In April, 1672, all previous parliaments and parliamentary conventions were dissolved; the rapidly increasing colony demanded "a new parliament," and instituted a government for itself; it did not deem it possible to conform more closely to the constitutions.

Labors of agriculture in the sultry clime were appalling to Englishmen. Neither did the culture of the cereal grasses at once promise success. It was observed that the climate of South Carolina is more congenial to the African “than that of the more northern colonies;" it became the great object of the emigrant "to buy negro slaves, without which," adds Wilson, "a planter can never do any great matter;" and the negro race was multiplied so rapidly by importations that, in a few years, we are told, the blacks in the low country were to the whites in the proportion of twenty-two to twelve-a proportion that had no parallel north of the West Indies.

Imagination already regarded Carolina as the chosen spot for the culture of the olive; and, in the region where flowers bloom every month in the year, orange-trees were to supplant the cedar; mulberries to feed silk-worms; and choicest wines to be ripened. For this end, Charles II., with an almost solitary instance of munificence toward America, sent at his own expense to Carolina a few foreign Protestants, to domesticate the productions of the south of Europe.

From England emigrations were considerable. Even Shaftesbury, when, in July, 1681, he was committed to the Tower, desired leave to withdraw to Carolina. The character of the proprietaries was a sufficient invitation to members of the church of England. The promise of equal immunities attracted many dissenters. A contemporary historian commemorates with singular praise the company from Somersetshire, who, in 1683, were conducted to Charleston by Joseph Blake, brother to the gallant admiral. Blake was already advanced in life; but impatient of present oppression, and fearing still greater evils from a popish successor, he devoted to the advancement of emigration all the fortune which he had inherited as the fruits of his brother's victories. A colony of Scotch-Irish of the same year received a hearty wel

come.

The tyranny of government in Scotland compelled its inhabitants to seek peace by abandoning their native country. In 1684, the Presbyterian, Lord Cardross, many of whose friends had suffered imprisonment, the rack, and even death, and who had been persecuted under Lauderdale, sailed for Carolina with ten families of outcasts. They planted themselves at Port Royal; the colony of Ashley river exercised over them a jurisdiction to which they reluctantly submitted; Cardross returned to Europe, where he rendered service in the approaching revolution; and, in 1686, the Spaniards, taking umbrage at a plantation established on ground which they claimed as a dependency of St. Augustine, invaded the frontier settlement, and laid it entirely waste. Of the unhappy emigrants, some found their way back to Scotland; some mingled with the earlier planters of Carolina.

The most remarkable incident in the early history of South Carolina was the arrival of many Huguenots, who, in moral worth and intelligence, were of "the Best" of the French. Resolved to enforce religious uniformity in his dominions, Louis XIV. attempted to dragoon the French Calvinists into returning to the Catholic church, by quartering soldiers in every Protestant family to torment them into apostasy. In 1685, the edict of Nantes, which had confirmed to Protestants in France an imperfect toleration, was revoked, and all public worship was forbidden them. Desiring not to drive away, but to convert his subjects, the king forbade emigration under penalty of the gallows; the hounds were let loose on game shut up in a close park. Every wise government was eager to offer a home to those who broke away and who brought with them the highest industrial skill of France. They introduced into the north of Germany manufactures before unknown. A suburb of London was filled with them. The prince of Orange gained regiments of soldiers. A colony of the refugees reached the Cape of Good Hope. In America they were welcome everywhere. The towns of Massachusetts contributed liberally to their sup port, and provided them with land. Others repaired to New York; but the climate of South Carolina attracted the exiles from Languedoc.

"We quitted home by night, leaving the soldiers in their beds, and abandoning the house with its furniture," wrote Judith, the young wife of Pierre Manigault. "We contrived to hide ourselves for ten days at Romans, in Dauphiny, while a search was made for us; but our faithful hostess would not betray us." Nor could they escape except by a circuitous journey through Germany and Holland, and thence to England, in the depths of winter. "Having embarked at London, we were sadly off. The spotted fever appeared on

board the vessel, and many died of the disease; among these, our aged mother. We touched at Bermuda, where the vessel was seized. Our money was all spent; with great difficulty we procured a passage in another vessel. After our arrival in Carolina we suffered every kind of evil. our eldest brother, unaccustomed to the hard labor which we were obliged to undergo, died of a fever. Since leaving

In eighteen months

France we had experienced every kind of affliction, disease, pestilence, famine, poverty, hard labor. I have been for six months without tasting bread, working the ground like a slave; and I have passed three or four years without having it when I wanted it. God has done great things for us, in enabling us to bear up under so many trials."

