowledged that the Carolinas were to be governed by the original charter. In addition, the proprietary removed all obstacles to freedom of trade with the Indians. It also vetoed an act of the Ludwell administration that harassed the rural Huguenots by requiring a uniform hour for all Sunday church services in the colony. Another constructive measure during the Ludwell term was that permitting quitrents to be paid in commodities.

John Archdale, an English Quaker who had become one of the eight proprietors by purchasing the share of Sir John Berkeley, became governor of the Carolinas in 1695. He assumed office with the intent of allaying the grievances of the colonies. His term lasted for only one year, but that year saw a significant liberalization in the Carolina colonies. In the South, peace was made with the Indians; in particular, the practice of whites kidnapping and enslaving the natives was ended. Furthermore, the quitrent burden was significantly lightened, including cessation of the attempt to collect the arrears. From the 1690s on, the main grievance concerning the quitrent had been the threat hanging over the colonists from the huge arrears of uncollected claims. Also, quitrents were made payable in commodities as well as in money. From that point on, the quitrent of one penny per acre was scarcely enforced in the proprietary colony, and the expected revenue accruing to the proprietary dwindled to a negligible sum, not nearly enough to pay the expenses of the local officials. Furthermore, Archdale reshuffled the South Carolina Council to give the Dissenters the majority, and also decreed that with rare exceptions the proprietors could not annul laws without the Assembly’s consent. The liberal reforms continued the following year, during the administration of Archdale’s successor, the Dissenter Joseph Blake, also a one-eighth proprietor. Blake’s Act of 1697 admitted into full civil rights the important Huguenot population of South Carolina as well as other aliens, and guaranteed religious liberty to all Christians except Catholics. This was an important reform in a colony where the large majority of people were Dissenters of one hue or another from the Church of England. Not until 1704, however, were the alien-born permitted to vote in South Carolina.

The Archdale and Blake reforms hardly eliminated the basic conflicts in the colony. Thus, in 1698 the proprietary reneged on its promise—given in the wake of the Sothel rebellion against Colleton—to forget about the Fundamental Constitutions and a new variant of this thoroughly disliked proposal was introduced again and continued to be introduced until 1705.

In 1699, indeed, the South Carolina Assembly saw fit to address a list of grievances to the proprietary. The list included violations of the requirement of consent to all laws by the Assembly, and the accumulation of vast landed estates in the hands of a few privileged persons. The Assembly asked that no land tract be granted over the size of 1,000 acres. Even the king’s collector of customs, the Tory Edward Randolph, warned the Crown in 1699 that “there are but few settled inhabitants in this province, the Lords [proprietors] having taken up vast tracts for their own use... where the land is most commodious for settlement, which prevents peopling the place....” The Assembly also objected strongly to the English tariff on South Carolina rice and naval stores (turpentine, pitch, tar)—but, as in the case of the other grievances, to no effect.

A major grievance soon became Randolph himself, who had arrived in 1699 to enforce vigorously the neglected Navigation Laws and the suppression of popular but illegal trade. Randolph wrote to the Crown of his horror at the pervasive commerce, including trade with the Dutch, all with simply “no regard to the acts of trade.” The institution of royal admiralty courts appointed by the Crown for vigorous enforcement also angered the colonists greatly. Indeed, the South Carolina Assembly, under severe pressure by the people, tried to pass laws in 1700 and 1701—all of course vetoed—to restrict the activities of the royal customs officials.

In North Carolina, the Archdale reforms also lowered the quitrents. Ludwell had attempted to do so, but had for his efforts been angrily removed from office by the proprietary. Soon attempts to collect a penny per acre were abandoned and the rate came to be set generally at two shillings per hundred acres, with payment accepted in commodities. For some land the quitrents were far less. Quitrents continued to be collected, at least partially, for the remainder of the proprietary term. Enforcement, however, was often evaded, and the quitrents were generally absorbed in salaries to local officials, so that the return to the proprietors was small.

From their beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, the Carolina counties had been conspicuous and notable havens of religious liberty. Here they contrasted to other American colonies, including their Spanish neighbors to the south. North Carolina, indeed, had been founded by independent settlers escaping religious and political discrimination in Virginia. The proprietary had announced from the first its intention to establish the Church of England in the Carolinas, but driven by desire to profit by encouraging settlers in the colony, had never put this plan into effect. Into this relatively free haven, then, came numerous dissenting groups, including the much persecuted Quakers and Huguenots, and the Anglicans were in a considerable minority. In fact, even the Anglicans in South Carolina believed strongly in self-government on a congregational level and insisted eventually on appointing their own ministers. In this, they were influenced by the decentralizing spirit of the Presbyterian majority of the colony. And as for North Carolina with its preponderance of Quakers, there had not even been a single Anglican church or priest in the colony, so little was there of an Anglican establishment in the Carolinas.

