Government

“Men of Good Estates”: Wealth Among North Carolina’s Royal Councillors

BY WILLIAM S. PRICE, JR.^*

[Vol. 49 (1972), 72-82]

With the exception of Leonard Woods Labaree’s Royal Government in America, originally published in 1930, few scholarly books on the colonial period have dealt with royal councils save in a token way. Even Jackson Turner Main’s The Upper House in Revolutionary America, 1763-1788 (1967), focuses almost entirely on the council’s legislative functions and its transition to an elected senate. Colonial historians have tended to concentrate on the struggle for provincial control between the chief executives and lower houses of assembly, a struggle central to the coming of the American Revolution and therefore a dramatic one. Consequently, the royal councils and their members have to a large degree been neglected far out of proportion to their contemporary importance in their colonies.

The council served not only as the upper house of the colonial assembly but as a higher court (usually chancery) and as a board of advice and consent to the chief executive in nearly all of his official actions. During its executive sessions with the governor, the council had a substantial role in shaping proclamations and decrees affecting the whole province and in administering land grants. It also wielded considerable influence over the governor’s patronage powers, including such important areas as the appointment and removal of justices of the peace. Although composed of twelve members, five councillors constituted a quorum, and three could conduct executive business in an emergency.

Councillors were usually nominated by the governor and appointed to serve “at pleasure” by the Privy Council in England. A period ranging from eighteen to thirty-six months frequently ensued between the time of the nomination and the appointment. Thus, a chief executive had a difficult time getting a candidate appointed expeditiously. The frustration was compounded when governors sometimes found that the men they had recommended for the council in the expectation that they would vote as directed acted quite independently once they had been seated.

During periods of absence by the royal governor from the province, the senior councillor served as chief executive. This service could be of quite long duration, as for instance when Matthew Rowan filled the office for nearly two years, from 1753 to the arrival of Arthur Dobbs in 1754. The royal council and its members possessed not a little power.¹

In addition to their political roles, councillors were also social and financial leaders in their communities. Like their counterparts in other colonies, upper house members in royal North Carolina were “men of good estates,”² as the accompanying list will show. This table is modeled on a similar one drawn for South Carolina councillors by M. Eugene Sirmans in 1961.³ There are some modifications made here in the hope of greater clarification. For instance, this table contains “dates of active service” instead of Sirmans’s “dates of service.” Several North Carolina councillors, viz., Charles Berry, James Murray, and John Rutherfurd, had split terms of service due to long sojourns in England or because of suspension by the governor and their peers on the council. Other members, such as Henry Eustace McCulloh, were listed on council membership rolls well after they stopped playing any active part in that body’s functions. Under the heading “value of estate,” this listing also includes “annual income” to indicate what a placeman’s⁴ office was worth in salary and fees.⁵ All monetary figures are given in sterling, and annual incomes are followed by the abbreviation “p.a.,” representing per annum.

Omitted from this list are James Stallard, Richard Eyans, John Porter, and Thomas Wardroper, who were approved as councillors by the Privy Council in England but did not serve. The first two men never resided in North Carolina; the latter two died before their commissions arrived. George Rhenny, who attended one council meeting in 1732 under a general commission as surveyor general of customs for the southern colonies, is not included since his visit was a very brief one. Four men placed by Governor George Burrington in the upper house illegally (i.e., without the approval of either the Privy Council or a majority of the provincial councillors) for the legislative session of November, 1734, are excluded: Benjamin Hill, Francis Pugh, Henry Gaston, and Daniel Hamner.

Sirmans classified a councillor’s occupation as the means through which he acquired his chief source of income.⁶ In this table that same criterion applies, but the problems arising from it are legion. Men of all social and economic orders in colonial America were extremely versatile in their occupational ventures. For example, thirty-nine of the forty-four men listed here at some point in their careers held a provincial office ranging in value from £100 to £800 per annum. Many councillors had training in law to facilitate their business dealings and often they accepted cases for clients. Also, most councillors had some mercantile investments. John Rutherfurd was at various stages in his life a merchant, a placeman, and a planter. Yet when one looks at him at the peak of his career, his wealth is for the most part agricultural. In some cases the distinction defies rigid classification, as with Cornelius Harnett who is listed as a merchant-planter.

