Page:Columbus and other heroes of American discovery; (IA columbusotherher00bell).pdf/176

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

from every part of Great Britain and its dependencies, to the fruitful lands which had long been claimed as their exclusive property by the Spaniards. The original proprietors were literally crowded out by "gay cavaliers" and rapacious planters, who soon made the very name of white man hateful in the ears of the unfortunate Indians. Under the governorship of the terrible Seth Sothel, a man whose name will live forever as that of the most infamous of many reckless rulers of Carolina, the natives were hunted down on every side, and sold as slaves to West Indian planters, while those among the emigrants who retained any reverence for the human or divine had their feelings outraged at every turn.

Not until the 18th century was considerably advanced did the Carolineans obtain any relief from this terrible state of things. Petition after petition was sent to the mother country by the unhappy sufferers, setting forth how the Indians were "assaulted, killed, destroyed, and taken" under the sanction of the law; how even the clergy openly led the most dissolute lives, etc., etc. The breaking out of an Indian war in 1715 seems to have been the first thing to arouse the home authorities to the dangers threatening their vast possessions in the West. The revolt was crushed with an iron hand, the survivors of the natives taking refuge in the swamps of Florida, and in 1721, George I. consented to take the government of Carolina into his own hands.

A few years later, the lands granted to the eight noblemen by Charles II. were bought up by the Crown for some £28,000; and from that time the colony grew rapidly in prosperity and importance, extending its settlements as far south as the Savannah river, across which went forth pioneers into the state afterward called Georgia, in honor of the English monarch, long before the first body of emigrants from the mother country landed on its shores. Thus, as New England and Virginia may be said to have been the parents of Carolina, the new-born colony became in its turn the founder of the infant community of Georgia. It was in 1732 that this, the youngest but one of the original thirteen states of the Union, was first settled by a colony from England, under the leadership of the now famous Oglethorpe, who, like John Eliot in the North, made it his chief object to conciliate the Indians.

Soon after the arrival of the emigrants from Europe, Oglethorpe succeeded in bringing about a congress between the so-called Creek Indians and the English, near the site of the modern Savannah, at which meeting peace was