Colonial America
Page 36
Religious conflict created further dissension. Although numerous Baptists, Puritans, Huguenots, and Quakers had settled in the southern portion of the colony over the past few decades, the outbreak of war with France gave the Goose Creek faction a pretext to expel the Huguenots from the assembly as a danger to the province's security. In May 1704 they passed a bill requiring all members of the assembly to be members of the Church of England. A second bill in November 1704 divided Clarendon province into six Anglican parishes, each with its own church to be supported with local taxes. The proprietors accepted both of these acts despite the objections of the religious dissenters, who made up nearly half of the population. Though the dissenters briefly managed to get the two acts disallowed, they were overruled again when another bill to establish the Anglican Church was passed in 1706. The settlers and their government were deeply at odds.
Yet, of all of its varied problems, the proprietary regime's ultimate weakness would be the incompatibility between its Indian policies and the objectives of the empire. The Carolina proprietors had for years encouraged their Native American neighbors to make war upon each other in order to obtain captives to sell as slaves. One consequence of this policy of constant warfare was to decimate the local Indian population. Another consequence was to antagonize the Spanish and the French in the region. The English encouraged their Yamasee allies to attack the Spanish-allied Timucuas in Florida as early as 1684, provoking retaliation by the Spanish against a community of Scottish settlers south of Charleston, in Stuart town, in 1686. By 1699, the English were encouraging the Chickasaws to go on slaving expeditions along the Mississippi River against French-allied Arkansas, Tunicas, and Taensas. The French countered by offering to arm their allies against the Chickasaws, hoping through a combination of threats and diplomacy to unite all of the Mississippi Valley Indians into an alliance with France.
When war broke out in Europe in 1702, unifying France and Spain under the house of Bourbon, the Carolinians realized that the chickens of their previous policies were coming home to roost, thereby threatening the destruction of Carolina itself. Accordingly, to avert this danger they attempted a pre-emptive strike. Carolina's Governor James Moore decided to invade Florida, organizing a joint expedition of 50 Carolinians and 1,300 Yamasees for the purpose. The expedition found the stone walls of the Castillo de San Marcos at St. Augustine impenetrable. The Spanish missions, on the other hand, provided an easy target. Over the course of the war the English in Carolina encouraged first the Yamasees and then the Creeks to raid the Spanish missions on multiple occasions. Some 10,000 Timucuas, Apalachees, and Guales were captured and sold as slaves over the course of the war.
These raids in turn helped to convince the Spanish and French governments that the English were bent on conquering the entire region. The French therefore organized a joint expedition with Spain to attack Charleston in 1706. The invasion failed miserably. However, officials within the imperial bureaucracy in England took note of the rising cost of defending Charleston and began raising questions about Carolina's policy of encouraging slave raids. The policy increased the likelihood of attacks by the Spanish and French, which might threaten English possessions in the Caribbean with their lucrative plantations. Although slave-raiding might produce short-term profits for the settlers and the proprietors, it conflicted with the long-term interests of the empire.
Over the next few years the South Carolina assembly made real strides towards reforming the Indian trading system, even if conflicts within the government frustrated their enforcement. The Anglican Church began to make an effort to send missionaries to the Indians. However, despite these efforts to begin to stabilize English–Native American relations, the long simmering tensions in the region could no longer be defused.
One set of problems arose in the relationship between the Europeans and the Tuscaroras, an Iroquoian-speaking people in what is now North Carolina. For years the Tuscaroras had been the victims of periodic raids by English-allied Indians from the area around Charleston. In 1710 their problems were made worse by the migration of 400 Swiss and German immigrants into their territory without their permission. In 1711 a group of Tuscaroras captured two of the settlers while they were exploring the area around the Neuse River, killing one of them. The Tuscaroras next proceeded to attack and kill more than 130 of the settlers. South Carolina quickly came to the settlers' defense, sending hundreds of volunteers (the vast majority of whom were Native Americans) to launch a series of successful attacks on the Tuscaroras. The South Carolina allied forces slaughtered several hundred male Tuscarora captives and burned their villages. Then, following long tradition, the allies sold hundreds of their captives into slavery, either locally or to planters in the West Indies. Some 2,000 Tuscaroras escaped and fled north, where they were eventually taken under the wing of their kinfolk in the Iroquois League.
Having quelled the Tuscarora uprising, the Carolina government was soon faced with another, even more serious, Indian conflict. Before 1702 the most important Indian nation in Carolina was that of the Yamasees, who inhabited the coastal plain to the south of Charleston. During the first 40 years of the settlement, they had been loyal allies of the Carolinians, especially after they had supplanted the Westos as the principal channel for the deerskin and Indian slave trades. They not only provided the bulk of the forces for Governor Moore in his expedition to St. Augustine in 1702 but also gave him help when he decided to attack the Spanish missions in western Florida at the end of 1703. In due course, however, the initial harmony declined, reflecting the increasing scarcity of game in the area through overhunting, a disruption in the European market for furs caused by the war, and constant competition for new captives. Many English traders had begun dealing with the Cherokees and other peoples to the west, bypassing the Yamasees altogether.
