Contrasts between the two Carolinas.
The careers of the two southern colonies whose beginnings we have thus sketched were very different, and between their respective social characteristics the contrasts were so great that it is impossible to make general statements applicable alike to the two. In one respect the contrast was different from that which one would observe in comparing Virginia with New England. In New England a marked concentration of social life in towns and villages co-existed with complete democracy, while in Virginia the isolated life upon great plantations was connected with an aristocratic structure of society. But between the two Carolinas the contrast was just the reverse of this. Of all the southern colonies, North Carolina was the one in which society was the most scattered, and town life the least developed, while it was also the one in which the general aspect of society was the least aristocratic. On the other hand, in South Carolina there was a peculiarly strong concentration of social life into a single focus in Charleston; and in connection with this we find a type of society in some respects more essentially aristocratic than in Virginia. We shall find it worth our while to dwell for a moment upon some of the immediate causes of these differences.
Effects of geographical conditions.
Interior of North Carolina contrasted with the coast.
The history of North America affords an interesting illustration of the way in which the character of a community may be determined for good or ill by geographical circumstances. There have been historians and philosophers unable to see anything except such physical conditions at work in determining the course of human affairs. With such views I have small sympathy,[280] but it would be idle to deny that physical conditions are very important, and the study of them is highly instructive. But for the peculiar physical conformation of its coast, North Carolina, rather than Virginia, would doubtless have been the first American state. It was upon Roanoke Island that the earliest attempts were made, but Ralph Lane in 1585 already came to the conclusion that the Chesapeake region would afford better opportunities. First and foremost, the harbourage was spoiled by the prevalent sand-bars. Then huge pine barrens near the coast hindered the first efforts of the planter, and extensive malarial swamps imperilled his life.[281] The first attempts at cultivation increased the danger, which was of a kind that would yield only to modern methods of drainage. It was only by the coast that the conditions were thus forbidding. No American state has greater natural advantages than North Carolina. For diversity of eligible soils, for salubrity of climate, for variety of flora and fauna, she is unsurpassed; while for beauty and grandeur of scenery she may well claim to be first among the states east of the Rocky Mountains.[282] John Lawson describes North Carolina with enthusiasm as “a delicious country, being placed in that girdle of the world which affords wine, oil, fruit, grain, and silk, with other rich commodities, besides a sweet air, moderate climate, and fertile soil. These are the blessings, under Heaven’s protection, that spin out the thread of life to its utmost extent, and crown our days with the sweets of health and plenty, which, when joined with content, render the possessors the happiest race of men upon earth.”[283] The good Lawson, who was somewhat inclined to see things in rose-colour, praised even the gentleness of the Indians, who (as we have seen) returned the compliment after their manner, by roasting him alive. But, with all this beauty and richness of the interior country, the obstacles presented at the coast turned the first great wave of English colonization into Virginia; and thereafter the settlement of North Carolina was determined largely, and by no means to its advantage, by the social conditions of the older colony.
Unkempt life.
In its early days North Carolina was simply a portion of Virginia’s frontier; and to this wild frontier the shiftless people who could not make a place for themselves in Virginia society, including many of the “mean whites,” flocked in large numbers. In their new home they soon acquired the reputation of being very lawless in temper, holding it to be the chief end of man to resist all constituted authority, and above all things to pay no taxes. In some respects, as in the administration of justice, one might have witnessed such scenes as continued for generations to characterize American frontier life. The courts sat oftentimes in taverns, where the tedium of business was relieved by glasses of grog, while the judge’s decisions were not put on record, but were simply shouted by the crier from the inn door or at the nearest market-place. It was not until 1703 that a clergyman was settled in the colony, though there were Quaker meetings before that time. As late as 1729 Colonel Byrd writes of Edenton, the seat of government: “I believe this is the only metropolis in the Christian or Mohammedan world where there is neither church, chapel, mosque, synagogue, or any other place of public worship, of any sect or religion whatsoever.” In this country “they pay no tribute, either to God or to Cæsar.”[284]
A genre picture by Colonel Byrd.
According to Colonel Byrd, these people were chargeable with laziness, but more especially the men, who let their wives work for them. The men, he says, “make their wives rise out of their beds early in the morning, at the same time that they lie and snore till the sun has run one third of his course and dispersed all the unwholesome damps. Then, after stretching and yawning for half an hour, they light their pipes, and under the protection of a cloud of smoke venture out into the open air; though, if it happens to be never so little cold, they quickly return shivering into the chimney corner. When the weather is mild, they stand leaning with both their arms upon the cornfield fence, and gravely consider whether they had best go and take a small heat at the hoe, but generally find reasons to put it off until another time. Thus they loiter away their lives, like Solomon’s sluggard, with their arms across, and at the winding up of the year scarcely have bread to eat.”[285] Every one has met with the type of man here described. In Massachusetts to-day you may find sporadic examples of him in decaying mountain villages, left high and dry by the railroads that follow the winding valleys; or now and then you may find him clustered in some tiny hamlet of crazy shanties nestling in a secluded area of what Mr. Ricardo would have called “the worst land under cultivation,” and bearing some such pithy local name as “Hardscrabble” or “Satan’s Kingdom.” Such men do not make the strength of Massachusetts, or of any commonwealth. They did not make the strength of North Carolina, and it should not be forgotten that Byrd’s testimony is that of an unfriendly or at least a satirical observer. Nevertheless there is strong reason for believing that his portrait is one for which the old Albemarle colony could have furnished many sitters. Such people were sure to be drawn thither by the legislation which made the colony an Alsatia for insolvent debtors.