1719.]

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forfeit; that the house of peers had favored its prosecution; and, as the known hostility of Spain threatened an invasion, the assembly, in November, resolved "to have no regard to the officers of the proprietaries or to their administration," and begged Robert Johnson, the governor, "to hold the reins of government for the king." When Johnson, remaining true to his employers, firmly rejected their offer, they, with Arthur. Middleton for their president, voted themselves " a convention delegated by the people;" and, resolved “ on having a governor of their own choosing," they elected the brave James Moore, a favorite with the people, "whom all the country had allowed to be the fittest person" for undertaking its defence. The militia of Charleston was to be reviewed on the twenty-first of December; and that day was selected for proclaiming the new chief magistrate. To Parris, the commanding officer, Johnson issued particular orders to delay the muster, nor suffer a drum to be beat in the town. But the people of Carolina had, by the power of public opinion, renounced the government of the proprietaries; and, on the appointed day, with colors flying at the forts, and on all the ships in the harbor, the militia, which was but the people in arms, drew up in the public square. It would be tedious to relate minutely by what menaces, what entreaties, what arguments, Johnson struggled to resist the insurrection. In the king's name, he commanded Parris to disperse his men; and Parris answered, "I obey the convention." "The

revolutioners had their governor, council, and convention, and all of their own free election.' Peacefully, and without bloodshed, palatines, landgraves, and caciques, were dismissed from Carolina, where they had become so little connected with the vital interests of the state, that history with difficulty preserves them from oblivion.

In 1720, the agent from Carolina obtained in England a ready hearing from the lords of the regency. The proprietors were esteemed to have forfeited their

charter; measures were taken for its abrogation; and, in the mean time, Francis Nicholson - an adept in colonial governments, trained by experience in New York, in Virginia, in Maryland; brave, and not penurious, but narrow and irascible; of loose morality, yet a fervent supporter of the Church - received a royal commission as provisional governor of the province. The bold act of the people of Carolina, which in England was respected as an evidence of loyalty, was remembered in America as an example for posterity. The introduction of the direct regal supremacy was a pledge of more than security to the southern frontier: no lines were either run or proposed; and the neglect was an omen that the limits of the stronger nation would be advanced by encroachments or conquest.

The first act of Nicholson, in 1721, confirmed peace with the natives. On the borders of the territory of the peaceful Cherokees, he was met, in congress, by the chiefs of thirty-seven different villages. They smoked with him the pipe of peace, and marked the boundaries between the "beloved nation" and the colonists; and they returned to their happy homes in the mountain vales pleased with their generous brother and new ally. A treaty of commerce and peace was also concluded with the Creeks, whose hunting-grounds it was solemnly agreed should extend to the Savannah. Yet the ambition of England was not bounded by that river; and on the forks of the Alatamaha, in defiance of remonstrances from Spain and from Florida, a fort was kept by a small English garrison.

The controversy was not adjusted, when, in September, 1729, under the sanction of an act of parliament, and for the sum of twenty-two thousand five hundred pounds, seven eighths of the proprietaries sold to the crown their territory, the jurisdiction over it, and their arrears of quitrents. Lord Carteret alone, joining in the surrender of the government, reserved an eighth share in the soil. This is the period when a royal governor was first known in North Carolina. Its se

TREATY OF ENGLAND WITH THE CHEROKEES. 229

cluded hamlets had not imitated the popular revolution of the southern province.

