20. The North Carolina Proprietary

After the Tuscarora war, North Carolina politics settled down into the familiar colonial pattern of a proprietary party, centered in the appointive governor and the Council, stressing the prerogative of the executive, and confronting a popular and liberal force concentrated in the Assembly.

Wracked so recently by rebellion and war, North Carolina did not join South Carolina in the latter’s successful revolt against the proprietary in 1719. The popular party resisted such instances of executive tyranny as imposing conscription to fight against the Indians without Assembly approval. The most severe quarrel of the people with the proprietary occurred over that veteran irritant, the quitrent. The proprietary naturally wanted to be paid the quitrent in sterling. In this era, however, North Carolina’s underdeveloped economy used nineteen marketable commodities as media of exchange, or money, including beef, pork, butter, cheese, pitch, feathers, wheat, leather and hides, skins and corn, as well as the more usual tobacco. In 1715, the Assembly passed a law for payment of the quitrent in any of these commodities, at a fixed scale of relative prices, with the quality of the commodities established by two theoretically disinterested freeholders. The natural result was payment of the hated quitrents in whatever happened to be the least valuable commodity at the fixed scale, and of the poorest possible quality.

The proprietors, having had the usual difficulty in collecting quitrents, had decided at the turn of the century to appoint a network of agents to collect the payments. The agents were empowered to seize and sell the lands of those who failed to pay. In 1715, however, the Assembly deprived the agents of the power to place a value on the seized goods, the value being put into the books of the original owner and the purchaser. This act helped block effective collection of the rents. All in all, since salaries of the chief officials were paid from the quitrents, the proprietors obtained little or no net profit from their colony.

The end of the Tuscarora war left the coastal area south of Albemarle free of Indians, and whites began to expand into this region. The proprietors restricted this growth, however, by closing their land office in the area and insisting on the sale of land at prices so high as effectively to discourage settlement. To make matters worse, payment for the land had to be made to the proprietors in London. To escape this restriction, the governor and the Council began to grant huge tracts of land to their favorites at rates as low as three pence per one hundred acres, in exchange for monetary payment—as so often happens in history, government officials having monopoly privileges at their disposal proceeded to sell them at the best bargains they could obtain. The biggest culprit among the governors was Sir Richard Everard, who signed away 400,000 acres of such so-called blank patent in 1728 alone.

During the 1720s, the proprietors more and more lost control over the affairs of the colony and over its land policy. In order to encourage immigration into the colony, the Assembly (the governor and Council approving) broke through the proprietary restrictions on land. Ignoring the proprietary order, the new law permitted settlers to enter the southern region, on paying a tentative quitrent of three shillings per one hundred acres, and guaranteed confirmation of their land titles.

The popular new governor, George Burrington, friend of the liberal party, had agreed to this measure but was removed by the proprietors shortly thereafter. He was removed at the instigation of Christopher Gale, chief justice and collector of the royal customs, who loosely charged Burrington with plotting revolution against the proprietary. Burrington had, in fact, threatened to commit mayhem on Gale, had broken up sessions of Gale’s court, and had also prevented the royal customs officers from enforcing their exactions. But the proprietors had good cause to regret Burrington’s successor, Richard Everard. Everard set up a tyranny so petty and so venal that even the Gale faction and the Council were forced to split with him. Abusing Council and Assembly alike, Everard exacted exorbitant and illegal fees and used the law courts as instruments to settle family quarrels and punish his enemies. The government of North Carolina was reduced to a violent three-way split. Thus, in 1725, the governor and the Council tried to dissolve the Assembly, which, however, denied such power and complained to the proprietors of the persecutions of the Gale clique. The faction seeking dissolution of the Assembly was headed by Gale, now chief justice and judge of the admiralty court, and his son-in-law William Little, the attorney general. At this point, Burrington, now a leader in the Assembly, denounced Everard and assaulted a constable. Riots by the various factions ensued at the capital, Edenton.

Finally, in 1729, the proprietors, disgruntled with the turbulent colony and finding quitrents almost 10,000 pounds in hopeless arrears, were happy to sell all their rights over both North Carolina and South Carolina to the Crown for merely 23,000 pounds. North Carolina was now a royal colony. The only holdout was John Carteret, who refused to sell his one-eighth right. Fifteen years later, the Crown granted Lord Carteret, now the Earl of Granville, in exchange for his one-eighth proprietorship, the exclusive ownership of a huge land grant in northern North Carolina covering over one half of the whole area of the province and containing two-thirds of its population. Carteret was not only arbitrarily granted ownership over all the unsettled land in the area; he was also given the right to extract quitrents from the property owners already settled there. Carteret’s agents proceeded to charge excessive fees, which they insisted be paid in specie, to collect illegal quitrents, and to issue fraudulent deeds. This added to the already considerable turmoil over land and quitrents in the province.

Finally, in 1758, an armed crowd of Lord Carteret’s subject tenants forced Francis Corbin, one of his leading agents, to give bond that he would surrender all the excessive fees that he had collected. But Corbin, on his release, not only failed to comply with the agreement, but arrested four of his adversaries. The infuriated settlers rode to the Enfield jail and freed the prisoners. Insurrection then spread throughout the Granville District. Francis Corbin was forced to flee the region. The Assembly urged prosecution of the rioters, but Governor Arthur Dobbs denounced the fraudulent exactions of the Earl of Granville’s agents and expressed his sympathy with the people. The rioters therefore remained at liberty and Granville District was virtually rid of its proprietary incubus. Furthermore, after Granville’s death in 1763, his son neglected the proprietary and in a few years closed the land office, with the result that newcomers were able to settle and to refuse to pay either taxes or quitrents on their land.

It took a year and a half, from mid-1729 to early 1731, for the Crown to send out its first royal governor, and in that period all government virtually dissolved in North Carolina. No one paid any attention to Everard’s proprietary appointment; the General Court, as well as many precinct courts, simply ceased to meet. The Council was suspended and the Assembly had virtually no meetings. Laws were not enforced; taxes, quitrents, and other public revenues went uncollected. In the midst of this virtual state of anarchism, Edmund Porter, judge of the royal admiralty court, tried to aggrandize himself over the populace, causing great discontent in the colony, while Everard made arbitrary arrests and tried to extract exorbitant fees.