|
Description |
The office of secretary has existed from the time of the earliest organized government in North Carolina. The lords proprietors in 1663 ordered the creation of such an office, its holder to be appointed by themselves. After the crown re-purchased Carolina from the proprietors in 1729, the provincial secretary was appointed directly by the crown. With the coming of statehood, the Constitution of 1776 directed that he be appointed triennially by the General Assembly. A constitutional amendment of 1835 changed the triennial appointment to a biennial one. Under the Constitution of 1868 the office was made popularly elective for a four-year term, a provision that remains in effect under the present state constitution. The duties of the secretary have been, from the beginning, stipulated by instructions of the lords proprietors or derived by prescription from the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, stipulated by instructions of the crown, or, after 1776, legislated by the General Assembly. Originally the secretaryship was conceived as existing in numerous large colonies called counties, scattered throughout Carolina (now North and South Carolina), each having its own secretary, and each secretary being responsible primarily for recordation of land surveys in his respective county. At the same time, the lords proprietors conceived a cancellarius for the whole of Carolina, headed by a resident proprietor and his six councillors, to be called the Chancellor's Court. It was based on the classical concept of the office of cancellarius as it had descended through the Roman Empire into the chancelleries of the modern kingdoms of Europe that had been established upon the empire's ruins: superintendence of all charters, treaties, letters, and such other public instruments as were authenticated in the most solemn manner. This court, promulgated by the Fundamental Constitutions of 1669, was never erected, and its duties devolved by prescription upon the secretary, who evolved from the secretary of Albemarle County into the secretary of state of North Carolina. Consequently, the duties of the secretary of state may be classified by their nature. Those that involved his participation in processes of the executive branch of government may be designated as functional. Those duties relating to that aspect of this office arising from the ancient concept of cancellarius in which his office acts as the recipient of records created by others may be classed as record-keeping. Of the functional records, the longest-lived, and largest, series is made up of the records of the land office. The secretary played a central and integral role in the granting of vacant public land to individuals and corporations from 1663 to 1959 when his function relating to vacant lands was transferred by law to the newly created Department of Administration. From the seventeenth century until the eve of the American Revolution the provincial secretary was involved in every step of the granting process from the beginning entry to the recorded patent, and no Court of Claims could be held without him. The single exception to this rule is that he was neither consulted nor involved in the operation of the Earl of Granville's land office, which dispensed vacant land within the earl's proprietary share of Carolina (the northern half of North Carolina) from 1746 to 1763. (Records of the earl's land office, however, were made part of the secretary's office by order of the General Assembly in 1783.) When the state land office was opened in 1778 by an act of 1777, the basic operations involving the first two steps in the land granting process (entry and survey) were transferred from the secretary to the jurisdiction of county officers. This did not, however, simplify the operations of his office which became complicated by the opening of other special and separate land offices. These included John Armstrong's office for the entry of western lands (Tennessee) which was opened for seven months at Hillsborough, N.C. in 1783 and 1784, and the office for granting military lands located in Tennessee (originally under Martin Armstrong) from 1783 until 1841, established by the acts of 1782, 1783, and 1784. Then, as the state began gaining additional vacant land through cessions under treaties of 1819 and 1835 between the Cherokee Indians and the United States, other offices were opened for the surveying and bidding off of these lands. And lastly, from 1887 until 1915 the power to grant perpetual franchises for shellfish beds in the waters of Pamlico Sound was vested exclusively in the secretary by an act of 1887. Other early series of records relate to the use of the secretary's office as the repository of permanently valuable records of state, the cancellarius aspect of his duties. These include such records of probate as original and recorded wills that were filed with him from the earliest days until the act of 1760 allowed county courts to file originals of wills proved within their jurisdiction, and administrators' bonds and inventories of decedents' estates that had been filed with the secretary until 1760 under the act of 1715. At the same time that the county courts were allowed to begin retaining original probated records in their offices, the various clerks were required to send to the secretary annual lists of the letters testamentary and letters of administration granted in their courts. This provision was re-enacted in 1777 when the county