In computing the number of slaves owned by these men, only documented figures are used. Although there can be little doubt that William Smith owned a significant number of slaves or that Robert Halton possessed more than fourteen, speculation on these figures has been avoided.

Likewise, it would be tempting to inflate figures on land acreage owned through addition of land warrants,⁷ which exist in plenty. Such warrants, however, were often used for purely speculative purposes and in themselves lack finality. Among the most reliable sources for acreage figures are quitrent records, wills, and estate inventories, but for North Carolina these data are fragmentary. A planter of such considerable means as John Swann is listed as owning only 2,130 acres because that is the total contained in quitrent records; he left no will, nor was his estate inventoried. In every case the figures are conservative and often minimal. Therefore, nearly all of the men listed here were wealthier than can be demonstrated from the available sources.

Land ownership as an indication of great wealth must be used cautiously. Much depended on where the land was located and how much of it was under cultivation or could be used in the naval stores industry. For example, in 1728 Edward Moseley purchased 10,000 acres in Bath County for £84. Two years later, after clearing about 200 acres of it, he sold the entire tract to Governor Burrington for £250.⁸ Land in North Carolina’s coastal counties was more valuable prior to the Revolution than that in western counties. Although Nathaniel Duckenfield’s coastal acreage which was confiscated and sold during the American Revolution totaled less than one tenth of Henry Eustace McCulloh’s backcountry acreage losses, the Duckenfield sale brought the new state government more money.⁹ Still, ownership of vast quantities of land, however deficient in quality, could generate huge sums of money as the figures for Henry Eustace McCulloh illustrate.

Slave ownership as a gauge of wealth is less mercurial. Jackson Turner Main says that possession of twenty slaves in the pre-Revolutionary South denoted a man of means.¹⁰ Governor William Tryon claimed that a “good plantation” contained at least seventy slaves.¹¹ At any rate, the average price for a slave before 1776 was £36.¹² To live in some comfort before the Revolution a man needed at least £100 annually, and an income of £450 was required for a man of means to maintain a high standard of living.¹³

Among the forty-four councillors in the accompanying table are twenty-two planters, twelve placemen, four merchants, two professional soldiers, one lawyer, and three men of multiple occupation. Although in toto more placemen sat on the North Carolina council than on South Carolina’s, eight of them served before 1764. North Carolina’s upper house was never dominated by placemen, especially not after 1763, as one historian has recently charged.¹⁴ Indeed, South Carolina’s council declined in influence during the 1760s because of the increasing number of placemen appointed to it throughout that tense decade.¹⁵ Not surprisingly, since it lacked a great port and urban center like Charleston, North Carolina had fewer lawyers and merchants on its council than did its sister colony; but the total acreage owned by the North Carolinians exceeded that to the south, albeit with a considerable boost from Henry Eustace McCulloh’s 800,000 acres. Only six North Carolinians (James Craven, John Dawson, Edmund Gale, William Owen, John Rieusset, and John Sampson) had assets below the level for men of means, that is, less than £450 per annum. Almost certainly, however, Craven, Dawson, Gale, and Rieusset possessed more wealth than is demonstrable here. Slave ownership figures are available for twenty-one of the councillors. Fifteen of them owned in excess of twenty slaves, and twelve of the fifteen were planters. Where figures for values of estates are available for North Carolina, they compare favorably with those of South Carolina. Thus, while North Carolina was not as wealthy as its southern neighbor, most of its councillors were on a similar economic plane with South Carolina’s upper house members.

APPENDIX

North Carolina's Royal Councillors, 1731-1775

Appendix Notes

1. Quitrent Records of North Carolina, July 11, 1750, May 13, 1751, in the Secretary of State Papers, State Department of Archives and History, Raleigh, hereinafter cited as Quitrent Records; Estate Inventories, 1753, in Secretary of State Papers; William L. Saunders (ed.), The Colonial Records of North Carolina (Raleigh: State of North Carolina, 10 volumes, 1886-1890), IV, 219, 274, 277, hereinafter cited as Saunders, Colonial Records. Allen’s estate also included six horses, seventy-five cows, twelve hogs, and fifty-eight sheep. He left a library of over 250 folio volumes in English and French.

