Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/80

 irate people from whom he tried to collect quitrents and other revenues. Again and again, owing to the scarcity of specie, the legislature of South Carolina insisted on issuing large quantities of fiat money, thus enacting early scenes in the controversy between debtors and creditors that was to rage for more than two centuries as the star of American empire moved westward. On one occasion local merchants who protested against paper money were held in jail until they apologized; and when British merchants across the sea induced the proprietors to veto the objectionable currency law, the South Carolina assembly answered by revolution. During the contest, the governor was deposed, a local paper-money man chosen to rule in the king's name, and a protest lodged with the Crown against "the confused, negligent, and helpless government of the proprietaries."

Weary of a fruitless contest that had brought neither profit nor glory, the owners of the Carolinas sold out to the Crown in 1729, each of the territories thus becoming a royal province. With the completion of this sale, the wrath of the colonists that had once raged around the heads of governors selected by the proprietors was transferred to the officers of the king. Freeholders and planters were no more eager to pay quitrents to the royal treasury than to eight English landlords; neither were they willing to tolerate any extensive interference with their vested interests. After nearly half a century of conflict over such issues, the Carolinas were ready for the revolution that put an end to control by the agents of the Crown.

Two of the first Carolina proprietors, Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, seeing, at the time the southern project was first launched, a promise of fortune in American land speculation, determined to risk a venture on their own account; and in 1664 they managed to secure from their intimate friend, the Duke of York, a grant of territory between