was enjoyed without anxiety as without guarantees.  The charities of life were scattered at their feet like the flowers of their meadows."[B] No freer country 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 becoming dotted with numerous habitations.  The Tuscarora Indians, the terrible scourge of Eastern Carolina, having been subdued, and entered into a treaty of peace and friendship in 1718, no serious obstacle interposed to prevent a Western extension of settlements.  Already adventurous individuals, and even families of hardy pioneers had extended their migrations to the Eastern base of the