England, as it should deem best. The council resolved that there was no need of a colonial assembly to grant taxes and regulate other important matters; but that the governor and council should act, according to their own judgment, with no accountability except to his British majesty. Louis XIV., after reading a report of this debate, warned the king of England against listening to an adviser like Halifax on the manner of governing New England; and it was decided that, in those distant regions, the whole power, legislative as well as executive, should abide in the crown.

A copy of the judgment against the charter of Massachusetts was received in Boston on the second of July of the following year; but, before that day, the duke of York had ascended the throne.

Gloomy forebodings overspread New England. The confederacy of the Calvinist colonies had already died of apathy. The restoration of monarchy, in 1660, had been the signal for its decline. By its articles no two colonies could be joined in one except with the consent of the whole; and the charter by which Charles II. annexed New Haven to Connecticut proved that there was a higher power, which overruled their decisions and paralyzed their acts. From that epoch the meetings of the commissioners were held but once in three years. The dangers of the Indian war roused their dying energies. After the peace at Boston, in 1681, they did but settle a few small war-claims; their only meeting after the forfeiture of the charter of Massachusetts was in September, 1684, at Hartford, from which place they appointed a day of fasting to bewail the rebukes and threatening from Heaven, and their last word was "for the defence of the Protestant religion."

CHAPTER VII.

SHAFTESBURY AND LOCKE LEGISLATE FOR CAROLINA.

MEANTIME, Civilization had advanced at the South; and twin stars were emerging beyond the limits of Virginia, in the country over which Soto had rambled in quest of gold, where Calvinists, befriended by Coligny, had sought a refuge, and where Raleigh had attempted to found colonial principalities.

In March, 1663, the province of Carolina, extending from the thirty-sixth degree of north latitude to the river San Matheo, was erected into one territory; and the earl of Clarendon; Monk, now duke of Albemarle; Lord Craven, a brave cavalier; Lord Ashley Cooper, afterward earl of Shaftesbury; Sir John Colleton; Lord Berkeley; Sir William Berkeley, the governor of Virginia; and the passionate, ignorant, and not too honest Sir George Carteret—were constituted its proprietors and immediate sovereigns. No authority was reserved to the crown but a barren allegiance.

The territory now granted was included by the Spaniards within the limits of Florida; and the castle of St. Augustine was deemed proof of the actual possession of an indefinite adjacent country. Spain had not yet formally acknowledged the English title to any possessions in America; and the treaty concluded at Madrid, in May, 1667, did but faintly concede the right of England to transatlantic colonies, and to a continuance of commerce in "the accustomed seas." Three years later she recognised as English the colonies which were then in the possession of England, but their boundaries in the south and west were not determined.

And not Spain only claimed Carolina. In 1630, a patent for all the territory had been issued to Sir Robert Heath;

and there is room to believe that, in 1639, permanent plantations were planned and perhaps attempted by his assign. William Hawley appeared in Virginia as "governor of Carolina," the land between the thirty-first and thirty-sixth parallels of latitude; and leave was granted by the Virginia legislature that it might be colonized by one hundred persons from Virginia, "freemen, being single, and disengaged of debt." The attempts were certainly unsuccessful, for, in 1663, the patent was declared void, because the purposes for which it was granted had never been fulfilled.

In 1660 or 1661, New England men had found their way into the Cape Fear river, had purchased of the Indian chiefs a title to the soil, and had planted a little colony of herdsmen far to the south of any English settlement on the continent. They had partners in London, and, within five months of the grant of Carolina, their agents pleaded their discovery, occupancy, and purchase, as affording a valid title to the soil, while they claimed the privileges of self-government as a natural right. A compromise was offered; and the proprietaries, in their "proposals to all that would plant in Carolina," promised emigrants from New England religious freedom, a governor and council to be elected from among a number whom the emigrants themselves should nominate, a representative assembly, independent legislation, subject only to the negative of the proprietaries, land at a rent of a halfpenny an acre, and such freedom from customs as the charter would warrant. Yet the lands were not inviting to men who could choose their abodes from the whole wilderness; and, though Massachusetts, the young mother of colonies, in May, 1667, ministered to their wants by a general contribution through her settlements, the infant town planted on Oldtown creek, near the south side of Cape Fear river, was soon after abandoned.

