North Carolina

Change and Tradition in a Southern State

William A. Link

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118833537
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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Part 1

Colonial North Carolina

1
European Invasion

One might say that North Carolina history began with a bang, in a clash of cultures spurred by the powerful process of European expansion into the wider world after about 1500. Although scholars used to refer to this process as the “discovery” of the Americas, diverse peoples had inhabited North America's Eastern Seaboard for many thousands of years, with thriving and far-flung cultures. Some Indians were nomadic; others lived in permanent villages. Some engaged in sophisticated forms of agriculture; others fished and trapped shellfish along the coast, and still others subsisted as hunter-gatherers. No matter their economic base, most indigenous peoples engaged in trade with other groups, some over exchange networks extending across thousands of miles.

The Indian groups in North Carolina at the time of first European contact lived in separate, sometimes antagonistic, societies, though all of them would come to share a common historical trauma. What scholars have called an “encounter” of European and Indian cultures is rife with stereotypes and misconceptions. For many years historians commonly portrayed Europeans as civilizing colonists, Indians as savages. More recent scholars have corrected this view and demonstrated the integrity of Indian societies. Older scholars also had a tendency to collapse the “encounter” into a few decades. Rather than a single contact, the cultural, political, and economic exchange between Europeans and indigenous peoples occurred in waves, over many decades, even centuries.

From the outset, European social organization and culture remained hostile to Indian society. At the time of first contact, Europeans were aggressively moving into and seeking to dominate the farthest reaches of the world, where they tried to subdue, or simply remove, the diverse cultures they met. With an expansionist drive, Western Europeans wanted to enrich themselves at the expense of native peoples around the globe, all of whom they tended to view as inferior and barbaric. Most critically, contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere invariably brought devastating diseases to the latter. The first arrival of English in North Carolina was no exception. Following English visits to Indian villages, wrote English writer Thomas Hariot, Indians began to “die very fast, and many in short space.”¹ Although this demographic crisis weakened their ability to resist European invasion, Indians combatted these onslaughts, both physical and cultural, through different means; they were not simply victims. Indeed, they traded and interacted with the English explorers and settlers, often on terms dictated by the Indians, and their presence defined the character of European colonization.

Physical Geography and Environment

A long series of changes over the millennia combined to create North Carolina's remarkably distinctive geography. Some thirty million years ago, during the Mesozoic Era, much of the eastern third of North Carolina remained under water, but with the onset of the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago, the coastline extended 50 miles east of its present location. With the end of this ice age, the Atlantic Ocean pushed back to the west, filling the river valleys and forming the sounds of eastern North Carolina. Millions of years ago, the present Piedmont region featured immense mountains, the Ocoee Range, which were as high as today's western Rockies. Eon upon eon of erosion wore down these Piedmont ranges to the present elevation of between 350 and 1,800 feet. Composed of mostly rolling countryside, the region still contains small ranges such as the South Mountains in Burke and Rutherford Counties, the Uwharries of Montgomery and Randolph Counties, the Kings Mountain Range of Cleveland and Gaston Counties, and the Sauratown Mountains of Stokes and Surry Counties. West of the Ocoee Range lay a sea whose waters lapped the base of high mountains. About 270 million years ago, during the conclusion of the Paleozoic Era, tectonic pressures caused new mountains to emerge from the sea, the Appalachians, that, in our own time, dominate western North Carolina.

Prior to the Europeans' arrival, North Carolina's coastal areas contained abundant sea life, and its rivers were filled with fish and wildlife. Herds of white-tailed deer foraged river bottoms for food. Across the Carolinas roamed larger grazing animals such as bison and elk; omnivores such as black bears; small mammals such as squirrels and opossum; fowl such as pigeons, doves, and wild turkeys; and various species of reptiles and amphibians. Predators included wolves, panthers, and bobcats, and they helped to keep the population of the grazing animals in check. Creeks, rivers, sounds, and estuaries spawned rich and diverse aquatic life.

North Carolina was also a land of dense forests, which stretched the entire length of the state. In the Coastal Plain, forests of long-leaf pine dominated the landscape, while in northeastern North Carolina, cypress forests prevailed. To the west, pine forests gave way to large stands of uninterrupted hardwood—oak, hickory, and chestnut—deciduous forests that extended from the Coastal Plain to the high ranges of the Appalachians. So thick were the forests of North Carolina that it was said that a squirrel could travel from one end of the state to the other without ever setting foot on the ground.

Figure 1.1 Bynums Bluff, Mt. Mitchell Reservation. Source: Library of Congress, National Photo Company Collection, LC-USZ62-100927.

Possessing these varied characteristics, North Carolina's physical geography had much to do with shaping its distinctive history. Spanning 500 miles in length from the coast to the mountains, and at its widest point nearly 200 miles from north to south, the state is defined by dramatic changes in elevation. In the far West, the Appalachian Mountains cradle a plateau that extends from the Blue Ridge westward to the Great Smokies, which straddle the border with Tennessee. The highest peak of the western mountains, Mt. Mitchell, is the tallest point on the Eastern Seaboard, with an elevation of 6,683 feet above sea level. From the mountains the terrain descends into the Piedmont, at several hundred feet of elevation, and then to the Coastal Plain, lying approximately at sea level.

Water resources also figured prominently in how the history of the state unfolded. In general, North Carolinians suffered from a lack of deep harbors and navigable river systems, hindering transportation of goods and people. The North Carolina coastline is composed of barrier islands to the east and sounds to the west, and most of its intracoastal waterways are not easily navigable. The lack of a good Atlantic harbor—as good, at least, as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk, and Charleston—was significant. North Carolina also lacks any large rivers that might have provided a backbone for water-borne transport. In the West, the Little Tennessee, French Broad, and Hiawassee Rivers flow into the Tennessee River system, which drains toward the Gulf of Mexico. Piedmont rivers, such as the Catawba, Yadkin, and Broad, flow from north to south, and eventually into South Carolina. Coastal Plain Rivers such as the Roanoke, Chowan, Tar-Pamlico, Trent, Cape Fear, and Neuse, drain into sounds, but frequently clog with sediment, making them too shallow and tricky for large boats or barge traffic.

