(Journals of the House of Commons/House of Representatives of the Province/Colony/State of South Carolina (Many of the early journals are available
only in manuscript format or in edited reprints). The earliest extant journal appears to be that for the Grand Council of Carolina covering 25 Aug.
1671 to 24 June 1680. North Carolina bears the distinction of having hosted the first English colony in America, the famous “Lost Colony” of Roanoke.
This was established in 1585, and then, after quick abandonment, reestablished in 1587. Neither establishment “took.” For the next eight decades prior to
the founding of Carolina the area now comprising North Carolina, although mostly uninhabited, was nominally part of and administered by the Colony of
Virginia. In 1663 Charles I of England granted a Charter for the Province of Carolina, named after the Latin Carolus for himself, to a group of eight
“Lords Proprietors.” This group of nobles had helped restore him to the throne in 1660. Initially the Carolina territory nominally comprised an area
now occupied by the modern American states of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina. In 1665 the Carolina Charter was
further expanded to nominally include Spanish territory to the south as far as St. Augustine in modern Florida. However the first settlement in the whole
vast area, Charles Town {now Charleston, S.C.} was not founded until 1670, and for many decades most of the area was sparsely populated. The Lords
Proprietors administered the small population for roughly five decades through a body called the Grand Council. In acknowledgment of the difficulty of
governing the vast territory, starting in 1691 the Colonial proprietors appointed a governor resident in Charleston for the whole of Carolina, but
regularly appointed either another governor or a deputy to administer the northern portion of the colony which was taking on settlers from Virginia.
During this period Bath, the oldest town in the colony served as a nominal capital from 1702-1722, after which, until 1743, Edenton took on that role.
Historical records for the period are very incomplete. For example, there are fewer than six sets of recorded Minutes of the Executive Council prior to
1711. Therefore, it is often unclear which Carolina executive and legislative acts during the years 1691-1729 applied to which parts of the sprawling
colony. In 1712, North and South Carolina were officially divided into separate colonies, with South Carolina continuing to nominally administer the
dependencies further south. In 1719, in response to the settlers’ dissatisfaction with proprietary rule, Carolina was effectively made into a crown
colony administered by a royal governor and his council. This was made official in 1729 when the Lords Proprietors sold their charter back to the Crown.
In that same year, by act of Parliament, the territories roughly comprising modern Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi were severed off and given a
separate Royal Charter as the Colony of Georgia, and both North and South Carolina, now crown colonies, assumed their modern borders. In that year South
Carolina received a royal governor and council. However, the new colony of North Carolina, with a population of 30,000 in 1730, had no permanent
institutions of government until their establishment at New Bern in 1743. North Carolina became independent from England by means of the Halifax Resolves
issued by its Fourth Provincial Congress in Halifax on 12 April 1776. The colony was a Patriot base during the American Revolution, and officially became
the 12th state of the Union on 21 November 1789. After statehood, in 1794, the capital was moved to Raleigh. Pimsleur’s Checklists of Basic American
Legal Publications, in its listings of identified published session laws for North Carolina, begins with an unenumerated session in the year 1752.
However, various legislative assemblies with law-making power over the area comprising modern North Carolina were functioning at least as far back as
1671; i.e., The Grand Council for Carolina, 1670-1719, and His Majesty’s Council for Carolina, 1720-1775. The history of the Senate of Carolina dates
back to the beginning of local rule by the Proprietors through the Grand Council in 1671. The House of Representatives dates back to the establishment
in 1691 of an advisory body to the Grand Council consisting of 20 elected members termed the Commons House of Assembly.)(Those in the Early State
Records collections were digitized from a microfilm copy of titles originally held by the North Carolina Department of Archives and History, the University
of North Carolina, Southern Historical Collection, and the Library of Congress and other sources).
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