courts were re-established under the state Constitution of 1776, and a new provision was added whereby the clerks were required to return copies of inventories and accounts as well. However, the clerks ceased making these returns in 1790, apparently by consensus after the Assembly's failure to include the requirement in the 1789 act concerning wills and administrations. Unlike the continuation of the colonial requirement relating to wills and administrations, the secretary appears not to have continued as the custodian of the records of the governor's council. During the colonial period, though not a constituent member of the council, the secretary had been its clerk and custodian of its records. Under statehood, the council of state was elected by the General Assembly and had its own clerk. Consequently the records of the council from the colonial period to the present are to be found among the records of the executive office. (The secretary was raised to the status of a constituent member of the council by the Constitution of 1868.) Despite this innovation, the secretary's office continued to be considered the proper repository for other records not created by him. When periodic courts of oyer and terminer were established by proclamation of Governor Josiah Martin in 1774 and 1775 and by ordinance of the Provincial Congress in 1777, it was directed that copies of the minutes of their transactions be lodged with the secretary. So were the records of the Provincial Congresses, the Provincial Conventions, the Provincial Council of Safety, the local Committees of Safety and the Board of War sent for safekeeping to the secretary. And, looking to the preservation of its own records, the General Assembly deposited its archive of enrolled acts with the secretary in 1787 and required him to make transcriptions of them for the public printer (the printer having failed to return some laws in the past). In 1819, the General Assembly went a step further and required the clerks of the House and Senate to deposit the journals of the two houses with the secretary who was empowered by the act to make certified copies from those records as if he were their natural custodian. When conventions were called, or commissions erected, to propose constitutional alterations or amendments in 1835, 1861, 1868, 1875, and 1931 their records, like the records of the conventions to ratify the federal constitution in 1788 and 1789, were ordered to be lodged in the archives of the state with the secretary. Similarly, after North Carolina ratified the fourteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution and was readmitted to the union, General Canby, when closing his headquarters and withdrawing the occupying federal forces from the state, packed up the canvass returns, poll lists, and ballots for those elections that had been held between 1865 and 1868 under federal, rather than state, law, and transmitted them to the Secretary of State of North Carolina "for deposit and safekeeping" (Governor's Office, Box No. G.O. 131: Hq., 2d Mil. District, Charleston, S.C., July 6, 1868). It was for this same purpose, permanent preservation, that copies of the enrollment of voters on the permanent registration lists under the acts of 1901 and 1903 were filed with the secretary. Beginning with the act of 1876-77, the secretary was given both functional and cancellarius duties with regard to elections when he was required to receive and file election returns and to record the abstracts of votes prepared and sent to him by the boards of canvassers in the counties as well as to furnish any elected official desiring it a certificate attesting to his election to office. In connection with elections of officials, an act of 1913 required candidates to file with the secretary statements of contributions to and expenditures by their campaigns. As another step toward hedging against corruption at elections, lobbyists were required under the act of 1933 to file their expense reports with the secretary. All these requirements concerning elections have remained in force from passage of the several acts cited to the present, and records arising from them are to be found reported among the records of the secretary of state. As in the case of elections, other of the secretary's duties as cancellarius evolved into functional duties. For example, under the act of 1852, which provided for the incorporation of benevolent, charitable, and educational bodies and mining and manufacturing companies by filing their agreements with the various clerks of court, the clerks were directed to send copies for registration by the secretary of state. Banks, railroads, and insurance companies were specifically exempted from the act of 1852, but in a later act of 1871-72, incorporating railroads were required to file their charters with the secretary. An act that same session gave supervisory powers to the secretary over insurance companies who were required to file their charters with him, but it dropped the provision requiring the county clerks to send him notice of incorporation of benevolent, charitable, and educational bodies and mining and manufacturing companies. An act of 1893 which gave the secretary supervisory power vver certain kinds of corporations corrected this omission and renewed the requirement for the clerks of court to send the usual notice to the secretary. Supervision of insurance companies was transferred to the insurance commissioner, and supervision of banks to