But this happy condition—this approach to separation of church and state—was not destined to last. Instead, at the turn of the eighteenth century, the Anglican Old Guard moved purposefully and aggressively to fasten a state church upon the only Southern colonies that had yet escaped this incubus. This was a particularly bitter pill for the dissenting majority that had enjoyed religious freedom.

The Anglican aggression was ignited by events in England where, about 1700, a renewed wave of Anglican repression under Queen Anne’s regime was launched against the Dissenters. The peace accord with the Dissenters that had emerged from the Glorious Revolution and been embodied in the Toleration Act of 1689 was now rudely shattered. One of the leaders of a campaign dedicated to the extermination of the Dissenters within one generation was Lord Granville, who also happened to be the palatine of Carolina—that proprietor entrusted with colonial affairs. In 1704, Lord Granville instructed the new governor of South Carolina, Sir Nathaniel Johnson, a veteran supporter of the Stuarts and the Colleton regime, to secure the establishment of the church in the Carolinas.

Johnson was confronted, in South Carolina, with an Assembly majority of Dissenters. To drive through an establishment bill, therefore, he had to resort to trickery and fraud. First, very early in the 1704 session when many members were absent, Johnson rushed through an act excluding all non-Anglicans from the Assembly. This measure was at least temporarily needed, in order to drive through an establishment bill without fear of the Dissenter majority; and the latter was accomplished by the fall of 1704. The bill established the Anglican church and imposed taxation on the public for its support. Many Anglicans opposed this tyrannical seizure; one, the Reverend Edward Marston, was deprived of his salary, deposed from his office, and almost arrested by the new Assembly.

The understandably bitter dissenting colonists appealed the tyrannical law to the proprietor, who of course rejected the appeal. But the Crown and the Board of Trade were persuaded to nullify the two laws. The Crown did not want an establishment so severe on the rights of Dissenters that the growth and the commerce of the colony with England would be repressed. Even the bishop of London, whose diocese included the Carolinas, sided with the protesting colonists. The act of establishment, however, was disallowed because it was too liberal: it allowed the laymen of a parish to remove a minister, thus striking at the principle of hierarchical control of the church by the state.

If both edicts of the Crown had been immediately obeyed, the Assembly, now including a dissenting majority, would have never passed a new act establishing the Anglican church. Hence, Governor Johnson’s new Assembly of 1706, completely excluding Dissenters, rushed through a new establishment act without the provision for lay removal of ministers. Lay members, however, were permitted to select their ministers. Tax funds were appropriated for churches and ministerial salaries; and church repairs were to be paid from assessments on all the inhabitants of the parish. The dissenting Assemblymen were only readmitted after the establishment bill was safely passed.

The Dissenters were naturally angry at their treatment. Though they were no longer excluded from the Assembly, any repeal of the state church would be blocked by the governor’s veto. The Dissenters rioted at length during 1707, the riots being led by a political club headed by prominent Dissenters. Included in these rebellious protests was a new phenomenon: a woman’s political club.

The Dissenters were also embittered because one of their great leaders, Landgrave Thomas Smith, was being persecuted by the Johnson regime. For criticizing the Assembly in a private letter, Smith was ordered arrested; when he escaped, the Assembly sought to disqualify Smith from public office for life. But, in this affair at least, the Dissenters had their revenge. Now Speaker of a Dissenter-controlled Assembly, Smith had the satisfaction of arresting former Speaker Colonel Risbee, the reputed author of the exclusion act, for disrespectful words spoken in private against the new Assembly. Finally, the Dissenters also gained the temporary satisfaction of forcing the proprietors to remove the hated Johnson from office in 1708.

The drive for a state church occurred at the same time in North Carolina, which was at least formally ruled by the South Carolina governor. The northern colony, true to its tradition, was even more dissenting and rebellious than its southern neighbor. North Carolina’s troubles began with the appointment of Henderson Walker, a zealous Anglican, as deputy governor in 1699. Walker, deeply disturbed that North Carolina had successfully gone forty years “without priests or altar,” maneuvered through the Assembly the Vestry Act of 1701, which imposed a state church on North Carolina, including a poll tax on the colonists for support of the Anglican clergymen. The act was disallowed by the proprietary for not going far enough in paying the clergy—but the fight had just begun.

