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John Archdale was a son of Thomas Archdale of Loaks, in Chipping Wycomb, Bucks County, England and came to New England in 1664 as agent of his brother-in-law, Governor Gorges of Maine. He visited the Albemarle region of North Carolina in March 1686, and was commissioner for Gorges in Maine in 1687-'88. He became governor of North Carolina in 1695, and held the office for about two years. He was sagacious, prudent, and moderate, and under his administration the province made great progress in internal improvements. Archdale was a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers), and, while enforcing a militia law, exempted all Friends from service. By his moderation he quieted the troubles between the colonists and their feudal sovereigns, and, by establishing a special board for deciding contests between white men and Indians, he won the friendship of the latter. His conscientious scruples concerning the required oaths prevented his taking a seat in parliament, to which he was elected in 1698. Archdale published "A New Description of the Fertile and Pleasant Province of Carolina, with a Brief Account of its Discovery, Settling, and Government, up to this Time, with several Remarkable Passages during My Time" (London, 1707). He was a Quaker and a Lord Proprietor, having purchased John Berkeley's share. When a law was passed requiring officeholders to take an oath to serve the English crown, the Quakers, who believed oaths should be made only to God, met opposition and were prohibited from holding public office. From that time on their influence waned. The Lords Proprietors in 1694 authorized Governor John Archdale "for ye Incouragement of settling those parts wch lye north of Cape Fear" to dispose of lands at moderate and reasonable rates so long as they were not below a half penny per acre. John Archdale, a distinguished and talented Quaker, arriving in 1695, began an administration so just and wise the dissension ceased and the colony entered upon a new career of prosperity. The quit-rents on lands were remitted for four years. The people were given the option of paying their taxes in money or in produce. The Indians were coniliated with kindness and protected against kidnappers. Some native Catholics were ransomed from slavery and sent to their homes in Florida, and the Spanish governor reciprocated the deed with a friendly message. When the old jealousy against the Huguenots asserted itself in the general assembly, the benevolent influence of Archdale procured the passage of a law by which all Christians, except the Catholics, were fully enfranchised; the ungenerous exception was made against the governor's will. It was a real misfortune to the colony when, in 1698, the good governor was recalled to England. Owing to incompetent and thieving governors, appointed through favoritism and not fitness for the office, and to abortive attempts to introduce the Fundamental Constitutions on an unwilling people, the Albemarle colony did not prosper, and in 1693 the population was but half what it had been fifteen years before, while the Clarendon colony planted by Yeamans on the Cape Fear had been wholly abandoned. Meantime another colony had been planted at the mouths of the Ashley and Cooper rivers. These two surviving colonies, several hundred miles apart, now began to be called North and South Carolina. Their governments were combined into one, and better times were now at hand. In 1695, John Archdale, a good Quaker, became governor of both Carolinas, and from this time the settlements were much more prosperous that before. The Pilgrims gave thanks that 90 per cent of the native population of New England had been wiped out so that in the words of John Archdale, Governor of Carolina in the 1690s, "the Hand of God [has been] eminently seen in thinning the Indians, to make room for the English". In 1707, John Archdale, former governor of the province of Carolina, describes in his memoirs how he communicated with certain Indians: I…ordered him to bring these Indians with him to Charles Town, which accordingly he did. There were three men and one woman; they could speak Spanish, and I had a Jew for an Interpreter, so upon examination I found they professed the Christian Religion as the Papists do… This incident took place in August 1695. There is no evidence to support many claims that John Archdale was a Governor or Deputy Governor of Albemarle in the mid-1680s. |
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