page_title: Edward Moseley
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Edward Moseley / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: £3 Colonial currency from the Province of North Carolina. Signed by William Downing, John Lovick, Edward Moseley, Cullen Pollock, and Thomas Swann. Handwritten. (Friedberg Colonial ref# NC-33). Downing and Swann were both Speakers of the House of Burgesses, Lovick and Pollock were members.
context_page_description: Edward Moseley, was the Surveyor General of the Province of North Carolina before 1710 and 1723 to 1733. He was also the first colonial Treasurer of North Carolina, starting in 1715. He was responsible, with William Byrd II of Virginia Colony, for surveying the boundary between North Carolina and Virginia in 1728.
  Edward Moseley was also Speaker of the North Carolina House of Burgesses for several terms, as he was consistently re-elected by his party. He briefly acted as Royal Governor of North Carolina while Gov. George Burrington was traveling out of the province.
context_section_description: Moseley became a planter, lawyer, surveyor, and politician, with extensive land holdings (at least 55,000 acres) and numerous slaves for the labor of cultivating tobacco, pine trees, rice, and other crops.  Known for his generosity to community and church, Moseley may be best remembered for his detailed map of the North Carolina colony, which he published in 1733.  A revised version was drawn by the original engraver, John Cowley (cartographer) of London, in 1737.  Both were lasting contributions to the settlement of the colony. East Carolina University's Special Collections house perhaps the original copy of the map of 1733, owned by Moseley himself in Greenville, and it held quite a history of its own.  An earlier map of the Albemarle (1708) made by Moseley was recently discovered by Dr. Larry Tise of East Carolina University in a publication of treasures from the Lambeth Palace Collection of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.
  Even though an Anglican, Moseley supported the rights of Dissenters, including Quakers, during Cary's Rebellion, albeit for pecuniary reasons. He also supported the growth of the Anglican Church.
  Moseley was a personally motivated, opportunistic man who suffered the vagaries of rival surveyors and colonial justice.  He evidently used his authority as surveyor unwisely and was twice accused of not having set foot on the properties that he had supposedly surveyed.  Virginia authorities, hungry for a favorable boundary between Virginia and North Carolina, ignored Moseley's more accurate determination of that line, described in the Carolina Charter.  By 1711, he was removed as the colony's surveyor and fined £500, having to return all the surveying fees that he had collected near the border.
  Later, Edward Moseley was banned from holding public office for several years because he tried to obtain evidence to link Colonial Governor Charles Eden to the pirate [Edward Teach] known as Blackbeard.  Moseley and his brother-in-law Maurice Moore had forcibly entered the office of the colonial secretary in 1718 in search of incriminating evidence and had been surrounded by the governor's agents.  Angry words were exchanged. When Moseley's case came to trial the following year, he was accused of uttering "seditious words" against the governor at the time.  Despite at least one member of the jury being a former legal client of Moseley, Governor Eden's attorney obtained a conviction.
  The conviction was merely a slap on the wrist, for Moseley became surveyor-general again in 1723.  He was appointed Treasurer of the Province in 1735, a position he held until his death.
  As a member of "the Family," elite South Carolinian planters who tried to usurp the Lower Cape Fear from the king, he legislatively supported Brunswick Town's founder, brother-in-law Maurice Moore, during the royal government's attempt to restore order in 1732–33.  Royal authorities created the successful port town of Wilmington from the opposition. Later, Moseley removed to Brunswick Town, where he died in 1749.
caption: North Carolina Colonial currency (1729) signed by Moseley.
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "3269", "Image ImageLength": "4387", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "800", "Image YResolution": "800", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS6 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2014:03:17 01:09:38", "Image ExifOffset": "256", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "2466", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "7475", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3269", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "4387", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}