The relationship between the Yamasees and the English was showing signs of tension as early as 1711. Then by 1714 a clear diplomatic breakdown occurred, convincing a number of other Indian peoples in the region, notably the Savannahs, Lower Creeks, and the Euchees, to join an alliance with the Yamasees against the English. War finally broke out in 1715. When it did so the Yamasees gained additional allies among some of the Upper Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, and Catawbas.14 The conflict was as serious for Carolina as King Philip's assault had been for New England. The Yamasees and their many allies carried hostilities to the very gates of Charleston, killing over 400 settlers. Once more the colonists appealed to the proprietors for aid, again to no effect. Virginia offered help, but only if the Carolinians sent a large number of slaves in compensation, and the few volunteers who did arrive were described as useless. So desperate was the situation that even slaves had to be armed. Ironically, the war eventually turned in favor of the English thanks to the same dynamic that had shaped similar conflicts in the past. The Cherokees decided that their dependence on English trade required them to side with the English and turn against fellow Native Americans, in this case by helping to destroy the Yamasees. After defeating the Yamasees, the Cherokees sold most of their captives into slavery.15
The Yamasee War raises an interpretive question for historians, as do previous conflicts between Europeans and North American native peoples. Why did the Indian nations not unite to drive the English out of their region entirely? The answer, as the Yamasee War shows, is that Native Americans made widely varying decisions about their relationships with European nations, mainly because their interests differed. Native American peoples in the early eighteenth century thought of themselves as members of discrete groups defined by shared kinship, culture, and language, not as “Indians” with a common racial identity or a universal set of interests. In this respect they were no different than English, Spanish, French, or Dutch people, all of whom were far more likely to think of themselves as members of distinct groups defined by religion and language than as “Europeans” with the same racial identity or the same interests. At the same time, the experience of fighting this war on such a large scale c
hanged some groups' assessment of how best to promote their tribal interests. The Creeks, who had long been part of an affiliated confederacy, realized after the Yamasee War that they were best served by avoiding an alliance with any single European power. During the decades that followed the war the Creeks made diplomatic overtures to both English Carolinians and Spanish Floridians and in effect maintained their neutrality in conflicts between the two, just as the Iroquois had been able to do further north. The Cherokees adopted a similar strategy, making occasional overtures to the French and insisting on hard bargains with the English. The Yamasee War had proved their indispensability as English allies, so the English generally did what they asked.
The proprietors' failure to defend the colony during the Yamasee War led to further pleas for Carolina to be placed under royal protection, especially as the colony was by now on the verge of bankruptcy. Another war with Spain threatened, and in November 1719 the assembly took control by electing its own governor, James Moore. The colonists, however, were careful to send a full explanation of their actions to the king, accompanied by yet another denunciation of the proprietors. The ploy was successful since the officials in Whitehall had long been hostile to the concept of proprietary government, especially its ability to enforce the laws of trade. Accordingly, in August 1720 the veteran Francis Nicholson was appointed royal governor with power to appoint a council, summon an assembly, and take all measures for the administration of the colony. The Board of Trade bought out the proprietors' land claims and rights to govern, finally completing the process in 1729 with an act of Parliament that rewarded them with payments of £2,500 each.16
The demise of proprietary government, the expulsion of the Yamasees, and the ending of the war in Europe all helped foster some important economic and social changes. For its first 45 years the colony had survived largely on the deerskin and Indian slave trades. Depopulation among native peoples had by the 1710s opened the colony to wider settlement and a more diversified economy. Rice had been introduced in the 1690s, its cultivation aided by the importation of African slaves whose familiarity with the crop as well as their labor helped to make successful cultivation possible. Soon a plantation system developed along the main rivers and their tributaries, while at the same time Charleston became a center of commerce and administration to which the planters gravitated during the fall and winter months when the assembly was sitting. South Carolina was finally changing from a frontier to a provincial society. It had also become a “slave society” rather than a “society with slaves.”
The agreement between the Crown and the proprietors in 1729 also covered North Carolina, which had come under scrutiny for similar reasons. As in South Carolina, attempts by the assembly to establish the Anglican Church in 1701 and again in 1704 had created much antagonism among religious dissenters, particularly the Quakers. The Quakers were backed by a faction within the Anglican majority, and disputes between this faction and the ruling Anglican faction became so bitter that the supporters of the dissenters even attempted to overthrow the government. In the end the Anglican majority prevailed and managed in 1715 to impose an Anglican establishment, supported by local tax revenues. However, the episode illustrated to the imperial bureaucracy the general ineffectiveness of the proprietary government.
This ineffectiveness was further evidenced by the inability of the proprietors to defend the province, as demonstrated by the Tuscarora War. Although the North Carolinians had been able to obtain help from both Virginia and South Carolina, they had (as usual) received no assistance from the proprietors, and this failure did not go unnoticed in London.
