CHAPTER XVII RICE PRODUCES NEW SOCIAL CONDITIONS It is in the blood of the Englishman never to be still. Accounted the most phlegmatic of races, the English are consumed with a resistless desire for discovery and adventure. Popularly supposed to have less imagination than the Latin and Celt, and deficient in that quality of poetic and speculative dreaming that is characteristic of the Teuton, nevertheless their imagination has always been profoundly stirred by the mystery of the unknown continent, by the knowledge that seas were to be charted and lands to be mapped; to find out where rivers led or what existed behind a range of mountains has ever been with them a passion. And perhaps more than any other race they have been possessed with an insatiable land hunger. It is this that has made them colonizers and conquerors, that has planted the flag of England deep in the snows of the north and far under the burning skies of the tropics. Love of commerce and love of gain animated them, but these would have been insufficient to make them brave danger and hardship if they had not been possessed of that resistless love of adventure. That insatiable land hunger was not appeased by transplanting the Englishman from England to America. Love of adventure and the commercial advantages that were to accrue from the planting of the new world were the motives that spurred Raleigh; the desire to expand and to own still more territory made Massachusetts colonize the north and explore the south. The Virginians, with a virgin territory to develop, cast curious and covetous eyes on the terra incognita to the south of them; those sturdy Puritans found their energies not satisfied in building up their own colony, but must ever extend their frontiers and carve new settlements out of the wilderness; and "New England enterprise explored the American coast from one end to the other, in search of lucrative trade and new resting places." In the course of their wanderings these men from the north came to the North Carolina coast, and near the mouth of the Cape Fear River settled on land bought from the Indians. But the climate was unsuited to them and the surroundings displeased them, and after a short sojourn they went away; first, however, leaving in writing and affixed to a post for the benefit of posterity their opinion of the country in characteristically blunt New England manner. Here it was found some years later by immigrants from the Barbadoes. But before that a few scattered settlers had drifted in from Virginia, "with here a solitary plantation, and there a little group of farms, and always a restless van of adventurers working their way down the coast and into the interior." This was the beginning of what at that time, 1663, was known as Carolina, but which later was split into the two provinces of North and South Carolina and under those names became states of the Union. This region, in that day, was a sort of No Man's Land. It was vaguely included in the Virginia grant, it was claimed by the Spaniards as a part of Florida. A hundred years before, in 1562, Jean Ribaut had planted a colony of Huguenots at Port Royal, where he built a fort, and had been treacherously murdered by the Adelantado Menendez, who, in a pious frame of mind, told the French that he was there "to plant the Holy Gospel, that the Indians may be enlightened and come to the knowledge of the Holy Catholic faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, as the Roman Church teaches it." And so when Ribaut fell into his hands after promise of safe conduct, "I," Menendez writes, "caused Juan Ribao with all the rest to be put to the knife, judging this to be necessary for the service of God our Lord and of your Majesty." And for a hundred years the Spanish asserted their claim and nothing was done to dispute it until Charles II granted the territory to eight proprietors, for whom John Locke drew up "the Grand Model," a remarkable and 1 Lodge: Short History of the English Colonies, p. 134. fantastic constitution that was unworkable and was never put into effect. The territory granted to the Duke of Albemarle and his associates occupied a position of peculiar importance as the frontier of the English colonies in America. It lay between Virginia, then the most advanced southerly British outpost on the American continent, and the Spanish settlements. It was not only the international frontier but it served also, as Fiske points out, "for some time as a kind of backwoods for Virginia"; and he adds that “until recently one of the most important factors in American history has been the existence of a perpetually advancing frontier, where new territory has often to be won by hard fighting against its barbarian occupants, where the life has been at once more romantic and more sordid than on the civilized seaboard, and where democracy has assumed its most distinctly American features." How great this influence of the land beyond has exercised upon the development of the American character and American institutions, we shall see more clearly when we come to study the great migration that swept from the East to the West to populate the plains and build great cities, and the flood that rolled up from the South and fructified that vast region over which the Indian roamed and the buffalo grazed, but for the present we merely mention it as one of the factors in race development; for in almost three centuries of American existence there was never a time that a frontier was not to be conquered, and virgin soil to be broken, and civilization to be planted. With the early efforts at settlement and the history of Carolina until it was divided into two provinces, there is little need to concern ourselves. To attract settlers to North Carolina a law was passed exempting them from the payment of taxes for one year, all debts contracted outside the province ipso facto outlawed, and no person could be sued for five years for any cause of action that might have arisen outside of the colony. North Carolina, or Albemarle, as it was then known, under these beneficent laws attracted the worthless, the improvident and the dishonest, and Virginia, resenting an Alsatia planted at its doors, contemptuously termed the new settlement "Rogue's Harbor." Naturally the worst element in all the colonies found shelter here. The men, we are told, were lazy and made their wives work for them. If the weather was cold, "they lie and snore till the sun had run one third of its course and dispersed all the unwholesome damps," and the low, alluvial land was the breeding ground for malaria. In mild weather "they stand leaning with both their arms upon the cornfield fence, and gravely consider whether they had best go and take a little heat at the hoe, but generally find reasons to put it off until another time." 1 In 1677, only thirteen years after the first gov1 Byrd MSS., pp. 75–76. |