the banking commissioner when those offices were subsequently erected, but the filing of corporation and limited partnership documents has remained one of the secretary's duties. A similar duty, the registration of trademarks, terms, brands, and so forth, in order to protect the owner of them, was imposed on the secretary by an act of 1903. Registration of securities qualified to be sold in the state, and their dealers and salesmen, which had been one of the duties of the Corporation Commission under an act of 1925, was transferred to the secretary in 1973. At various times the secretary's office was designated as the repository for the bonds of certain officials (clerks of court, for example, during the colonial period), and for record of their oaths. At other times, officials' security bonds were required to be filed with the state treasurer. An act of 1830 required the secretary to keep a record of the commissions and oaths of persons appointed by the governor to take despositions, affidavits, and similar statements, in other states for use in North Carolina courts. The secretary was further required to notify county clerks, and subsequently to publish at large, the names of these commissioners of affidavits, or commissioners of deeds, as they were also known. Under an act of 1869-70, the secretary was required to maintain a register of the commissioners and to keep it current by noting expirations of term or resignations of commissions. The secretary had been charged with keeping a similar register for justices of the peace under an act of 1836, annotated to reflect death or resignation of the justices commissioned by the governor. In the twentieth century, records of the domestic counterparts of commissioners of affidavits, the notaries public, was transferred under the Executive Organization Act of 1971 to the secretary of state from the Office of the Governor, who had previous responsibility for the commissioning and registering of them. From as early as 1787 the secretary was given the responsibility of preparing copies of the public laws for the printer, the clerks of the two houses preparing copies of the journals of the Senate and the House for the same purpose. (Except for the years 1836 to 1855, when it was transferred to the secretary by an act of 1836,) the power to contract with a printer for the publication of state documents was retained by the General Assembly as well as the power of choosing the public printer, and the legislature continued to hold that power until it was conveyed to the governor and the Council of State under an act of 1897. However in 1842 the legislature had given the secretary the duty of providing suitable stationery for the governor, the assembly, and the departments of state. Under the 1855 act which withdrew the secretary's power to contract with the public printer, the secretary also became obligated to provide paper to the printer. Upon the reorganization of state government and the judicial system in 1868, the secretary was made the state stationer with the duty of distributing stationery, form books, blank books, registration and election books, dockets, and other stationery required by the various county officers and courts, as well as the executive and legislative branches of the state government and the public printer. In a related area, the secretary had been charged under an act of 1836 with the duty of distributing copies of the printed acts of assembly and the journals of the two houses to the various county courts, members of the General Assembly, and all others entitled to a copy. To these were added the obligation to furnish the county clerks with copies of the SUPREME COURT REPORTS, the printed public documents, and revisals of the laws, for publication of the latter of which he was often allowed to contract with a printer. (It was these accumulations of duty that gave rise to the present Publications Division in the secretary's office.) In the present organization of the secretary's records, there is no separate series of records arising from his duties as stationer to the state. Instead, these records are distributed among the correspondence, accounts, bills, and contracts noted in his records below. REFERENCES: P.L., 1715, c.48. P.L., 1760, c.1, ss.8-9. P.L., 1777, cc.1; 2, s.65. P.L., 1782, c.3. P.L., 1783, cc.2, 3. Message from House to Senate agreeing to joint resolution of 17 May 1783. In Clark, Walter, ed. THE STATE RECORDS OF NORTH CAROLINA. Vol. XIX. Raleigh: State of North Carolina, 1904; Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1994. P. 368. P.L., 1784, c.15. P.L., 1789, c.23. P.L., 1819, c.31. P.L., 1820, c.26. P.L., 1830, c.31. P.L., 1836, cc.9, 38. P.L., 1842, c.48. P.L., 1852, cc.67, 81. P.L., 1854-55, c.36. P.L., 1868-69, c.270, ss.56-62. P.L., 1869-70, c.194. P.L., 1871-72, cc.138, 199. P.L., 1876-77, c.275. P.L., 1885, c.173. P.L., 1887, c.119. P.L., 1893, c.318. P.L., 1897, c.464. P.L., 1901, c.550. P.L., 1903, cc.271, 557. P.L., 1913, c.164. P.L., 1925, c.190. P.L., 1933, c.11. S.L., 1959, c.683. S.L., 1971, cc.684, 865. S.L., 1973, c.1380. G.S. 143A-19 through 143A-23 [1992]. Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, Version of 21 July 1669. North Carolina Constitution of 1776. Amendments of 1835, Art. I. North Carolina Constitution of 1868, Art. III. North Carolina Constitution of 1971, Art. III. Office of the Secretary of State. NORTH CAROLINA MANUAL, 1991-1992. Edited by Julie W. Snee. Raleigh, 1992. Pp. 31-41. |
