Page:The American encyclopedia of history, biography and travel (IA americanencyclop00blak).pdf/365

 Parliament sent out commissioners who displaced the officers of the proprietary, and put the government into the hands of the Puritans, who soon passed an act that excluded papists and prelatists from the benefit of the act of toleration. A civil war at one time raged in the colony, Roundheads and Cavaliers being opposed to each other, as in the mother land. But with the restoration of Charles II, these troubles ceased, and the prosperity of the settlement for a long period suffered but little interruption. Yet an order was passed in 1681, for intrusting all offices to Protestants, so that the Catholics were disfranchised a second time in the colony they had founded.

The territory on the coast south of Virginia, extending nominally as far south as St. Augustine, was granted, in 1663, to the great Lord Clarendon, the Earl of Shaftesbury, and six other eminent individuals. The whole region was to constitute one province, under the name of Carolina, the proprietors receiving, together with the grant of the land, ample powers of government. But a settlement had already been formed near Albemarle Sound by some religious exiles from Virginia, and another one near the mouth of Cape Fear river, by some adventurers from New England, afterwards reinforced by a band of emigrants from Barbadoes. In 1670, three ships were fitted out with colonists from England, under the command of William Sayle, who formed a settlement at Port Royal, which he soon removed to the peninsula at the mouth of the Ashley and the Cooper rivers, giving to the town that he founded there the name of Charleston. As this place was remote from Albemarle, it obtained a separate government, and thus were created the two colonies of North and South Carolina. The proprietors gave public assurance that the settlers should enjoy unrestricted religious liberty, and that their representatives should have a voice in the enactment of laws. Unluckily they employed the celebrated philosopher, John Locke, to devise a scheme of government for the colony; and he gave them, under the name of the 'Grand Model,' the most complicated and fanciful system that the wit of man ever contrived, and which was a perpetual source of trouble and confusion for the quarter of a century during which it was in partial operation. It established two orders of nobility, landgraves and caciques; it assigned two fifths of the land for seignories, baronies, and manors, to be cultivated by a race of tenants attached to the soil, and the remaining three fifths were allotted to private freeholders; and it erected a formidable bureaucracy, with officers and titles enough for a populous kingdom of the Old World. This rickety system could never be put into full operation, and in 1693, it was entirely abrogated. The motley population was swelled by two ship-loads of Dutch emigrants from New York, and by a cargo of slaves from Barbadoes. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, many Huguenots came to South Carolina, and settled along the Santee; they had been preceded by some Presbyterian settlers from the north of Ireland, and by a Scotch colony led by lord Cardross. Religious toleration and the prospect of obtaining land on easy terms were the lures which drew so many different classes of immigrants. The population thus formed did not show themselves very tractable. They persisted in keeping up an illegal traffic with New England, they grumbled at paying quit rent to the proprietaries, and they quarreled with the arbitrary and rapacious governors who were sent to