York—John Blair and George Wyeth.
Princess Anne—Anthony Walke and Thomas Walke.
Norfolk—James Webb and James Taylor. (Portsmouth.)
Henrico—(Richmond City)—Edmund Randolph and John Marshall.
James City—Nathl. Burwell and Robert Andrews.
Elizabeth City—Miles King and Worlich Westwood.
Charlotte—Paul Carrington and Thomas Read.[[678]]
North Carolina.—North Carolina was at first overwhelmingly Anti-Federal. It had peculiar economic characteristics. Though in the south, it had a large body of small farmers; and the great slave-tilled plantation was not such a marked feature of its economy as it was of South Carolina. It had small mercantile interests as compared with Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, with their considerable seaport towns. And perhaps most significant of all was the fact that a very large proportion of the public securities in that state were bought up by speculators from northern cities[[679]] and therefore not held by native inhabitants in the centres of influence. This must have had a very deadening effect on the spirit of the movement for ratification.
Owing to these peculiarities, it is impossible to lay out North Carolina into such sharply differentiated economic regions as some of the other commonwealths. Nevertheless, certain lines are marked out by Libby in his survey of the vote in 1789 when the Constitution was finally ratified. “The counties around Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds constituted the bulk of the federal area.... This region was the earliest settled, the most densely populated, and represented most of the mercantile and commercial interests of the state.” With this region went some additional inland districts when the swing to the Federalists carried the state for ratification. The second region was in the centre of the state where the “interests were wholly agricultural;” this region was strongly Anti-Federal. To it was added the Tennessee region, also Anti-Federal, for the same reasons that carried western Virginia against the Constitution.[[680]]
South Carolina.—South Carolina presents the economic elements in the ratification with the utmost simplicity. There we find two rather sharply marked districts in antagonism over the Constitution. “The rival sections,” says Libby, “were the coast or lower district and the upper, or more properly, the middle and upper country. The coast region was the first settled and contained a larger portion of the wealth of the state; its mercantile and commercial interests were important; its church was the Episcopal, supported by the state.” This region, it is scarcely necessary to remark, was overwhelmingly in favor of the Constitution. The upper area, against the Constitution, “was a frontier section, the last to receive settlement; its lands were fertile and its mixed population were largely small farmers.... There was no established church, each community supported its own church and there was a great variety in the district.”[[681]]