A final cause of royal displeasure was the suspicion that North Carolina was providing a haven for pirates, once again illustrating the corruption and incompetence of the proprietary government. The ending of the war in Europe led many licensed privateers to become pirates, perhaps the most notable of whom was Captain Teach, or Blackbeard, who found the waters of Albemarle Sound a most convenient haven. Tobias Knight, the provincial secretary, and possibly Charles Eden, one of the proprietors, were suspected of complicity in providing Teach with harbor facilities and help in the sale of his booty. An expedition from Virginia, organized by Nicholson, was required to bring the scourge to an end. In 1718 Teach was finally cornered and killed on the Albemarle outer banks near Ocracoke Inlet.
After 1718 North Carolina was effectively a royal province, since the Crown insisted on vetting the next nominee for governor, but formal surrender was achieved only through the same act of Parliament which ended the proprietors' title to South Carolina.
Traditional accounts have tended to view proprietary experiments like those in the Carolinas as doomed to failure, incompatible with the seeds of liberty already planted in North American soil.17 Proprietary colonies, however, were established successfully by the French in Canada, the Spanish in Central America, and to some extent the Dutch in New York. The system failed in the Carolinas for other reasons. The proprietors failed to establish an effective government over the white settlers, and were too short-sighted to create a viable long-term policy for dealing with their Indian neighbors; instead their pursuit of short-term gain caused terrible instability and conflict. The paradox is that a pyramidal society was eventually established in the Carolinas, though not in the way envisaged by Locke and Shaftesbury, the authors of the Fundamental Constitutions. By the middle of the eighteenth century a local aristocracy had emerged, though it owed nothing to the proprietors and placed little reliance on a yeomanry. This aristocracy had come to depend instead on African slavery for its labor requirements. Thus were the projects of the Old World turned upside down in the New.
5 Proprietary Problems in Pennsylvania and New Jersey
Although Pennsylvania was relatively untouched by violence during the imperial wars, it experienced plenty of political strife following the accession of William and Mary. By the time Queen Anne's War ended in 1713, Penn's proprietorship had survived, although the government of Pennsylvania had assumed a form vastly different from the one he originally envisioned. Meanwhile, Delaware became separated from Pennsylvania, while the Jerseys were united into a single royal colony called New Jersey.
After the Glorious Revolution, Penn's close ties to James II and his policy of religious toleration brought him under intense scrutiny by the new regime, and in July 1690 he was accused of high treason. Although Penn made his peace with William III, his proprietary rights were suspended in October 1692 when William III appointed Benjamin Fletcher to be joint governor of Pennsylvania and New York. Fletcher's appointment was justified “by reason of the great neglects and miscarriages” which had occurred in Pennsylvania during Penn's absence. An unstated reason was the desire to create a more effective system of defense now that the Dominion of New England had been disbanded. But if Fletcher imagined that he would have more authority as the king's representative than Penn had enjoyed, he was soon disabused of this notion. The assembly challenged Fletcher just as it had earlier challenged Penn, demanding the right to initiate legislation. It also insisted on auditing all public monies, out of concern that funds might be siphoned off for military purposes. On that matter the Quakers were adamant; war was unlawful no matter how perilous the situation might be.
Fletcher's difficulties led to Penn's being restored to his proprietorship in August 1694, despite the opposition of the royal bureaucracy. William III could hardly claim to be the savior of English rights if he abolished one of its most distinctive species, proprietary government. In any case a Quaker proprietor might be more effective in securing the supplies the government so desperately wanted.
Penn had to guarantee a number of conditions to get his title back, the most important of which was his return in person to secure Pennsylvania's defense. While awaiting his arrival the colony would be governed by his lieutenant governor, William Markham. The lower house by no means welcomed the restoration of proprietary government. There would again be an elective council with a rival claim to represent
the people. To placate the assembly, in November 1696 Markham issued a new frame of government, giving the lower house the right to initiate legislation. However, Markham's frame still allowed the governor and council considerable powers, including the same right to initiate legislation as the assembly. The assembly could not accept this measure, and claimed the sole right to initiation. Furthermore, the deputies now demanded the authority to audit the public accounts, which was presently reserved to the council. The majority in the lower house now had a new leader, David Lloyd, a cousin of the former anti-proprietary leader. Trained as a lawyer in England, Lloyd was well versed in constitutional procedures. Under his leadership the acrimony between the assembly and the council continued unabated.
In 1699 Penn finally left England, still believing that Quaker principles founded on reason could produce calm. After two years, however, he recognized that further concessions were necessary, not least because his proprietorship was under attack once more in England. Accordingly, in 1701 Penn issued a new frame of government. It was remarkably short, making no mention of the council and declaring that all laws were to be made “By the Governor with the consent and approbation of the freemen in general assembly met.” Pennsylvania was to have a unicameral legislature, a unique phenomenon in England's American colonies. The only check on the assembly was that all bills were still subject to the veto of the proprietor and, ultimately, of the Privy Council.18