2. J. Bryan Grimes (ed.), North Carolina Wills and Inventories (Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton Printing Company, 1912), 15, hereinafter cited as Grimes, North Carolina Wills; Quitrent Records, May 29, 1750.

3. Marvin L. Michael Kay, “The Payment of Provincial and Local Taxes in North Carolina, 1748-1771,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, XXVI (April, 1969), 234-235.

4. Grimes, North Carolina Wills, 134-137; Evangeline Walker Andrews (ed.), with the collaboration of Charles McLean Andrews, Journal of a Lady of Quality; Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the Years 1774 to 1776, by Janet Schaw (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), 287-289, hereinafter cited as Andrews, Journal of a Lady of Quality; New Hanover County Tax Lists, 1767, in Secretary of State Papers, hereinafter cited as New Hanover Taxes; Francis Benjamin Johnston and Thomas Tiletson Waterman, The Early Architecture of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Second Edition, 1947), 29, hereinafter cited as Johnston and Waterman, Early Architecture of North Carolina. Corbin once owned the Cupola House in Edenton, the most important example of Jacobean design south of Connecticut with the possible exception of Bacon’s Castle in Virginia.

5. Robert O. DeMond, The Loyalists of North Carolina during the Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1940), 243-251, hereinafter cited as DeMond, North Carolina Loyalists; Alonzo T. Dill, Governor Tryon and His Palace (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 85, 115, 151. Cornell was the wealthiest merchant in colonial North Carolina. He owned several warehouses, a retail store, and a home in New Bern which contained eighty hogs-heads of rum in its cellar. Cornell loaned the province £8,000 for the building of Tryon’s Palace at New Bern and underwrote Governor Tryon’s 1771 expedition to crush the Regulators.

6. Quitrent Records, February 14, 1739; Tillie Bond Manuscripts, July 17, 1747, September 28, 1755, State Archives, hereinafter cited as Bond Manuscripts. Craven owned two houses in Edenton.

7. Stephen B. Weeks, “Libraries and Literature in North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1895 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896), 209; Quitrent Records, 1750-1756.

8. Kemp Plummer Battle (ed.), Letters and Documents Relating to the History of the Lower Cape Fear (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press [James Sprunt Historical Monographs, No. 4], 1903), 21; Memorial dated July 7, 1783, in the DeRosset Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection; New Hanover Taxes, 1767; Claim dated March 4, 1783, in Loyalist Claims, British Audit Office Papers, State Archives, hereinafter cited as Loyalist Claims.

9. Loyalist Claims, 1784; DeMond, North Carolina Loyalists, 250.

10. Saunders, Colonial Records, IV, 594, 1245, 1250, 1252; New Hanover Taxes, 1763; Stanley A. South, “‘Russellborough’: Two Royal Governors’ Mansion at Brunswick Town,” North Carolina Historical Review, XLIV (October, 1967), 363. Dry bought Tryon’s home in Brunswick Town during 1767 for £600.

11. Loyalist Claims, July 6, 1786; DeMond, North Carolina Loyalists, 240-241.

12. Saunders, Colonial Records, IV, 945, 965, 1038, 1241.

13. Bond Manuscripts, December 15, 1735, December 6, 1738; Saunders, Colonial Records, III, 413, 591; Walter Clark (ed.), The State Records of North Carolina (Winston and Goldsboro: State of North Carolina, 16 volumes, numbered XI-XXVI, 1895-1907), XXII, 256, hereinafter cited as Clark, State Records. Gale also owned two lots in Edenton.

14. Bond Manuscripts, March 22, 1748, March 27, 1750; Saunders, Colonial Records, IV, 49, 51, 218, 222, 440, 632, 651, 675, 764-765.

15. Samuel A. Ashe and others (eds.), Biographical History of North Carolina: From Colonial Times to the Present (Greensboro: Charles L. Van Noppen, 8 volumes, 1905-1917), VIII, 200-203, hereinafter cited as Ashe, Biographical History.

16. Quitrent Records, May 9, 1751; Elizabeth Moore, The Rice, Hasell, Hawks, and Carruthers Families of North Carolina (Bladensburg, Md.: Genealogical Recorders, 1966), 28-33, 45-46, hereinafter cited as Moore, The Rice, Hasell ... Families.

