Supported by the queen, the English government recommended a full political union, creating the 1705 Alien Act to push their northern neighbors to agree. After Scotland was committed to negotiations, the English government repealed the act’s punitive measures in December 1705 (probably too late to have been transmitted to Carolina before the formation of the legislature in early January 1706).58
Johnson’s attempt to block Nairne’s rise is particularly telling because it followed patterns set in English politics. The 1707 Act of Union, creating Great Britain out of England and Scotland, was not universally popular. While Whigs largely supported it, their Tory political opponents were more skeptical, in part because they were too invested in preaching obedience to the monarch to find considering a distant German relative to succeed Anne fully acceptable. Some Tories continued to feel similar discomfort about the Glorious Revolution, even though it was by then a settled reality. Tories also disliked the prospect of bringing the non-Anglican Church of Scotland into the nation, a development less troubling for the Whigs, who relied on the support of Dissenters and Church of England moderates. The earl of Sunderland played an important role in each of these events. Not only was he a member of the powerful Whig “Junto” that led the party in these years, but he had served as one of the commissioners that negotiated the pact with Scotland and as the party’s manager when the House of Lords considered the resulting 1707 Act of Union.59
Whereas Nairne turned to a Whig for help in 1708, Johnson owed his earlier elevation to the governorship to a Tory. John Grenville, a staunch supporter of the Church of England, had taken over as head of the Lords Proprietors in 1701. He joined the Privy Council the same year, appointed by the recently crowned Queen Anne in her quest to strengthen the previously out-of-favor Tories. Under Grenville’s leadership, the Proprietors made Johnson governor in 1702. The following year, Grenville received a peerage, making him a counterweight to the enthusiastic Whig, Sunderland. Johnson lost his position as governor only after Grenville stepped down.60
Having dismissed Nairne’s concerns about Indians in 1702–1703 and labeled him an alien in 1706, Nathaniel Johnson soon came to see Nairne as even more dangerous. He was not simply someone who did not belong but someone who defied the obligation to belong, less an outsider than a traitor. Although it was not until mid–1708 that Johnson charged Nairne with being a false Briton, the governor and his allies had previously considered him an unfaithful Anglican. The two issues were closely related. Nairne’s letter to Sunderland suggests that his resistance to the governor’s deeply controversial religious policies was one of the central causes of the antagonism that culminated in the treason charge.
The intersection of religious loyalties and politics had been central to Nairne’s first election to the Commons House in 1705, a process that proved difficult at every stage. Even finding candidates to run in Nairne’s Colleton County had been problematic. Only a few residents were both eligible and willing. Even fewer voted. The only surviving account of the election notes that fourteen people appeared on the Colleton ballot and ten people went to the polls. These problems only grew worse when the Commons House met in January 1706. Eventually so few legislators agreed to take the oaths prescribed by recent laws that it became impossible for the assembly to meet. The governor dissolved the session and called new elections for the following month.61
Johnson’s attempt to exclude his opponent Nairne had been part of his attempt to strengthen the Church of England. He had taken the post, he told a minister in 1708, for religious reasons. Normally, the minister reported, Johnson “wou’d Scorn such a poor and precarious Government as this is, were not the Preservation & Establishmt of the Church a Consideration Superior to all others.”62
This religious concern went beyond the personal attention and encouragement shown by his Virginia counterpart, Francis Nicholson. The Carolina governor also wanted to give the church and its members greater political power. He began by calling for extending religious restrictions. Officials in England had long been required to take the Anglican sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. These rules, however, had been so loosely enforced that less rigid Dissenters could meet the legal requirements simply by participating irregularly in the Anglican rite. Angered by the ruse, zealous Anglicans introduced the controversial Occasional Conformity Bill banning the practice in 1702, the year Johnson took up the governorship. Two years later, Johnson called for a similar measure in Carolina, pushing it through a lower house that had not yet fully assembled. Although the new law largely brought the colony only into line with older English practice, it applied to a very different setting. Attendance at the Anglican sacrament could be more easily monitored in Carolina, with its handful of churches. Even more important, unlike in England, church members were a minority in Carolina. Johnson’s measure, explicitly declaring its intent to keep “persons of different persuasions” out of the Commons House, at one stroke banned both a majority of voters and a substantial proportion of sitting assembly members from serving in the future. Later that year Johnson used the new power granted to Anglicans to pass a bill providing their church with tax support.63
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