NCNorth Carolina History

First to instruct, next to last to ratify

On 12 April 1776 the provincial congress meeting at Halifax told North Carolina's delegates in Philadelphia to vote for independence, the first such instruction from any colony, and the date sits on the state flag to this day. Thirteen years later the same state was still refusing to join the country it had helped start. Its convention at Hillsborough broke up in August 1788 without ratifying the Constitution, on the grounds that the document had no bill of rights, and North Carolina spent more than a year as a foreign nation next door to the United States. It came in at Fayetteville on 21 November 1789, the twelfth state, only after Congress had sent the first ten amendments out to the states.

Roanoke and the nations already there

Three peoples with three different origins shared the ground. The Cherokee held the mountains and spoke an Iroquoian language, as did the Tuscarora far to the east on the coastal plain. The Catawba in the Piedmont spoke a Siouan tongue. Along the sounds lived Algonquian-speaking communities, the Secotan, Roanoke and Chowanoke, and it was these the English met first.

Walter Raleigh's patent sent a reconnaissance to the Outer Banks in 1584 and a military colony under Ralph Lane in 1585, which wore out its welcome and left with Francis Drake. A civilian colony under the artist John White followed in 1587, and on 18 August that year White's granddaughter Virginia Dare was born on Roanoke Island, the first English child born in the Americas. White sailed for supplies, war with Spain kept him away three years, and when he returned in 1590 the houses were gone and the word CROATOAN was carved on a palisade post. What became of the hundred and fifteen people has never been settled.

Proprietors, pirates and Regulators

Charles II handed Carolina to eight Lords Proprietors in 1663, but the northern end filled up from Virginia rather than from England, with small farmers in the Albemarle sound country who were awkward to govern and slow to pay quitrents. The Tuscarora War of 1711 to 1715 broke the largest nation on the coastal plain and drove most survivors north to join the Haudenosaunee. Shallow inlets and empty coastline suited pirates, and Edward Teach, called Blackbeard, was killed in a boarding action off Ocracoke on 22 November 1718. The Crown bought out seven of the eight proprietors and made it a royal colony in 1729.

By the 1760s the backcountry was in open revolt against corrupt sheriffs and court fees. The Regulators shut down courts and were finally beaten by Governor William Tryon's militia at Alamance on 16 May 1771, five years before Lexington.

Gold, secession, and the last surrender

In 1799 a boy named Conrad Reed picked a seventeen-pound yellow rock out of Little Meadow Creek in Cabarrus County. The family used it as a doorstop for three years and then sold it for three dollars and fifty cents. It was gold, and North Carolina led American gold production until California, enough that the federal government opened a branch mint at Charlotte in 1837. Otherwise the antebellum state was so unwilling to spend on roads, canals and schools that its own leaders called it the Rip Van Winkle State.

North Carolina left the Union on 20 May 1861, second to last of the eleven, and then contributed more soldiers to the Confederate army than any other state, roughly a hundred and twenty-five thousand, and lost more of them, close to forty thousand. Blockade runners kept Wilmington open longer than any other Confederate Atlantic port, until Fort Fisher fell on 15 January 1865. The war ended in the state as well: at Bennett Place near Durham on 26 April 1865, Joseph Johnston surrendered to William Sherman the armies of the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida, the largest capitulation of the war.

Wilmington 1898 and the mill century

Reconstruction produced a working biracial politics in the 1890s, when Populist and Republican Fusionists won the legislature and Wilmington had Black aldermen, magistrates and policemen. On 10 November 1898 an armed white mob burned the office of the Black-owned Daily Record, killed an unknown number of Black residents and forced the elected city government to resign at gunpoint, the only successful coup against a municipal government in American history. A suffrage amendment with a grandfather clause followed in 1900 and shut Black North Carolinians out of voting for two generations.

The economy that took shape after the war rested on three legs. James B. Duke built the American Tobacco Company out of Durham until the Supreme Court broke it up in 1911. Cotton mills spread across the Piedmont, and with them the strikes at the Loray Mill in Gastonia in 1929 and the general textile walkout of 1934. High Point made furniture. On the coast, on 17 December 1903, two bicycle makers from Dayton flew a powered aircraft at Kill Devil Hills.

A lunch counter, a park, and the end of the mills

On 1 February 1960 four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat down at the whites-only lunch counter of the Greensboro Woolworth and would not leave. Within two months the tactic had spread to more than fifty cities, and in April students meeting at Shaw University in Raleigh founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

The other change was deliberate. In 1959 the state chartered Research Triangle Park on empty pine land between Duke, the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State, betting that research jobs could replace low-wage work. IBM arrived in 1965 and the park became the largest of its kind in the country. Charlotte, helped by a state law that had long allowed banks to branch statewide, grew NCNB into NationsBank, which bought BankAmerica in 1998 and kept the headquarters in Charlotte. The old economy went the other way. Textile employment collapsed after 1994, and when Pillowtex shut its Kannapolis plants in July 2003 it put about forty-eight hundred people out of work in a single day, the largest permanent layoff the state has recorded.

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