North Carolina's geography thus appeared uninviting to prospective colonists, particularly those Europeans who depended on water-borne travel for communication and commerce. At the same time, its propensity for fast-approaching and violent Atlantic storms and its numerous sandbars made—and still make—the North Carolina coast dangerous for shipping. The Outer Banks, a series of barrier islands, vary in width from two miles to only a few hundred feet, and often shift according to the whims of the tides, winds, and waves. Numerous inlets mark places where Atlantic storms have broken through barrier islands and created channels between the ocean and the sounds. At Cape Hatteras, the Gulf Stream, an Atlantic current flowing from the south, mixes with the colder waters of the North Atlantic, forming the notorious Diamond Shoals, where shallow sandbars for centuries awaited ships and their crews. South from Cape Hatteras, the Outer Banks coast extends its treacherous waters to Cape Lookout. Having caused as many as 5,000 reported shipwrecks between the sixteenth century and the present, sailors justly dubbed these waters “the Graveyard of the Atlantic.”

Present-day North Carolina is understood to contain three principal geographical regions: the Coastal Plain, the Piedmont, and the Mountains. The Coastal Plain, extending some 150 miles from the coast westward, is defined by the occasions in which the Atlantic Ocean, over many years, spread its waters across the land, leaving terraces of sediment and sand each time it receded. Each of the major rivers of the Coastal Plain includes a “Fall Line,” the point at which the Piedmont and Coastal Plain meet and the onset of rapids makes navigation difficult. With the Fall Line constituting its western border, the Coastal Plain, the largest of North Carolina's three major regions, contains sandy soil well suited for agriculture. Immediately adjacent to the coast and extending 30–80 miles inland lies a subregion known as the Tidewater, a low-lying and marshy area in between the sand dunes and the sounds, the place where many of the state's rivers form estuaries. The Tidewater supports a variety of habitats, and includes, in northeastern North Carolina, the Great Dismal Swamp extending between the James River in Virginia and the Albemarle Sound. The Great Dismal Swamp is home to an astounding diversity of plant life such as white cedar, bald cypress, and other wetland trees. The western edge of the Coastal Plain, with a slightly higher elevation and a layer of humus topsoil, became a center for the colony's and later the state's plantation crops.

West of the Coastal Plain, the Piedmont contains a different type of soil (generally red clay) and shallow, rapidly flowing streams and rivers. With traffic and commerce historically following the flow of the rivers, Piedmont Carolinians long remained isolated from those in the Coastal Plain. In the northern Piedmont, migration and commerce originated from Virginia; in the southern Piedmont, the natural geography of rivers tied the region to South Carolina. Western North Carolina, geographically isolated from the rest of the state, is characterized by mountains, numerous cross-ranges, peaks, coves, and valleys. The mountains in North Carolina include some of the highest peaks of the entire Appalachian range.

It is difficult to overestimate the significance of North Carolina's distinctive geography. Unlike other parts of America, the absence of deep-water ports, the presence of treacherous shoals, inlets, and sounds on the coast, and rivers that one could only precariously navigate combined to make water-borne transportation a slow and expensive undertaking. In short, the lack of a good means of transportation stalled economic development. While colonies to the north and to the south developed plantation agriculture and generated significant wealth, North Carolina during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remained underdeveloped and relatively poor. Geography also resulted in North Carolinians remaining largely isolated. By the colonial era, residents possessed an acute sense of localism that, perhaps, exceeded that of any other colony in early America.

First Peoples, First Contact

Shortly before the arrival of the first Europeans, North Carolina's Indian peoples were diverse, including about thirty different tribes that fell into one of three linguistic groups. On the coast and sounds north of the Neuse River, Indians speaking Algonquian-related languages prevailed; linguistically they wer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Part 1 Colonial North Carolina
• 1 European Invasion
• 2 Origins of North Carolina
• 3 A Slave Society
• Suggested Readings, Part 1
• Document Section, Part 1 Native Americans in Eighteenth-Century North Carolina: European Views
• Part 2 The Revolutionary Republic
• 4 Immigrants and the Backcountry World
• 5 The Age of Revolution
• 6 The New Republic
• Suggested Readings, Part 2
• Document Section, Part 2 The Debate about the Federal Constitution
• Part 3 The Civil War Crisis
• 7 Social Change in Antebellum North Carolina
• 8 Political Parties and the Coming of the Civil War
• 9 The Civil War
• Suggested Readings, Part 3
• Document Section, Part 3 Voices of the Enslaved
• Part 4 Reconstruction and Its Aftermath
• 10 Reconstruction
• 11 Social Change in the Post-Reconstruction Era
• 12 Populism and the Crisis of the 1890s
• Suggested Readings, Part 4
• Document Section, Part 4 The Klan
• Part 5 Modernizing North Carolina
• 13 Progressive North Carolina
• 14 World War I and the 1920s
• 15 Depression, New Deal, and World War II
• Suggested Readings, Part 5
• Document Section, Part 5 The Debate about Darwin
• Part 6 Toward the Twenty-First Century
• 16 Postwar North Carolina
• 17 The Civil Rights Revolution
• 18 Modernizers and Traditionalists
• Suggested Readings, Part 6
• Document Section, Part 6 School Desegregation and Its Legacy
• Appendix
• Index
• EULA