was ever organized by man. Freedom
of conscience, exemption from taxation, except by their own consent;
gratuities in land to every emigrant, and other wholesome regulations
claimed the prompt legislative action of the infant colony. "These
simple laws suited a simple people, who were as free as the air of
their mountains; and when oppressed, were as rough as the billows of
the ocean."[C]

In 1707, a company of Huguenots, as the French Protestants were
called, settled on the Trent. In 1709, the Lords Proprietors granted
to Baron de Graffenreidt ten thousand acres of land on the Neuse and
Cape Fear rivers for colonizing purposes. In a short time afterward, a
great number of Palatines (Germans) and fifteen hundred Swiss followed
the Baron, and settled at the confluence of the Trent and the Neuse.
The town was called New Berne, after Berne, in Switzerland, the
birth-place of Graffenreidt. This was the first important introduction
into Eastern Carolina of a most excellent class of liberty-loving
people, whose descendants wherever their lots were cast, in our
country, gave illustrious proof of their valor and patriotism during
the Revolutionary war.

In 1729, the Lords Proprietors (except Lord Granville) surrendered the
government of the province, with all the franchises under the charter
of Charles II, and their property in the soil, to the crown for a
valuable consideration. The population at that time did not exceed ten
thousand inhabitants. George Burrington. Governor of the province
under the Lords Proprietors, was re-appointed to the same office by
the King. In February, 1731, he thus officially writes to the Duke of
New Castle. "The inhabitants of North Carolina are not industrious,
but subtle and crafty to admiration; always behaved insolently to
their Governors; some of them they have imprisoned; drove others out
of the country; and at other times have set up a governor of their own
choice, supported by men under arms. These people are neither to be
cajoled nor outwitted. Whenever any governor attempts to effect
anything by these means, he will lose his labor, and show his
ignorance." Lord Granville's part of the colony of North Carolina
(one-eighth) was not laid off to him, adjoining Virginia, until 1743.
At that date, a strong tide of emigration was taking place from the
Chowan and Roanoke, the pioneer attractive points of the colony, as
well as from abroad, to the great interior, and Western territory, now
bec