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Harvey's death later in the year, John Jenkins resumed the governorship,
retaining that position until his death in December 1681. Although his
enemies denounced Jenkins as a tool of Durant, he evidently exercised con-siderable
personal influence as a colonel of the militia and chief executive.
Indeed, Jenkins served as governor, de facto and de jure , longer than any
other during the proprietary era.
Sothel in the meantime was ransomed from the pirates and arrived in the
colony soon after the death of Jenkins. However, his experience had altered
his character, changing him from a "discreet sober gentleman" to a despotic
ruler. In 1689, after an oppressive tenure of several years during which he
allegedly accepted bribes and unlawfully seized property, Sothel was im-prisoned
and banished from the colony. His downfall was precipitated by his
arrest of George Durant and the confiscation of Durant' s estate. The ex-perience
pointedly demonstrated the continuing conflict between the pre-proprietary
settlers and proprietary government. At the center of the
turmoil was Perquimans wherein lived such pre-charter settlers as Jenkins,
Harvey, and particularly Durant.
Following Culpeper's Rebellion, Perquimans Precinct served as the de
facto capital of North Carolina until 1716. Provincial governors, including
Robert Daniel, resided in the precinct. The General Court, which tried cases
at law, and the Court of Chancery, which heard suits in equity, met in private
homes, sometimes taverns, in Perquimans. Extant records show that the
residences of Diana Foster, then Thomas White (whom Foster married), Thomas
Nichols, John Godfrey (and at his death, his wife Elizabeth), Thomas Blount,
John Hecklefield, and Richard Sanderson housed every session of the two courts
from the mid- 1 690s through March 1716, when the seat of government was moved
to Queen Anne's Creek (Eden ton) in Chowan Precinct.
North Carolina continued to exhibit internal dissension in the
eighteenth century. However, it ceased to involve pro-and anti-proprietary
factionalism, taking instead the form of regional conflict. The decade of the
1690s witnessed the expansion of the colony southward to the Pamlico Sound,
which resulted in the creation of Bath County in 1696. In 1705 the precincts
of Hyde, Craven, and Beaufort were created. Economic growth, in this newly
settled area, resulted in a rising demand on the part of those in the southern
precincts for commensurate political power, an occasional sitting of the
General Court in the south, an equalization of representation among the
precincts in the legislature, and the protection of the fur trade, which was
the basis of Bath's ecomony.
The ensuing political struggle, grounded in regional differences and the
thwarted aspirations of the Bath elite, produced Cary's Rebellion in the first
decade of the eighteenth century. Thomas Cary emerged as the champion of the
Bath interests, but he and the Bath party received support of the Quaker
element. The Quakers of the province by that time were confined almost ex-clusively
to the precincts of Perquimans and Pasquotank. Though representing
2-6
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