Submitted to the Daily Reflector August, 2006
North Carolina Collection Receives Gift of Early Law Book
Special to the Daily Reflector by John R. M. Lawrence
Thanks to the generosity of the Darden family of eastern North Carolina, the North Carolina Collection at East Carolina University’s Joyner Library is the recipient of a rare, early collection of the laws of North Carolina. Printed in 1752 by the printer James Davis in New Bern, the volume, entitled A Collection of All the Public Acts of Assembly, of the Province of North Carolina: Now In Force and Use, represented the culmination of an eighteen-year effort to codify and print the laws of North Carolina.
In 1669, the original Lords Proprietors commissioned John Locke to draft The Fundamental Constitution of Carolina, which was printed in England. Unfortunately, the new colony lacked a printing press. So as new laws were passed by the Assembly, copies had to be made by hand and distributed in manuscript form. Copies of each law needed to be distributed to Governor, the members of the Council and the Assembly, the clerks of each county court, the justices who served on every court, and to officials in England. As the colony and the number of counties grew, so did the enormous task of distributing the laws. By 1740, over 200 copies had to be laboriously copied and distributed to various officials. The copying workload was distributed among the clerks of the Assembly and the various courts. However, the more scribes involved, the more prone the process was to error. Complaints were rampant that no two copies of the laws were ever alike, and that even the highest officials were often confused over the wording of a particular law. The transition from proprietary to royal colony further complicated issues, because some royal officials argued that much of the Fundamental Constitution and many laws made by the Assembly were now null and void.
Arriving in North Carolina in 1734, Governor Gabriel Johnston almost immediately encouraged the Assembly to bring order to the laws. However, not until 1746 was a committee appointed to revise the laws and have them printed. Led by Samuel Swann and Edward Moseley, the editorial process took nearly three years to complete. In spring of 1749, the Assembly took steps to secure a printer by passing a bill to encourage James Davis, who had received his training in Williamsburg, Virginia, to set up shop in New Bern. Before the end of the year, Davis had settled in New Bern and printed his first work, The Journal of the House of Burgesses of the Province of North Carolina, for the fall session of the Assembly. Printing the 373-page, collected laws would take another two years. The first edition appeared late in 1751. A second edition with limited additional material appeared the following year.
The law compilations proved an immediate success. By making the laws readily available, they placed government of the colony and later that of the state on a firm foundation. Heavily used for many years, few of the original volumes survived in tact. Less than twenty copies of the first two editions are known to exist in British or American libraries. The copy in Joyner Library, which once belonged to Washington County historian, educator, and judge, John W. Darden (1885-1960) was missing its covers and several pages. Etherington Conservation of Greensboro has restored and rebound the volume. Today, A Collection of All the Public Acts of Assembly serves as a window onto the world of colonial North Carolina. From fences, roads, mills, and ferries to Indians, wolves, and orphans, those who use the North Carolina Collection can see not only the problems that early settlers faced in North Carolina, but also the solutions they developed to deal with those issues. Joyner Library is indeed lucky to provide this important resource for the use of students, faculty, and researchers.
Area residents, as well as the university community, are welcome to take advantage of the North Carolina Collection’s resources. For more information on this gift or colonial North Carolina in general, visit the North Carolina Collection on the third floor of Joyner Library. See our web site at http://www.ecu.edu/cs-lib/ncc/index.cfm or call 328-6601 for hours and directions.
John R. M. Lawrence is a reference librarian for the North Carolina Collection.