17. Andrews, Journal of a Lady of Quality, 169n; New Hanover Taxes, 1767.

18. Loyalist Claims, November 4, 1781; DeMond, North Carolina Loyalists, 243.

19. Grimes, North Carolina Wills, 265-266; Quitrent Records, June 8, 1750; Saunders, Colonial Records, IV, 57. Innes left his livestock, library, and £100 to be used in establishing a free school for North Carolina’s youth.

20. Saunders, Colonial Records, II, 209.

21. New Hanover Taxes, 1762.

22. Saunders, Colonial Records, III, 425. The figure for “slaves owned” may include an unascertainable proportion of indentured servants.

23. Saunders, Colonial Records, V, 338. The best aid in solving the puzzle of McCullochs and McCullohs in colonial North Carolina is John Cannon, “Henry McCulloch and Henry McCulloh,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, XV (January, 1958), 71-73.

24. Saunders, Colonial Records, IV, 347-348, 947, 950, 964-965, 1255; VIII, 161. Both Alexander and Henry Eustace McCulloh, who were first cousins, might more properly be called land speculators than planters. Alexander signed his name as both “McCulloch” and “McCulloh” at varying times. The latter spelling is used here to associate him more clearly with his cousin.

25. Loyalist Claims, May 11, 1778, September 16, 1782, January 14, 1783. McCulloh claimed that his North Carolina lands yielded an annual income of £1,600 before the American Revolution.

26. New Hanover Taxes, 1762; Loyalist Claims, May 8, December 31, 1789.

27. Saunders, Colonial Records, IV, 596; VI, 765, 1012.

28. Grimes, North Carolina Wills, 309-312; Quitrent Records, August 13, 1750; Johnston and Waterman, Early Architecture of North Carolina, 153. Orton Plantation House, built by Moore in 1725, was one of the earliest and finest homes on the Cape Fear.

29. Grimes, North Carolina Wills, 313-320; Quitrent Records, May 9, 1751. From the time of his arrival in the colony around 1705, Moseley was one of North Carolina’s leading citizens. His initial success rested on an extensive law practice (and a “good match” with Henderson Walker’s widow), but as he ascended politically and socially, his land and slave holdings grew enormously.

30. Quitrent Records, November 16, 1750; New Hanover Taxes, 1762; Nina M. Tiffany and Susan I. Lesley (eds.), The Letters of James Murray, Loyalist (Boston: Privately printed, 1901), 156n.

31. Saunders, Colonial Records, III, 378, 423.

32. Loyalist Claims, December 30, 1783, 1786; Clark, State Records, XXII, 250.

33. Grimes, North Carolina Wills, 531-534; Item dated July 4, 1748, in Pollock Papers, State Archives.

34. Clark, State Records, XXII, 257; Saunders, Colonial Records, III, 26.

35. Saunders, Colonial Records, IV, 595; Moore, The Rice, Hasell ... Families, 11-14; Quitrent Records, May 9, 1751.

36. Saunders, Colonial Records, IV, 952; Quitrent Records, September 22, 1750; Johnston and Waterman, Early Architecture of North Carolina, 154.

37. Quitrent Records, March 25, 1760; Saunders, Colonial Records, IV, 759.

38. Andrews, Journal of a Lady of Quality, 294-298; New Hanover Taxes, 1767; Loyalist Claims, March 16, 1782, March 23, 1784.

39. Saunders, Colonial Records, IV, 334; Minutes dated May 18, 1772, in North Carolina Court of Claims Records, State Archives.

40. Grimes, North Carolina Wills, 393-399.

41. Clark, State Records, XXII, 288; Saunders, Colonial Records, III, 136.

42. Saunders, Colonial Records, VI, 797; Minutes of the Court of Chancery dated April 25, 1764, in Secretary of State Papers; Arthur Dobbs to Justice Ward, October 31, 1756, in Desmond Clarke Papers Relating to Arthur Dobbs, Southern Historical Collection.

43. New Hanover Taxes, 1767; Strudwick Papers, September 27, 1761. Strudwick paid £3,140 for this land in 1754.

44. Quitrent Records, May 30, 1750, April 17, 1751.

Footnotes