Flying from a kingdom where the profession of their religion was a felony, where their estates were liable to be confiscated in favor of the apostate, where the preaching of their faith was a crime to be expiated on the wheel, where their children might be torn from them and transferred to the nearest Catholic relation, the fugitives from Languedoc, from Rochelle, and Saintange, and Bordeaux, from St. Quentin, Poictiers, and the beautiful valley of Tours, from St. Lo and Dieppe, men who had the virtues of the English Puritans without their bigotry, came to the land to which Shaftesbury had invited the believer of every creed. There they obtained an assignment of lands, and soon had tenements. On every Lord's day they might be seen gathering from their plantations upon the banks of the Cooper, the parents with their children whom no bigot could now wrest from them, making their way in skiffs to their church at the confluence of the rivers.

The country abounds in monuments of the French Protes

tants. When the struggle for independence arrived, the son of Judith Manigault intrusted the vast fortune he had acquired to the country that had adopted his mother. The hall of the town of Boston, famed as "the cradle of liberty;" the treaty that gave to the United States peace with independence, and the Mississippi for a boundary; the name of the oldest college of Maine-bear witness to the public virtues of American descendants of the Huguenots.

To the emigrants from France, South Carolina conceded the privileges of citizenship so soon as it could be done by the act of the Carolinians themselves.

For the proprietary power was essentially weak. The company of courtiers, which became no more than a partnership of speculators in colonial lands, had not sufficient force to resist foreign violence or assert domestic authority. It could derive no strength but from the colonists or from the crown. But the colonists connected self-protection with the right of self-government; and the crown would not incur expense, except on a surrender of the jurisdiction. The proprietary government, having its organ in the council, could prolong its existence only by concessions, and was destined from its inherent weakness to be overthrown by the commons.

In 1670, the proprietaries acquiesced in a government which had little reference to the constitutions. The first governor sunk under the climate and the hardships of founding a colony. His successor, Sir John Yeamans, was a sordid calculator, bent only on acquiring a fortune. He encouraged expense, and enriched himself, without gaining respect or hatred. "It must be a bad soil," said his weary employers, "that will not maintain industrious men, or we must be very silly that would maintain the idle." If they continued their outlays, it was to foster vineyards and olive-groves; they refused supplies of cattle, and desired returns in compensation for their expenditures.

From 1674, the moderation and good sense of West preserved tranquillity for about nine years; but the lords, who had first purchased his services by the grant of all their merchandise and debts in Carolina, in the end dismissed him from office, on the charge that he favored the popular party.

The continued struggle with the proprietaries hastened the emancipation of the people from their rule; but the praise of having never been in the wrong cannot be awarded to the colonists. The latter claimed the right of weakening the neighboring Indian tribes by a partisan warfare, and a sale of the captives into West Indian bondage; their antagonists demanded that the treaty of peace with the red men should be preserved. Again, the proprietaries offered some favorable modifications of the constitutions; the colonists respected the modifications no more than the original laws. A rapid change of governors augmented the confusion. There was no harmony of interests between the lords paramount and their tenants, or of authority between the executive and the popular assembly. As in other colonies south of the Potomac, colonial legislation did not favor the collection of debts that had been contracted elsewhere; the proprietaries demanded a rigid conformity to the cruel method of the English courts. It had been usual to hold the polls for elections at Charleston only; as population extended, the proprietaries ordered an apportionment of the representation; but Carolina would not allow districts to be carved out and representation to be apportioned from abroad; and the useful reformation could not be adopted till it was demanded and effected by the people themselves.

England had always favored its merchants in the invasion of the Spanish commercial monopoly; had sometimes protected pirates, and Charles II. had knighted a freebooter. In Carolina, especially after Port Royal had been laid waste by the Spaniards, there were not wanting those who regarded the buccaneers as their natural allies against a common enemy, and thus opened one more dispute with the proprietaries.

When the commerce of South Carolina had so increased that a collector of plantation duties was appointed, a new struggle arose. The court of the proprietaries, careful not to offend the king, gave orders that the acts of navigation, although they were an infringement of the charter, should be enforced. The colonists, who had made themselves independent of the proprietaries in fact, esteemed themselves independent of parliament of right. Here, as everywhere, the acts were resisted as at war with natural equity.