A History of the American People

complained that the Ulstermen took over in an audacious and disorderly manner,' telling him and other officials thatit was against the laws of God and nature that so much land should be
idle while so many Christians wanted it to labor on and raise their bread.' How could he answer
such a heartfelt point, except by speeding up the process of lawful conveyance?
The further south you went, the cheaper the land got. Indeed it was often to be had for nothing.
From the I720s onwards, Germans, Swiss, Irish, Scotch, and others, moved down from the
northeast along the rich inland valleys of the mountain area-the Cumberland, Shenandoah, and
Hagerstown valleys, then through the passes east into what is now North Carolina, Kentucky,
and Tennessee. Shortly after the mid-century they were getting into Georgia this way. As F. J.
Turner was later to note, in The Frontier in American History, this moving mass of people
contained children with names like Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and James Robertson, and the
forebears of Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, John C. Calhoun, James K. Polk,
Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, and Stonewall Jackson. This was when Andrew Jackson's
father set up in Carolina piedmont and Thomas Jefferson's built his home on the frontier at Blue
Ridge.
South of the Chesapeake, the framework of government became weaker. In the Carolinas there
was constant bickering between north and south, as well as between Tidewater grandees and
inland settlers in the piedmont. In 1691 the Carolina proprietors recognized the fait accompli of a
northern region by dividing the colony into two provinces, with a deputy governor living in the
town of Albemarle, capital of what was already being called North Carolina. On May 12, 1712
the separation was completed and North Carolina became a colony on its own. It had already run
its own legislature, be it noted, for forty-seven years-five years longer than South Carolina's in
Charleston. This did not solve the problem in either half, for the proprietors were absentee
landlords-the absentee grandee was the curse of the early South, as it always was in Ireland-and
that meant there was a lack of control and purpose in the governor's mansion, leading to tardy
and inadequate response to Indian raids, a poorly led and equipped militia, and other evils. The
settlers petitioned London for help-it is significant that, even in the 1720s, colonists still had the
`look homeward' reflex and saw the crown as their father and savior. The crown responded:
South Carolina became a royal colony on May 29, 1721 and North Carolina followed eight years
later on July 25, 1729. But that did not mean the arrival of royal soldiers or assured protection
from London.
Nor were the Indians the only threat. In 1720, for instance, South Carolina had only 7,800
whites, as opposed to 11,800 black slaves-the largest ratio of blacks to whites, about 6o percent,
in any colony. And it was bringing in more slaves fast; another 2,000 in the years 1721-5 alone.
Many slaves escaped, and these maroons, as they were called, tended to organize themselves into
gangs to break out of British territory into Spanish Florida, which issued a decree in 1733 stating
that slaves who defied the British and managed to reach land under the Spanish flag would be
considered free. The result, in 1739, was a series of slave revolts. A band of Charleston slaves set
out for Spanish St Augustine and freedom, killing all whites they met on the way, a total of
twenty-one; forty-four of these maroons were rounded up and executed on the spot. On the Stono
River, a black firebrand called Cato led an even bloodier uprising-thirty whites and about fifty
blacks were killed before order was restored. There was a third revolt in St John's Parish, in
Berkeley County.
Violence between blacks and whites was by no means confined to Carolina, of course, as the
number of blacks imported from Africa and the West Indies steadily increased. In 1741 a series
of mysterious fires in New York City, where blacks were a fifth of the population, led to rumors