About this time, chief justice Trott, who had become extremely unpopular in the colony, was charged with many iniquitous proceedings; and the governor, the major part of the council, and the assembly, united in a memorial representing his malpractices to the proprietors. Mr. Young was deputed their agent to enforce these complaints.
Soon after his arrival in London, he presented a memorial to the proprietors, detailing the proceedings of Carolina, and stating the objections of the assembly to the right of their lordships to repeal laws, which had been approved by their deputies.
This memorial was very unfavourably received, and the members of the council who had subscribed it, were displaced. The proprietors asserted their right to repeal all laws passed in the province, approved the conduct of the chief justice, censured that of the governor in disobeying their instructions respecting the dissolution of the assembly, and repeated their orders on this subject.
However the governor might disapprove the instructions given him, he did not hesitate to obey them. The new council was summoned, the assembly was dissolved, and writs were issued for electing another at Charleston.
The public mind had been gradually prepared for a revolution, and these irritating measures completed the disgust with which the people viewed the government of the proprietors. An opportunity to make the change so generally desired was soon afforded. A rupture having taken place between Great Britain and Spain, advice was received from England of a plan formed in the Havanna for the invasion of Carolina. The governor convened the council, and such members of the assembly as were in town, and laid his intelligence before them. He, at the same time, stated the ruinous condition of the fortifications, and proposed that a sum for repairing them should be raised, by voluntary subscription, of which he set the example by a liberal donation.
The assembly declared a subscription to be unnecessary, as the duties would afford an ample fund for the object. The repeal of the law imposing them was said to be utterly void, and would be disregarded.
[Sidenote: Combination to subvert the government.]
The members of the new assembly, though they had not been regularly convened at Charleston, had held several private meetings in the country to concert measures of future resistance. They had drawn up an association for uniting the whole province in opposition to the proprietary government, which was proposed to the militia at their public meetings, and subscribed almost unanimously. This confederacy was formed with such secrecy and dispatch, that, before the governor was informed of it, almost every inhabitant of the province was engaged in it.