Tory parties might at
times seem to color the land their own hue. But there always ran, though
often roughly and with turbulence, a set of the stream against autocracy.
In Carolina, South and North, by the Ashley and Cooper rivers, and in that
region called Albemarle, just back of Virginia, there arose and went on,
through the remainder of the seventeenth century and in the eighteenth,
struggles with the Lords Proprietaries and the Governors that these named,
and behind this a more covert struggle with the Crown. The details
differed, but the issues involved were much the same in North and South
Carolina. The struggle lasted for the threescore and odd years of the
proprietary government and renewed itself upon occasion after 1729 when the
Carolinas became royal colonies. Later, it was swept, a strong affluent,
into the great general stream of colonial revolt, culminating in the
Revolution.
Into North Carolina, beside the border population entering through Virginia
and containing much of a backwoods and derelict nature, came many
Huguenots, the best of folk, and industrious Swiss, and Germans from the
Rhine. Then the Scotch began to come in numbers, and families of Scotch
descent from the north of Ireland. The tone of society consequently changed
from that of the early days. The ruffian and the shiftless sank to the
bottom. There grew up in North Carolina a people, agricultural but without
great plantations, hardworking and freedom-loving.
South Carolina, on the other hand, had great plantations, a town society,
suave and polished, a learned clergy, an aristocratic cast to life.
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