Escaping from a kingdom where the profession of their religion was a felony, where their estates were liable to be confiscated in favor of the apostate, where the preaching of their faith was a crime to be expiated on the wheel, where their children might be torn from them to be subjected to the nearest Catholic relation, the fugitives from Languedoc on the Mediterranean, from Rochelle, and Saintange, and Bordeaux, the provinces on the Bay of Biscay, from St. Quentin, Poictiers, and the beautiful valley of Tours, from St. Lo and Dieppe, men who had the virtues of the English Puritans without their bigotry, came to the land to which Shaftesbury had invited the believer of every creed. From a realm whose king, in wanton bigotry, had driven half a million of its best citizens into exile, they came to the hospitable refuge of the oppressed; where superstition and fanaticism, infidelity and faith, cold speculation and animated zeal, were alike admitted without question, and where the fires of religious persecution were never to be kindled. There they obtained an assignment of lands, and soon had tenements. Their church was in Charleston; and on every Lord's Day, gathering from their plantations upon the banks of the Cooper, and taking advantage of the ebb and flow of the tide, they might all be seen, the parents with their children, whom no bigot could now wrest from them, making their way in light skiffs to the flourishing village at the confluence of the rivers.

Other Huguenot emigrants established themselves on the south bank of the Santee, in a region which has since been celebrated for affluence and refined hospitality.

The United States are full of monuments of the emigra tions from France. When the struggle for independence arrived, the son of Judith Manigault intrusted the vast fortune he had acquired to the service of the country that had adopted his mother. The hall in Boston, where the eloquence of New England rocked the infant spirit of independence, was the gift of the son of a Huguenot. When the treaty of Paris for the independence of our country was framing, the grandson of a Huguenot, acquainted from childhood with the wrongs of his ancestors,

would not allow his jealousies of France to be lulled, and did his part towards stretching the boundary of the states to the Mississippi. On our north-eastern frontier state, the name of the oldest college bears witness to the wise liberality of a descendant of the Huguenots. The children of the Calvinists of France have reason to respect the memory of their ancestors.

1691.

1697.

It has been usual to relate that religious bigotry denied to the Huguenot emigrants immediate denization. If full hospitality was for a season withheld, the delay grew out of a controversy in which all Carolinians had a common interest, and the privileges of citizenship were conceded so soon as it could be done by Carolinians themselves. It had not yet been determined with whom the power of naturalizing foreigners resided, nor how Carolina should be governed. The great mass of the people were intent on framing their own institutions; and collisions with the lords proprietors long kept the government in confusion.

For the proprietary power was essentially weak. The company of courtiers, which became no more than a partnership of speculators in colonial lands, had not sufficient force to resist foreign violence or assert domestic authority. It could derive no strength but from the colonists or from the crown. But the colonists connected self-protection with the right of self-government; and the crown would not incur expense, except on a surrender of the jurisdiction. The proprietary government, having its organ in the council, could prolong its existence only by concessions, and was destined from its inherent weakness to be overthrown by the commons.

1670.

1671.

At first, the proprietaries acquiesced in a government which had little reference to the constitutions. The first governor had sunk under the climate and the hardships of founding a colony. His successor, Sir John Yeamans, was a sordid calculator, bent on acquiring a fortune. He encouraged expense, and enriched himself, without gaining respect or hatred. "It must be a bad soil," said his weary employers, "that

1674.

will not maintain industrious men, or we must be very silly that would maintain the idle." If they continued their outlays, it was in hopes of seeing vineyards and olivegroves and plantations established; they refused supplies of cattle, and desired returns in compensation for their expenditures.

1674 to 1683.

The moderation and good sense of West were able to preserve tranquillity for about nine years; but the lords, who had first purchased his services by the grant of all their merchandise and debts in Carolina, in the end dismissed him from office, on the charge that he favored the popular party.

The continued struggles with the proprietaries hastened the emancipation of the people from their rule; but the praise of having never been in the wrong cannot be awarded to the colonists. The latter claimed the right of weakening the neighboring Indian tribes by a partisan warfare, and a sale of the captives into West Indian bondage; their antagonists demanded that the treaty of peace with the natives should be preserved. Again, the proprietaries offered some favorable modifications of the constitutions; the colonists respected the modifications no more than the original laws. A rapid change of governors augmented the confusion. There was no harmony of interests between the lords paramount and their tenants, or of authority between the executive and the popular assembly. As in other colonies south of the Potomac, colonial legislation did not favor the collection of debts that had been contracted elsewhere; the proprietaries demanded a rigid conformity to the cruel and intolerant method of the English courts. It had been usual to hold the polls for elections at Charleston only; as population extended, the proprietaries ordered an apportionment of the representation; but Carolina would not allow districts to be carved out and representation to be apportioned from abroad; and the useful reformation could not be adopted till it was demanded and effected by the people themselves.

England had always favored its merchants in the invasion of the Spanish commercial monopoly; had sometimes pro

tected pirates, and Charles II. had knighted a freebooter. The political relations of the pirate and the contraband trader underwent a corresponding change. But men's habits do not change so easily; and in Carolina, especially after Port Royal had been laid waste by the Spaniards, there were not wanting those who regarded the buccaneers as their natural allies against a common enemy, and thus opened one more issue with the proprietaries.

The first treaty relating to America between Spain and England was ratified in 1667, and made more general in 1670. Before that time Spain had claimed not the territory of the Carolinas only, but that of Virginia, New England, in short, of all North America. By this convention she recognised as English the colonies which England then possessed; but the boundaries in the south and west were not determined.

When the commerce of South Carolina had so increased that a collector of plantation duties was 1685. appointed, a new struggle arose. The palatine court, careful not to offend the king, who, nevertheless, was not diverted from the design of annulling their charter by a process of law, gave orders that the acts of navigation should be enforced. The colonists, who had made themselves independent of the proprietaries in fact, esteemed themselves independent of parliament of right. Here, as everywhere, the acts were resisted as at war with natural equity, and as an infringement of the charter.

The pregnant cause of dissensions in Carolina could not be removed till the question of powers should be definitively settled. The proprietaries were willing to believe that the cause existed in the want of dignity and character in the governor. That affairs might be more firmly established, James Colleton, a brother of a proprietary, was appointed governor, with the rank of landgrave and an endowment of forty-eight thousand acres of land; but neither his relationship, nor his rank, nor his reputation, nor his office, nor his acres, could procure for him obedience, because the actual relations between the contending parties were in no respect changed. When Colleton met the colonial

1686.

Νον.

parliament which had been elected before his arrival, a majority refused to acknowledge the binding force of the constitutions; by a violent act of power, Colleton, like Cromwell in a similar instance in English history, excluded the refractory members from the parliament. These, in their turn, protested against any measures which might be adopted by the remaining minority.

A new parliament was still more intractable; and 1687. the "standing laws" which they adopted were negatived by the palatine court.

From questions of political liberty, the strife between the parties extended to all their relations. When Colleton endeavored to collect quit-rents not only on cultivated fields, but on wild lands, direct insubordination ensued; and the assembly, imprisoning the secretary of the province, and seizing the records, defied the governor and his patrons.

Colleton resolved on one last desperate effort, 1689. and, pretending danger from Indians or Spaniards,

called out the militia, and declared martial law. But who were to execute martial law? The militia were the people, and there were no other troops. Colleton was in a more hopeless condition than ever; for the assembly had no doubt of its duty to protect the country against a military despotism. The English Revolution of 1688 was therefore imitated on the banks of the Ashley and 1690. Cooper. Soon after William and Mary were proclaimed, a meeting of the representatives of South Carolina disfranchised Colleton, and banished him from the province.