So soon as the royal government was fully confirmed, it attempted, by treaties of union, to convert the Indians on the borders of Carolina into allies or subjects; and, early in 1730, Sir Alexander Cumming, a special envoy, guided by Indian traders to Keowee, summoned a general assembly of the chiefs of the Cherokees to meet at Nequassee, in the valley of the Tennessee. They came together in the month of April, and were told that King George was their sovereign. When they offered a chaplet, four scalps of their enemies, and five eagles' tails, as the records of the treaty, and the pledge of their fidelity, it was proposed to them to send deputies to England; and English writers interpreted their assent as an act of homage to the British monarch. In England, a treaty of alliance, offensive and defensive, was drawn up by the English, and signed by the name and seal of one party, by the emblems and marks of the other. No white men, except the English, might build cabins or plant corn upon the wide lands of the Cherokees. Thus a nation rose up as a barrier against the French. In September, the seven envoys from the mountains of Tennessee, already bewildered by astonishment at the vastness of London, and the splendor and discipline of the English army, were presented at court; and when the English king claimed their land and all the country about them as his property, surprise and inadvertence extorted from one of their war-chieftains the irrevocable answer, "To-eu-hah," it is "a most certain truth;" and the delivery of eagles' feathers confirmed his words. The covenant promised that love should flow forever like the rivers, that peace should endure like the mountains; and it was faithfully kept, at least for one generation.

CHAPTER XLVII.

BOUNDARY OF FRENCH COLONIES AT THE NORTH.

"with

Of the maritime powers of Europe, it was Spain which chiefly took umbrage at the progress of the English settlements and the English alliances at the south. The questions at issue with France were attended with greater difficulty. The treaty of Utrecht surrendered to England Acadia and Nova Scotia, its ancient boundaries." Disputes were to arise respecting them; but even the eastern frontier of the province of Massachusetts was not vindicated without a contest. To the country between the Kennebec and the St. Croix a new claimant appeared in the Abenakis themselves. In 1716, the general court extended its jurisdiction to the utmost bounds of the province; the enterprise of the fishermen and the traders of New England, whom, at first, the convenience of commerce made welcome, not only revived the villages that had been desolated during the war, but, on the eastern bank of the Kennebec, laid the foundation of new settlements, and protected them by forts.

The red men became alarmed. Away went their chiefs across the forests to Quebec, to ask if France had indeed surrendered the country, of which they themselves were the rightful lords; and as Vaudreuil answered, that the treaty of which the English spoke made no mention of their country, their chief resisted the claim of the government of Massachusetts. "I have my land," said he, "where the Great Spirit has placed me; and while there remains one child of my tribe, I shall fight to preserve it." France could not maintain its influence by an open alliance, but its missionaries guided their converts. At Norridgewock, on the banks of the Kennebec, the venerable Sebastian Rasles, for more than a quarter of a century the companion and

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instructor of savages, had gathered a flourishing village round a church which, rising in the desert, made some pretensions to magnificence. Severely ascetic, using no wine, and little food except pounded maize,a rigorous observer of the days of Lent, - he built his own cabin, tilled his own garden, drew for himself wood and water, prepared his own hominy, and, distributing all that he received, gave an example of religious poverty. And yet he was laborious in garnishing his forest sanctuary, believing the faith of the savage must be quickened by striking appeals to the senses. Himself a

painter, he adorned the humble walls of his church with pictures. There he gave instruction almost daily. Following his pupils to their wigwams, he tempered the spirit of devotion with familiar conversation and innocent gayety, winning the mastery over their souls by his powers of persuasion. He had trained a little band of forty young savages, arrayed in cassock and surplice, to assist in the service, and chant the hymns, of the church; and their public processions attracted a great concourse of red men. Two chapels were built near the village, dedicated to the Virgin, and adorned with her statue in relief, — another to the guardian angel; and before them the hunter muttered his prayers, on his way to the river or the woods. When the tribe descended to the seaside, in the season of wild-fowl, they were followed by Rasles; and on some islet a little chapel of bark was quickly consecrated.

one

In 1717, the government of Massachusetts also attempted to establish a mission; and its minister made a mocking of purgatory and the invocation of saints, of the cross and the rosary. My Christians," retorted Rasles, "believe the truths of the Catholic faith, but are not skilful disputants;" and he himself prepared a defence of the Roman church. Thus Calvin and Loyola met in the woods of Maine. But the Protestant minister, unable to compete with the Jesuit for the affections of the Indians, returned to Boston, while "the friar remained, the incendiary of mischief."