Byrd’s solution to the Dismal Swamp was to drain it and remake it as productive farmland. Later projectors, including George Washington, got behind Byrd’s idea. Teaming with other investors, Washington established a company in 1763 whose purpose was to use slaves to drain the swamp, grow hemp, and cut wood shingles. By 1790, they were working to build a canal (a “ditch,” as it was more accurately called at the time) to tunnel through the morass of cypress trees, prickly briars, and muddy waterways.20
The Carolina coastline was nearly as uninviting, cutting off the northern part of the colony from ready access to large sailing vessels. Only New Englanders, in their low-bottomed boats, could navigate the shallow, shoal-filled inlets of the Outer Banks. Without a major harbor, and facing burdensome taxes if they shipped their goods through Virginia, many Carolinians turned to smuggling. Hidden inlets made North Carolina attractive to pirates. Along trade routes from the West Indies to the North American continent, piracy flourished in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Several of Albermarle’s governors were accused of sheltering these high-seas thieves and personally profiting from the illicit trade. The notorious Blackbeard (a.k.a. Edward Teach, or Edward Thatch) made a home here, as did the Barbados gentleman turned pirate, Major Stede Bonnet. Supposedly, both were warmly welcomed into the humble homes of North Carolinians. At least that was what the surly Blackbeard claimed, until he lost his head in a grisly clash with Virginians in 1718.21
The Albemarle section of North Carolina was comparable to the poorest districts in Virginia. Most of the settlements were widely scattered—something else the proprietors did not like. The settlers refused to pay their quitrents (land tax), which was one of the ways the proprietors hoped to make money.22 By 1729, when the proprietors sold their original grant to the British government, North Carolina listed 3,281 land grants, and 309 grantees who owned almost half the land. This meant that in a population of nearly 36,000 people, the majority received small or modest grants, or owned no land at all. Most poor households lacked slaves, indentured servants, or even sons working the land. In 1709, squatters in the poorest district in Albemarle petitioned “your honers” for tax relief, pointing out that their land was nothing more than sand. A few months later, an Anglican minister reported in disgust that the colonists “were so careless and uncleanly” that there was “little difference between the corn in the horse’s manger and the bread on their tables.” The entire North Carolina colony was “overrun with sloth and poverty.”23
Worthless land and equally worthless settlers had led Virginia officials to question the Virginia-Carolina boundary line as early as 1672, when Governor Berkeley initiated negotiations with the Carolina proprietors in an effort to absorb Albemarle into Virginia. That plan fell through, but it was tried again two decades later. Over the years, colonial officials rarely succeeded in collecting customs duties. The proprietors faced resistance in collecting quitrents. Disorder ruled. A British possession in name only, Albemarle County was routinely able to escape imperial rule.24
During its first fifty years, the errant northern part of Carolina, which had its own government, was rocked by two internal rebellions and one war with Tuscarora Indians. The misnamed Culpeper’s Rebellion (1677–79) is particularly instructive. In a contest with Thomas Miller, an ambitious trader and tobacco planter who wanted to crack down on smugglers, collect customs duties, and gain favor with proprietors, Thomas Culpeper, a surveyor, sided with the poorer settlers. Theirs was a personal conflict with broad repercussions. Miller took advantage of a leadership vacuum to seize control of government. Like a petty tyrant, he surrounded himself with an armed guard, while Culpeper rallied popular support and organized an informal militia. Miller was forced to flee the colony. Back in London, he charged Culpeper with leading an uprising, and as a result in 1680 Culpeper was tried for treason.25
In an unexpected development, the proprietor Lord Shaftesbury came to Culpeper’s defense. He delivered an eloquent oration before the Court of King’s Bench, arguing that a stable government had never legally existed in North Carolina. Anticipating Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Shaftesbury concluded that the colony remained effectively in a state of nature. Without a genuine government, there could be no rebellion. Commentary like this merely underscored northern Carolina’s outlier status.26
Culpeper’s Rebellion was something less than a servile insurrection. The poor settlers’ rallying cry of “noe Landgraves, noe Casiques” filled the air, yet we cannot call theirs strictly a war of the poor against the rich. Miller’s agenda was to stop smuggling and force his fellow Englishmen to participate in the British colonial trade system. His targets were those, including modest farmers, who depended on smuggling to survive. Class power, in this instance, was about those who benefited from a greater reliance on the imperial orbit of influence. But Miller had also asserted an unconstitutional claim to the governorship and, by applying heavy-handed tactics, failed to command respect within the political community. Indeed, he was known for his foul mouth and drunken oaths against the king, which resulted in charges of sedition and blasphemy. He was at best a poseur, at worst a crude bully. In the end, North Carolina’s aristocratic leadership proved as dubious as the made-up titles of landgraves and caciques.27
A history of misrule continued to haunt North Carolina. Governor Seth Sothell, who served from 1681 to 1689, engrossed as many as forty-four thousand acres for private gain. He was eventually banished from the colony. Nor was this unique. From 1662 to 1736, North Carolina went through forty-one governors, while its sister colony saw twenty-five. After 1691, in an effort to enhance stability, the government in South Carolina appointed the deputy governor for North Carolina. When a rebellion against Governor Edward Hyde ignited in 1708, Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood went to war against his southern neighbor. Their conflict triggered renewed hostilities from the Tuscarora Indians, who resented unceasing English encroachment on their lands.28
In 1711, South Carolina intervened, sending Captain John Barnwell north to put down the Tuscaroras. Barnwell expected to be awarded a large land grant for his service. With his expectations unmet, he turned the tables and incited the Indians to attack several North Carolina settlements. Even before his betrayal, though, he felt little identification with the colonists, writing that North Carolinians were the most “cowardly Blockheads [another word for lubber] that ever God created & must be used like negro[e]s if you expect any good of them.”29