Lord Granville’s instructions to the governor of South Carolina, Sir Nathaniel Johnson, to secure whatever legislation was necessary to impose a state church on the Carolinas, led Johnson to replace Walker as deputy governor of North Carolina with Colonel Robert Daniel. Daniel could not hope to drive the establishment through the North Carolina Assembly, however, as it had a comfortable Quaker majority. The zealous Daniel therefore decided to attain his goal by expelling the Quakers from the Assembly, and used as his weapon a dubious legal application of the new Test Oath of allegiance to Queen Anne, required of all public officials in England. This oath excluded Quakers, who by their religion could only “affirm” and could not swear to oaths. The expulsion of the Quaker assemblymen left the high-church party with a small majority and this party now drove through the new Vestry Act—establishing the church—as well as an act imposing the Test Oath for all public officials (including assemblymen) in the future. The embittered Quakers were able to pressure Governor Johnson to remove Daniel in 1705, but the damage had been done. Despite the establishment, however, Anglican zeal was so weak in freewheeling North Carolina that not until 1732 did the colony see a regular Anglican minister.

The new deputy governor, welcomed by the Quakers for his supposedly liberal views, was Thomas Cary, a Charleston merchant and son-in-law of the great Archdale. But Cary betrayed his supporters by repressing the Quakers even more ardently than had his predecessors. Cary not only expelled the Quakers from the Assembly, but also levied a heavy fine on anyone presuming to enter office without taking the Test Oath. Furthermore, Cary further weakened the Assembly by having an act passed fining anyone daring to promote actively his own election to any office.

The numerous body of North Carolina Quakers finally sent John Porter (a non-Quaker) to England in 1707 to plead their case with the lord proprietors. Two of the proprietors, John Archdale and John Danson, were Quakers, and they persuaded the others of the justice of the Quaker case. The proprietors abolished the Test Oath, deposed Cary, suspended Governor Johnson’s authority over North Carolina, and authorized the Council of North Carolina to select its own president, who would assume the full duties as governor.

The Council then selected as president William Glover, who governed North Carolina in Cary’s stead, but the Anglican Glover betrayed the Quakers in his turn by still insisting on enforcement of the Test Oath. John Porter and the infuriated Quakers now formed an alliance with the double-turncoat Cary to try to oust Glover from his rule. The election to the Assembly of 1708 was won by the Cary-Porter forces, who disregarded Glover’s insistence on the Test Oath, declared Cary governor, voided all the laws of the Glover regime, and appointed many Quakers to office. Leader of the Cary forces in the Assembly was the Speaker, the powerful Edward Moseley, a wealthy planter and devout Anglican, who nevertheless steadfastly supported religious freedom and opposed any establishment. Glover, however, refused to recognize the legality of this democratic upheaval and fled to Virginia still claiming the governorship.

The relatively liberal Cary-Porter rule lasted until 1711, when the proprietary decided to stamp out the seditious popular regime, and sent Edward Hyde, a cousin of Queen Anne, to be the new governor of North Carolina, now permanently separated from South Carolina. Hyde immediately instituted a regime of repression, allying himself completely with the Gloverite faction. All the liberal laws, as well as the court proceedings of Cary’s second administration, were nullified, and the Test Oath was reimposed on all public officials on pain of a heavy 100-pound fine for all refusals to take it. The Quaker Assemblymen were once again expelled. In addition, a law was passed to punish severely all “seditious words” or “scurrilous libels” against the government, the government itself, of course, being the judge of what was seditious or scurrilous against itself. Moreover, Cary and Porter were indicted for various crimes and misdemeanors.

To counter this repression, Thomas Cary organized an armed rebellion against the Hyde regime. In the midst of the fighting, Governor Alexander Spottswood of Virginia sent a force of royal marines to aid Hyde, which counterrevolutionary intervention dispersed the rebellion. Cary and other leaders fled to Virginia. There he was arrested, however, and sent to England to stand trial for treason, but was released for lack of evidence. Thus the rebellion failed and the Test Oath remained in force in North Carolina.

These struggles in the Carolinas weakened the authority of the proprietary and helped make them ripe for the abolition of proprietary rule in South Carolina in 1719 and in North Carolina in 1729. By 1730, then, the Carolinas and Virginia were both royal colonies, leaving Maryland with its restored proprietary as the only proprietary colony in the South.

While these conflicts were going on, North Carolina was experiencing a rapid growth. A heavy influx of people came from Virginia, seeking more religious freedom or cheaper land free of arbitrary landed monopolies. North Carolina’s status as a refuge is shown by Virginia’s repeated accusations that it was harboring runaway slaves. Finally, the first town was laid out in North Carolina: Bath, in 1704, which promptly became the capital. Many of the immigrants were European refugees including French Protestant Huguenots and German and Swiss palatines.

Treatment of the Indians, however, grew increasingly brutal. The white settlers had participated in the Indian fur trade, they had learned from the Indians techniques of clearing the unfamiliar land, of cultivating the soil, and of growing such new crops as corn, tobacco, and potatoes. Now the whites repaid the Indians by embarking on a campaign of decimation. Proclamations stated that the Indians would be exterminated “like vermin,” and the legislature of North Carolina granted bounties for Indian scalps. Indian prisoners of war, including many children, were sold into slavery by their captors.