Although the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1713, and the Spanish War of Succession came to an end, yet there was little hope of peace in the West as long as either side allied with the Indians. The fate of the Tuscaroras may have stimulated the Yamassee Indians to revenge in 1716. In April, headed by Spaniards, they massacred about eighty inhabitants of Granville County, South Carolina. Charles Craven, the governor, proved himself a man of vigour, activity, and stern resolve, and by his efforts within a few months the colony was assured of safety, and there was apparent peace between the settlers of Carolina and the Spaniards of Florida. In the winter of 1719 that perpetual love of dissension, and dislike of any federal action, was once more manifested by the Assembly of South Carolina. The governor was a son of Sir Nathaniel Johnstone, and he had done his best for the Proprietors, but unlike the northern portions the South now disowned all proprietary rule and elected a governor under the Crown. The home authorities immediately sent out Francis Nicholson, a capable colonial official who had already had experience in New York, Virginia, and Maryland. Ten years later the Proprietors accepted the inevitable, and being compensated financially, handed over the Carolinas to the Crown. They probably never regretted the bargain, as in 1739 the war against Spain once more jeopardised the existence of the English settlements in the south, the inhabitants of which were in chronic fear of murder and rapine. The chief Spanish attack was made in 1742, when an army of 5000 landed at St Simon's, owing to the failure of Captain Hardy to intercept the enemy's fleet. The expedition was unsuccessful; the colonists held their own; eighty prisoners were brought into Charlestown; and the Spaniards retired. The share taken by the two Carolinas in American history during the next few years was far less than that of other colonies, but will be dealt with in another chapter. The great interest of the early history of the Carolinas is that the colony won for itself against very considerable odds the rights of local government and freedom from the shackles of the Proprietors. The settlers exhibited from first to last that full determination which is peculiarly associated with those of English stock to control their own destiny without the leading-strings of a few, perhaps benevolent, but generally misguided, human beings, whose powers have been conferred upon them by chance. The settlers of the Carolinas were a dogged type of men who faced external dangers with courage and good sense, distinctly contradictory of their pig-headed, factious, anarchic spirit in all internal affairs. FOOTNOTES: [67] Hammond, _Leah and Rachel_ (London, 1656), p. 20. [68] White, _A Relation of the Colony of the Lord Baron Baltimore in Maryland_ (ed. 1847). [69] _Ibid._ [70] Hammond, _ut supra._ [71] Bozman, _History of Maryland, 1633-60_ (1837), vol. ii. p. 661.