Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

lands and property for payment of qu¡trents, whereupon Johnston dissolved
the Assembly.
Finally the Crown, in 1741, decided largely in favor of the landowners,
upholding the principle of the blank patents and previous usage regarding
paying quitrents in depreciated commodities. And so, Governor Johnston
finally met complete defeat in his attempt to burden the province with heavy
quitrents. Whereas in the first few years of his rule he had collected over
4,000 pounds of back quitrents, payments were increasingly in arrears and
little was collected thereafter. As a result, the salaries of the government
officials paid from quitrents went also in arrears; in 1746, Johnston complained
that his salary was eight years overdue. At the governor's death in
1752, arrears of his salary totaled over 13,000 pounds.
The other important dispute of the Johnston administration stemmed from
an inherent flaw of democracy—unequal representation as the distribution of
population changes. In 1715, representation in the North Carolina Assembly
was established at four for each county in Albemarle, and two for each of the
other counties. At that time this allocation reflected the distribution of population
in the province. But as time went on, the population expanded in the
southern part of the colony, and the fixed quota became more and more inequitable.
Johnston tried to rectify this condition but, at the same time, moved
against democratic aspects of the 1715 structure, which gave the vote to all
freemen of the colony, and which provided for the election of a new Assembly
every two years. In 1735, Johnston, under royal instruction, induced the
Assembly to impose a freehold property requirement for voting. In addition,
the Crown, in 1737, disallowed the biennial act, leaving the governor free to
call or to dissolve the Assembly at will.
As part of his campaign against the Assembly and its overweighting of
Albemarle representatives, Johnston moved the seat of government—haphazard
as it was, since public records were kept in private houses—from Edenton
in the north to New Bern in the south. The geographical struggle culminated
in 1746, when Johnston called an Assembly to meet in the extreme south, at
Wilmington on the Cape Fear River. The Albemarle representatives—a
majority of the Assembly—boycotted the meeting, robbing it of a quorum
according to the old act of 1715, but the rump Assembly equalized the representation
to two members per county and established the capital at New Bern.
This trick threw down a direct challenge to Albemarle, which responded
by refusing to send representatives or to recognize any act of the New Bern
government. Moreover, the people of Albemarle refused to pay taxes, refused
to accept the new central government's money, and refused to serve as jurors
or recognize the decisions of the General Court. Anyone in prison was set free
by the public. The approach to anarchism was not quite complete, however,
since the local county courts continued to function. In the meanwhile, the
burden of supporting the government was declared too heavy for the south,
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