North Carolina Pioneers during Colonial Days
In 1683 and 1696, South Carolina passed acts suspending foreign debts and how circumstances alter cases. When a man in England got in debt, ran away between two suns, and settled in Virginia or South Carolina, he was graciously and fraternally welcomed and thoroughly protected from his “engagements,” as his debts were mildly termed. If a debtor, flying his engagements, should find welcome and protection in North Carolina, he straightway became a rogue and a vagabond. Verily, it would seem that Virginia and South Carolina sought a monopoly of absconding debtors.
The marriage law passed in 1669 was also a subject of bitter reproach, although it simply authorized civil officers to celebrate the rites of matrimony.
The first permanent white settlement in North Carolina was made eastward of the Chowan River, extending down to and along Albemarle Sound. As early as 1653, Roger Greene received a land grant to be located on the Roanoke River and the south or west side of the Chowan River. The grant was issued as a reward for inducing settlements.
On March 1, 1662, a land grant recorded in Perquimans County was made by the King of the Yeopim Indians to George Durant for a tract of land called “Wecocomike,” lying on the Perquimans River and Roanoke Sound. The place is now known as Durant’s Neck. There was a purchase before that from the King of the Yeopims for the grant to Durant recites that Wecocomicke adjoined to the eastward the land the King had formerly sold to Samuel Pricklove. Still, there is neither a record nor a copy of any grant to Pricklove. There were still other such purchases, for in 1662, purchases made directly from the Indians, it was said, had come to be such an evil in the sight of the government that it was resolved no longer to recognize them. There were purchasers, too, who held their lands under grants from the Governor of Virginia. Indeed, the Assembly, in an address in 1731, asserts that there were so many persons holding lands in Albemarle under Virginia grants before March 1663 that a saving clause in their favor was put in the charter of that date by King Charles. There is certainly a saving clause in the fourth section of the first charter.
The Lords Proprietors more than once recognized the fact that lands had been purchased from the Indians before the date of their charter, and they distinctly recognized also the fact not only that a settlement had already been “begun” but that it had progressed far enough to need a fully organized government of its own. It is evident, therefore, that there was a considerable settlement in Albemarle before 1663, in which the lands were held, in some cases, by purchase from the Indians and in others under grants from Virginia.
In 1660, Raleigh’s Roanoke Island Colony and the New England settlement on the Cape Fear were conspicuous failures.
Two Barbados settlements on the Cape Fear River were made under different auspices. One was in the interests of the “several gentlemen and persons of good quality” who made the proposals in the letter dated August 12, 1663, and the other, under the auspices of Yeamans, broken up in the summer or early fall of 1667.
The story by Chalmers and repeated by subsequent historians about the seven years’ benign rule of Yeamans seems to be in error, as Yeamans was in Barbados holding a high official office.
The Albemarle settlement was the parent settlement of North Carolina. Emigration went southward, from the Chowan to the Roanoke, Maratock, or Noratoke (as it is spelled on the old maps), thence to the Pamplico River, where, in 1690, a colony of Frenchmen (an offshoot of the James River French settlement in Virginia), made a lodgment.
In 1707, some French colonists left the James River settlement and arrived in North Carolina, between the Neuse and Trent Rivers.
In January 1710, Baron Christopher DeGraffenried shipped several German Palatines to the Neuse River. In June of the same year, DeGraffenried followed them in person with his Switzers. Still creeping along southward, settlers began to find their way once more toward the Cape Fear country. In 1711, they had gone as far south as White Oak River, and in 1713, as far as New River in the county of Onslow. In 1714, however, the Governor and Council forbade the survey and sale of lands within twenty miles of the Cape Fear River up to the waters of the Trent. Surveys were cut off below the line of the New River settlement. There were obstacles to settlement arising from the instructions of the Lord's Proprietors in the matter of the entry and survey of lands outside of Albemarle County.
