comparatively poor and struggling community. It received but few additions by sea because of the sand-choked inlets and the fearful reputation of Cape Hatteras as a rendezvous with death for those brave enough to dare its storms and treacherous currents. On the other hand, these settlers ventured but short distances inland because of the no less terrible menace of the fighting Tuscarora Indians, who ranged over the region from seaboard to upland and carried terror to the hearts of even the boldest pioneers. Not until after the horrible massacre of 1711, from the effects of which the Albemarle settlement never fully recovered in colonial times, was an effort made to end the Tuscarora danger and to open up the lower and central part of the colony to occupation and settlement.

The assistance which South Carolina gave to her sister colony in revenging itself on the Tuscaroras brought to the knowledge of the leading men of Charleston the wonderful beauty and fertility of the land around the Cape Fear River and led to the founding of the second or southern settlement in North Carolina, first at Brunswick about 1725 and later at Wilmington, a town which eventually became the capital seat of the colony. But even the Cape Fear settlers, though laying out plantations

along the river and its branches, never passed farther inland than the "fall line" at Cross Creek (Fayetteville), the head of navigation on the river. Throughout the period they remained more closely in touch with their southern neighbors of South Carolina than with those of the older region to the northward and not only received from them many accessions of numbers but also entered into frequent intercourse of a social and commercial nature. Though the Cape Fear planters raised neither rice nor indigo, as did those of South Carolina and Georgia, they were similar to them in manners, customs, and habits of life.

Just as the men of the Cape Fear region confined their activities to the lower reaches of the river and its tributaries, so the settlers to the southwardat Georgetown, Charleston, and Savannah moved but short distances back from the coast during the colonial period. At first there were only a few plantations of South Carolina which lay as much as seventy miles inland, and though after 1760 certain merchants of Charleston took up extensive grants of land on the upper waters of the Savannah River, the only people in these colonies who gave real evidence of the pioneer instinct were the Germans. They entered South Carolina about

1735, pushed up the rivers into the region of Orangeburg and Amelia counties, and filled that frontier section with an industrious people who cultivated wheat, rye, and barley, entered into friendly relations with the Cherokee Indians, and lived in great harmony among themselves. As they increased in numbers and widened their area of occupation, some of them, by coming into touch with the Scotch-Irish who had pushed in from the north, eventually linked the back country civilization to that of the coast.

Such in broad perspective was the land of our colonial forefathers and such were the people who dwelt in it. The picture, when looked at more closely, has interesting features and a wealth of local color. Perhaps the most immediately strik- · ing, because one of the earliest and most fundamental, is the contrast between town and country.

CHAPTER II

TOWN AND COUNTRY

THE tilling of the soil absorbed the energies of not less than nine-tenths of the colonial population. Even those who by occupation were sailors, fishermen, fur traders, or merchants often gave a part of their time to the cultivation of farms or plantations. Land hunger was the master passion which brought the men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries across the sea and lured them on to the frontier. Where hundreds sought for freedom of worship and release from political oppression, thousands saw in the great unoccupied lands of the New World a chance to make a living and to escape from their landlords at home. To obtain a freehold in America was, as Thomas Hutchinson once wrote of New England, the "ruling purpose" which sent colonial sons with their cattle and belongings to some distant frontier township, where they would thrust back the wilderness and create 23

a new community. Throughout the whole of the colonial period this migration westward in quest of land, whether overseas or through the wilderness, whether from New England or Old England or the Continent, continued at an accelerating pace. The Revolutionary troubles, of course, brought it temporarily to a standstill. In New England

outside of New Hampshire,

where the Allen family had a claim to the soil that made the people of that colony a great deal of trouble every individual was his own proprietor, the supreme and independent lord of the acres he tilled. But elsewhere the ultimate title to the soil lay in the hands of the King or of such great proprietors as the Baltimores and the Penns, to whom grants had been made by the Crown. The colonist who obtained land from King or proprietor was expected to pay a small quitrent as a token of the higher ownership. The quitrent was not a real rent, proportionate to the actual value of the acres held; it was never large in amount nor burdensome to the settler; and it was rarely increased, whether the price of land rose or fell. The colonists never liked the quitrent, however, and in many instances resolutely refused to pay it, so that it became in time a cause of friction and a source of discontent