Section 2.  THE MODERN COUNTY IN MASSACHUSETTS.  There is a good account in Martin’s Text Book above mentioned.

Section 3.  THE OLD VIRGINIA COUNTY.  The best account is in J.H.U.  Studies, III., ii.-iii.  Edward Ingle, Virginia Local Institutions.

In dealing with the questions on page 69, both teachers and pupils will find Dole’s Talks about Law (Boston, 1887) extremely valuable and helpful.

CHAPTER IV.

TOWNSHIP AND COUNTY.

Section 1. Various Local Systems.

We have now completed our outline sketch of town and county government as illustrated in New England on the one hand and in Virginia on the other.  There are some important points in the early history of local government in other portions of the original thirteen states, to which we must next call attention; and then we shall be prepared to understand the manner in which our great western country has been organized under civil government.  We must first say something about South Carolina and Maryland.

[Sidenote:  Parishes in South Carolina.] South Carolina was settled from half a century to a century later than Massachusetts and Virginia, and by two distinct streams of immigration.  The lowlands near the coast were settled by Englishmen and by French Huguenots, but the form of government was purely English.  There were parishes, as in Virginia, but popular election played a greater part in them.  The vestrymen were elected yearly by all the taxpayers of the parish.  The minister was also elected by his people, and after 1719 each parish sent its representatives to the colonial legislature, though in a few instances two parishes were joined together for the purpose of choosing representatives.  The system was thus more democratic than in Virginia; and in this connection it is worth while to observe that parochial libraries and free schools were established as early as 1712, much earlier than in Virginia.

[Sidenote:  The back country] During the first half of the eighteenth century a very different stream of immigration, coming mostly along the slope of the Alleghanies from Virginia and Pennsylvania, and consisting in great part of Germans, Scotch Highlanders, and Scotch-Irish, peopled the upland western regions of South Carolina.  For some time this territory had scarcely any civil organization.  It was a kind of “wild West.”  There were as yet no counties in the colony.  There was just one sheriff for the whole colony, who “held his office by patent from the crown.” [1] A court sat in Charleston, but the arm of justice was hardly long enough to reach offenders in the mountains.  “To punish a horse-thief or prosecute a debtor one was sometimes compelled to travel a distance of several hundred miles, and be subjected to all the dangers and delays incident to a wild country.”  When people cannot get justice in what in civilized countries is the regular way, they will get it in some irregular way.  So these mountaineers began to form themselves into bands known as “regulators,” quite like the “vigilance committees” formed for the same purposes in California a hundred years later.  For thieves and murderers the “regulators” provided a speedy trial, and the nearest tree served as a gallows.