In September 1711, Indians did a terrible massacre of the colonists along the Neuse and Pamlico Rivers. During the attack, eighty infants were slaughtered. The Tuscarora Indians were the chief instigators and blighted the colony for years. The Tuscaroa would have destroyed it entirely were it not for the prompt and generous action of South Carolina in coming to its assistance. Governor Spotswood of Virginia made a very eloquent speech to his Legislature, appealing to its members by all the considerations of humanity, kinship, neighborhood, and self-interest for help for their brethren in Albemarle, and succeeded in getting an appropriation of £1,000 in their behalf. Still, the appropriation was not expended, and the security required by Governor Spotswood for repayment was such that the North Carolina authorities said they could not give it. The security required by Governor Spotswood was a mortgage upon the territory north of Roanoke; that is, it inhabited part of the territory and then was in dispute between the two colonies. South Carolina voted £4,000 and sent troops immediately without asking for a mortgage or other security for repayment.
On January 4, 1712, the first Governor of North Carolina was commissioned, separated, and distanced from North Carolina. The Manuscript of Baron DeGraffenried, covering his stay in America, his contract for the Palatines, and an extract of his letter to Governor Hyde. In his, MSS. will be found a plain and satisfactory explanation of Colonel Barnwell’s motives for not assaulting the Indian fort when its capture was no longer a matter of doubt. The reason was that the fort was full of white captives, who cried out that they would be slaughtered if the assault was made. Tradition in and about the locality, it is said, corroborates DeGraffenried’s statement as to the presence of white captives in the fort.
For ten years, the restrictions on the purchase of lands in the county of Bath, then extending from the Pamplico River to the South Carolina line, were such as to amount to a practical prohibition. The case was that new settlers were prevented from coming in. Old ones were induced to go away for want of land until the 17th of April, 1724, when the grievance being no longer bearable, the Assembly petitioned the Governor and Council to devise some way of opening up lands outside of Albemarle to survey and purchase until the will of the Lords Proprietors in the premises might be known, and declared it to be their purpose to address the Lords Proprietors on the subject. In response to this petition, the Governor and Council, acknowledging that squatters were already settling there without payment of rent or other consideration, ordered that lands in Bath County should be open to survey and sale on the same terms as lands in Albemarle until the will of the Lords Proprietors should be known.
Accordingly, the first grants for lands on the Cape Fear after 1714 were issued in 1725, though some settlers were there as early as 1724.
In 1672, William Edmundson, the Quaker, visited Albemarle and found only one Quaker family, Henry Phillips, although there were Quakers in Virginia. Later in the same year, George Fox also went over the same ground, making converts from other denominations. In 1676, Edmundson visited Carolina and was happy to see that the “Friends” were finely settled there.” It would seem, therefore, that the Quakers formed only a tiny part of the earliest inhabitants of Albemarle and that even that small part became Quakers by conversion from other faiths after reaching Albemarle. The belief, therefore, that they came as Quakers to Albemarle to escape persecution as such in Virginia or elsewhere is not well founded. The truth seems to be that the Quakers, being the first and for a long time the only denomination that sought to arouse the people of Albemarle to a sense of their duty as Christians, quickly gathered into their fold the bulk of the religious element of the country of all former faiths. This view of the case is confirmed by the declaration of Governor Walker, who, on October 21, 1703, wrote from Albemarle to the Bishop of London as follows:
“ We have been settled near this fifty years in this juice, and I may justly say most of twenty-one years, on my knowledge, without priest or altar, and before that time, according to all that appears to me, much worse. George Fox, some years ago, came into these parts and by strange infatuations did infuse the Quakers’ principles into some small number of the people, which did and hath continued to grow ever since very numerous because of their yearly sending in men to encourage and exhort them to these wicked principles. There was none to dispute nor to oppose them in carrying on these pernicious principles for many years, &c.”
Source: Colonial Records of North Carolina by William L. Saunders, Vol. I, 1662–1712 (1886).
Note: The estates and wills of some of the earliest settlers are found on North Carolina Pioneers.com.
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