Resources
- Colonial Period Overview: NCpediaThe first permanent English settlers in North Carolina emigrated from the tidewater area of southeastern Virginia. The first of these "overflow" settlers moved into the area of the Albemarle Sound in northeast North Carolina around 1650.
- North CarolinaOne of the original 13 colonies, North Carolina was the first state to instruct its delegates to vote for independence from the British crown during the Continental Congress.
- Seventeenth-Century North Carolina TimelineTimeline of 17th century North Carolina from the North Caroline Museum of History.
The Carolinas
South Carolina is founded by aristocratic settlers from England who establish the city of Charleston as a major center for the African slave trade as well as the trade of Native American slaves. Those who shun slavery move north to establish North Carolina.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzaynuPTUjQ
Perspectives
A Very Mutinous People
Historians have often glorified eighteenth-century Virginia planters' philosophical debates about the meaning of American liberty. But according to Noeleen McIlvenna, the true exemplars of egalitarian political values had fled Virginia's plantation society late in the seventeenth century to create the first successful European colony in the Albemarle, in present-day North Carolina. Making their way through the Great Dismal Swamp, runaway servants from Virginia joined other renegades to establish a free society along the most inaccessible Atlantic coastline of North America. They created a new community on the banks of Albemarle Sound, maintaining peace with neighboring Native Americans, upholding the egalitarian values of the English Revolution, and ignoring the laws of the mother country. Tapping into previously unused documents, McIlvenna explains how North Carolina's first planters struggled to impose a plantation society upon the settlers and how those early small farmers, defending a wide franchise and religious toleration, steadfastly resisted. She contends that the story of the Albemarle colony is a microcosm of the greater process by which a conglomeration of loosely settled, politically autonomous communities eventually succumbed to hierarchical social structures and elite rule. Highlighting the relationship between settlers and Native Americans, this study leads to a surprising new interpretation of the Tuscarora War.
The Tuscarora War
At dawn on September 22, 1711, more than 500 Tuscarora, Core, Neuse, Pamlico, Weetock, Machapunga, and Bear River Indian warriors swept down on the unsuspecting European settlers living along the Neuse and Pamlico Rivers of North Carolina. Over the following days, they destroyed hundreds of farms, killed at least 140 men, women, and children, and took about 40 captives. So began the Tuscarora War, North Carolina's bloodiest colonial war and surely one of its most brutal. In his gripping account, David La Vere examines the war through the lens of key players in the conflict, reveals the events that led to it, and traces its far-reaching consequences. La Vere details the innovative fortifications produced by the Tuscaroras, chronicles the colony's new practice of enslaving all captives and selling them out of country, and shows how both sides drew support from forces far outside the colony's borders. In these ways and others, La Vere concludes, this merciless war pointed a new direction in the development of the future state of North Carolina.
Hugh Williamson
Hugh Williamson (1735-1819) was a physician, a member of the educated intelligentsia in colonial America, and a signer of the US Constitution. Although he is one of the lesser-known Founding Fathers, he has been likened to Benjamin Franklin for his breadth of interest spanning science, medicine, government public policy, and Hamiltonian capitalism. His range of accomplishments was prodigious. Before the Revolutionary War, he was among the planners of the Boston Tea Party. When war broke out, he acted as a spy and a courier for Benjamin Franklin, and later became surgeon general of the North Carolina Revolutionary War Militia. After the war, he served in the North Carolina legislature, the Constitutional Convention, and the first US House of Representatives.In this first book-length biography of Hugh Williamson, Dr. George Sheldon presents an appealing portrait of an often-overlooked colonial patriot and an important member of the medical establishment in 18th-century America. Sheldon reveals many interesting details about Williamson's multifaceted life: He was a member of the University of Pennsylvania's first graduating class. He was a medical student at the University of Edinburgh's prestigious medical school and trained in surgery under the renowned John Hunter. He served as a courier in Europe before and during the Revolutionary War, arousing the suspicions of both the British and a contingent of Americans that he was a double agent. After the war Williamson not only served as a physician and politician in North Carolina but as the first secretary of the board of governors of the University of North Carolina, the first nondenominational institution of higher education in America. His expertise ranged from the cause of the 1792-fever outbreak in North Carolina and the correct installation of lightning rods, to work with George Washington on the draining of the Great Dismal Swamp and management of the Bloomingdale estate of his wife's family, which included much of present-day New York City.For anyone interested in the important contributors to early American history, this excellent biography of Hugh Williamson will be indispensable reading.
The Ashley Cooper Plan
In this highly original work, Thomas D. Wilson offers surprising new insights into the origins of the political storms we witness today. Wilson connects the Ashley Cooper Plan--a seventeenth-century model for a well-ordered society imagined by Anthony Ashley Cooper (1st Earl of Shaftesbury) and his protege John Locke--to current debates about views on climate change, sustainable development, urbanism, and professional expertise in general. In doing so, he examines the ways that the city design, political culture, ideology, and governing structures of the Province of Carolina have shaped political acts and public policy even in the present. Wilson identifies one of the fundamental paradoxes of American history: although Ashley Cooper and Locke based their model of rational planning on assumptions of equality, the lure of profits to be had from slaveholding soon undermined its utopian qualities. Wilson argues that in the transition to a slave society, the "Gothic" framework of the Carolina Fundamental Constitutions was stripped of its original imperative of class reciprocity, reverberating in American politics to this day. Reflecting on contemporary culture, Wilson argues that the nation's urban-rural divide rooted in this earlier period has corrosively influenced American character, pitting one demographic segment against another. While illuminating the political philosophies of Ashley Cooper and Locke as they relate to cities, Wilson also provides those currently under attack by antiurbanists--from city planners to climate scientists--with a deeper understanding of the intellectual origins of a divided America and the long history that reinforces it.