persisted and succeeded, himself becoming first president of the college. The initial commencement exercises took place in 1700.

Governor Spotswood, who came in 1710, did much for Virginia. He built the first iron furnaces in America, introduced wine-culture, for which he imported skilled Germans, and greatly interested himself in the civilization of the Indians. He was the earliest to explore the Shenandoah Valley. It was also by his energy that the famous pirate "Blackbeard" was captured and executed. Lieutenant Maynard, sent with two ships to hunt him, attacked and boarded the pirate vessel in Pamlico Sound, 1718. A tough fight at close quarters ensued. Blackbeard was shot dead, his crew crying for quarter. Thirteen of the men were hung at Williamsburg. Blackbeard's skull, made into a drinking-cup, is preserved to this day. The great corsair's fate, Benjamin Franklin, then a printer's devil in Boston, celebrated in verse.

Carolina was settled partly from England, France, and the Barbadoes, and partly from New England; but mainly from Virginia, which colony furthermore furnished most of its political ideas.

In March, 1663, Carolina was constituted a territory, extending from 36° north latitude southward to the river San Matheo, and assigned to a company of seven distinguished proprietaries, including General Monk, who had been created Duke of Albemarle, and John Locke's patron, the famous Lord Ashley Cooper, subsequently Earl of

Shaftesbury. Governor Sir William Berkeley, of Virginia, was also one of the proprietaries.

Locke drew up for the province a minute feudal constitution, but it was too cumbersome to work. Rule by the proprietaries proved radically bad. They were ignorant, callous to wrongs done by their governors, and indifferent to everything save their own profits. Many of the settlers too were turbulent and criminals, fugitives from the justice of other colonies. The difficulty was aggravated by Indian and Spanish wars, by negro slavery, so profitable for rice culture, especially in South Carolina, by strife between dissenters and churchmen, by the question of revenue, and by that of representation.

A proprietary party and a larger popular party were continually at feud, not seldom with arms, support of the Church allying itself mainly with the former, dissent with the latter. Zealots for the Church wished to exclude dissenters from the assembly. Their opponents would keep Huguenot immigrants, whom the favor of the proprietaries rendered unwelcome, entirely from the franchise. The popular party passed laws for electing representatives in every county instead of at Charleston alone, and for revenue tariffs to pay the debt entailed by war. The proprietaries vetoed both. They even favored the pirates who harried the coast. Civil commotions were frequent and growth slow. Interference by the crown was therefore most happy. From the time the Carolinas passed into royal hands, 1729, remarkable prosperity at-· tended them both.

Assuming charge of Carolina, the Crown reserved to itself the Spanish frontier, and here, in 1732, it settled Oglethorpe, the able and unselfish founder of Georgia, under the auspices of an organization in form much like a mercantile company, but benevolent in aim, whose main purpose was to open a home for the thousands of Englishmen who were in prison for debt. Many Scotch and many Austrians also came. Full civil liberty was promised to all, religious liberty to all but papists. Political strife was warm here, too, particularly respecting the admission of rum and slaves. Government by the corporators, though well-meaning, was ill-informed and a failure, and would have been ruinous to the colony but for Oglethorpe's genius and exertions. To the advantage of all, therefore, on the lapse of the charter in 1752, Georgia, like the Carolinas, assumed the status of a royal colony.

CHAPTER VI.

GOVERNMENTAL INSTITUTIONS IN THE COLONIES

THE political life, habits, and forms familiar to our fathers were such as their peculiar surroundings and experience had developed out of English originals. This process and its results form an interesting study.

The political unit at the South was the parish; in the North it was the town. Jury trial prevailed in all the colonies. Local self-government was vigorous everywhere, yet the most so in the North. The town regulated its affairs, such as the schools, police, roads, the public lands, the poor, and in Massachusetts and Connecticut also religion, at first by pure mass meetings where each citizen represented himself and which were both legislative and judicial in function, then by combining these meetings in various ways with the agency of selectmen. Where and so soon as a colony came to embrace several towns, representative machinery was set in motion and a colonial legislature formed, having two chambers nearly everywhere, like Parliament. The county, with the same character as at present, was instituted later than the oldest towns and parishes, but itself subsequently became, in thinly settled parts, the unit of governmental

organization and political action, being divided into towns or parishes only gradually. Voting was subject to a property qualification, in some colonies to a religious one also; but no nobility of blood or title got foothold.

The relation of the colonial governments to England is a far more perplexing matter. From the preceding chapters it appears that we may distinguish the colonies, if we come down to about 1750, as either (1) self-governing or charter colonies, in which liberty was most complete and subjection to England little more than nominal, and (2) non-selfgoverning, ruled, theoretically at any rate, in considerable measure from outside themselves. Rhode Island and Connecticut made up the former class. Of the latter there were two groups, the royal or provincial, including New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, and the proprietary, viz., Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware.

Yet we are to bear in mind that many important constitutional and governmental changes had occurred by 1750. Massachusetts, as we have seen, had ceased to be self-governing as at first, yet it retained a charter which conferred large liberty. All the provincial colonies began as proprietary, and all the proprietary were for a time provincial.

Under Andros, New England stretched from the St. Croix to Delaware Bay. After 1689 the tendency in all parts of the country was strong toward civil freedom, which, favored by the changes and apathy of proprietaries and the ignorance and rels of the English ministry, gradually rendered

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