21. Royal Government in North Carolina

As a royal colony, North Carolina government did not change greatly, but much of the confusion and many of the land restrictions imposed by the proprietary disappeared. Immigration now greatly increased and settlement expanded in the south and middle of the coastal areas. These new settlers included groups of Highland Scots in the Cape Fear area, who started emigrating from Scotland in force after the Jacobite rebellion was crushed in 1745.

Royal governor of North Carolina for nearly two decades (1734–52), Gabriel Johnston soon found himself in two basic quarrels with the Assembly. One quarrel, over the perennial land question, began at the opening of his administration: in the course of imposing land reform against the blank patents, Johnston decided to employ the quitrent weapon. As a corollary, he demanded that all quitrents be paid in sterling or in paper money, of which the value would be fixed by governor and Council. He also demanded payment of the backlog of arrears. This policy managed to alienate all the landowners in the colony, large and small, and the Assembly refused to agree to the change. The aroused settlers of Bertie and Edgecombe districts protested to the governor that their poor estates had been honestly purchased and settled with difficulty and that they had believed the lands were their own with the exception of a small quitrent. But now Johnston proposed to increase the quitrents and speedily collect the arrears; if he persisted the settlers would go elsewhere, where they could own the fruits of their own labor. Indeed, in 1737, some five hundred people from Bertie and Edgecombe rose up in arms to free a settler who they mistakenly thought had been harassed for failure to pay quitrents. The Assembly tried to arrest Johnston’s officials for seizing lands and property for payment of quitrents, whereupon Johnston dissolved the Assembly.

Finally the Crown, in 1741, decided largely in favor of the landowners, upholding the principle of the blank patents and previous usage regarding paying quitrents in depreciated commodities. And so, Governor Johnston finally met complete defeat in his attempt to burden the province with heavy quitrents. Whereas in the first few years of his rule he had collected over 4,000 pounds of back quitrents, payments were increasingly in arrears and little was collected thereafter. As a result, the salaries of the government officials paid from quitrents went also in arrears; in 1746, Johnston complained that his salary was eight years overdue. At the governor’s death in 1752, arrears of his salary totaled over 13,000 pounds.

The other important dispute of the Johnston administration stemmed from an inherent flaw of democracy—unequal representation as the distribution of population changes. In 1715, representation in the North Carolina Assembly was established at four for each county in Albemarle, and two for each of the other counties. At that time this allocation reflected the distribution of population in the province. But as time went on, the population expanded in the southern part of the colony, and the fixed quota became more and more inequitable. Johnston tried to rectify this condition but, at the same time, moved against democratic aspects of the 1715 structure, which gave the vote to all freemen of the colony, and which provided for the election of a new Assembly every two years. In 1735, Johnston, under royal instruction, induced the Assembly to impose a freehold property requirement for voting. In addition, the Crown, in 1737, disallowed the biennial act, leaving the governor free to call or to dissolve the Assembly at will.

As part of his campaign against the Assembly and its overweighting of Albemarle representatives, Johnston moved the seat of government—haphazard as it was, since public records were kept in private houses—from Edenton in the north to New Bern in the south. The geographical struggle culminated in 1746, when Johnston called an Assembly to meet in the extreme south, at Wilmington on the Cape Fear River. The Albemarle representatives—a majority of the Assembly—boycotted the meeting, robbing it of a quorum according to the old act of 1715, but the rump Assembly equalized the representation to two members per county and established the capital at New Bern.

This trick threw down a direct challenge to Albemarle, which responded by refusing to send representatives or to recognize any act of the New Bern government. Moreover, the people of Albemarle refused to pay taxes, refused to accept the new central government’s money, and refused to serve as jurors or recognize the decisions of the General Court. Anyone in prison was set free by the public. The approach to anarchism was not quite complete, however, since the local county courts continued to function. In the meanwhile, the burden of supporting the government was declared too heavy for the south, and taxes ceased to be paid throughout the province of North Carolina. In this way, an approach to anarchism came again to North Carolina and especially to ever-individualistic Albemarle. Government only fully returned in 1754, when the Crown finally decided in favor of the northern counties and the old form of representation.

The 1740s and 1750s also saw the Ulster Scot influx into and settlement of the western, Piedmont area of North Carolina, many of the Scots settling on the Granville claim. Generally, the Scots were settler-farmers rather than slave-owning plantation holders.