The conditions offered to the colony of Cape Fear "were not intended for the meridian" of Virginia. "There," said the proprietaries, in their instructions to Sir William Berkeley, "we hope to find more facile people" than the New England men. They intrusted the affair entirely to Sir William's management. He was to get settlers as cheaply as possible; yet at any rate to get settlers.

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As in Massachusetts, the plantations of Virginia extended along the sea. The banks of Nansemond river had been settled as early as 1609. In 1622, Pory, then secretary of the Old Dominion, travelled to the land on the river Chowan, and, on his return, celebrated the kindness of its native people, its fertility, and happy climate, that yielded two harvests in each year. Twenty-one years after the excursion of Pory, a company, that had heard of the region south-west of the Appomattox, obtained leave of the Virginia legislature to engage in its discovery, under the promise of a fourteen years' monopoly of the profits. Parties for the south, not less than for the west, continued to be encouraged by similar grants. The sons of Governor Yeardley wrote to England with pride, that the northern country of Carolina had been explored by "Virginians born."

A company from Nansemond county, led by Roger Green, were the first to show the way from Virginia to the rivers that flow into Albemarle sound. Green was rewarded, in 1653, by the grant of a thousand acres, while ten thousand acres were offered to any hundred persons who would plant on the banks of the Roanoke, or the south side of the Chowan and its tributary streams. Thomas Dew, once the speaker of the assembly, formed a plan for exploring the navigable rivers between Cape Hatteras and Cape Fear. The first settlements on Albemarle sound were a result of spontaneous overflowings from Virginia. Perhaps a few families were planted within the limits of Carolina before the restoration. At that period, men who were impatient of enforced religious conformity, and distrusted the new government in Virginia, plunged more deeply into the forests. It is known that, in 1662, the chief of a tribe of Indians granted to George Durant the neck of land which still bears his name; and, in the following year, George Cathmaid could claim a large grant of land upon the sound, for having established sixty-seven persons in Carolina. In September, the colony had attracted the attention of the proprietaries; and Berkeley was commissioned to institute a government over the region, which, in honor of Monk, received the name of Albemarle, that time has transferred to the bay. The plantations were chiefly on the north-east bank of the Chowan;

and, as the mouth of that river is north of the thirty-sixth parallel of latitude, they were not included in the first patent of Carolina. Yet Berkeley, who was but governor of Virginia, and was a joint proprietary of Carolina, obeyed his interest as landholder more than his duty as governor; and, severing the settlement from the Ancient Dominion, established a separate government over men who had already, at least in part, obtained a grant of their lands from the aboriginal lords of the soil. He appointed William Drummond, an emigrant to Virginia from Scotland, a man of prudence and popularity, to be the governor of Northern Carolina; and, conforming to instructions from his associates, he instituted a simple form of government, a Carolina assembly, and an easy tenure of lands; leaving the infant people to enjoy liberty of conscience and to forget the world, till quit-rents should fall due. Such was the origin of fixed settlements in North Carolina.

But not New England and Virginia only turned their eyes to the southern part of our republic. In 1663, several planters of Barbados, dissatisfied with their condition, and desiring to establish a colony under their own exclusive direction, despatched a vessel to examine the country. The careful explorers reported that the climate was agreeable and the soil of various qualities; that game abounded; that the natives promised peace. They purchased of the Indians a tract of land thirty-two miles square, on Cape Fear river, near the neglected settlement of the New Englanders; and their employers begged of the proprietaries a confirmation of the purchase and a separate charter of government. Not all their request was granted; yet liberal terms were offered; and Sir John Yeamans, the son of a cavalier, a needy baronet, who, to mend his fortune, had become a Barbados planter, was appointed governor, with a jurisdiction extending from Cape Fear to the San Matheo. The country was called Clarendon. "Make things easy to the people of New England; from thence the greatest supplies are expected:" such were his instructions. In the autumn of 1665, under an ample grant of liberties for the colony, he conducted a band of emigrants from Barbados, and on the south bank of Cape Fear river laid the foundation of a town, which flourished so little that its site is