Industries.
The industries of North Carolina in the early times were purely agricultural. There were no manufactures. The simplest and commonest articles of daily use were imported from the northern colonies or from England. Agriculture was conducted more wastefully and with less intelligence than in any of the other colonies. In the northern counties tobacco was almost exclusively cultivated. In the Cape Fear region there were flourishing rice-fields. A great deal of excellent timber was cut; in particular the yellow pine of North Carolina was then, as now, famous for its hardness and durability. Tar and turpentine were also produced in large quantities. All this furnished the basis for a flourishing foreign commerce; but the people did not take kindly to the sea, and the carrying trade was monopolized by New Englanders. The fisheries, which were of considerable value, were altogether neglected. All business or traffic about the coast was carried on under perilous conditions; for pirates were always hovering about, secure in the sympathy of many of the people, like the brigands of southern Italy in recent times.
Absence of towns.
In the absence of manufactures, and with commerce so little developed, there was no town life. Byrd describes Edenton as containing forty or fifty houses, small and cheaply built: “a citizen here is counted extravagant if he has ambition enough to aspire to a brick chimney.”[286] As late as 1776 New Berne and Wilmington were villages of five or six hundred inhabitants each. Not only were there no towns, but there were very few large plantations with stately manor houses like those of Virginia. A great part of the country was covered with its primeval forest, in which thousands of hogs, branded with their owners’ marks, wandered and rooted until the time came for hunting them out and slaughtering them. Where rude clearings had been made in the wilderness there were small, ill-kept farms. Nearly all the people were small farmers, whose work was done chiefly by black slaves or by white servants. The treatment of the slaves is said to have been usually mild, as in Virginia. The white servants fared better, and the general state of society was so low that when their time of service was ended they had here a good chance of rising to a position of equality with their masters. The country swarmed with ruffians of all sorts, who fled thither from South Carolina and Virginia; life and property were insecure, and Lynch law was not unfrequently administered. The small planters were apt to be hard drinkers, and among their social amusements were scrimmages, in which noses were sometimes broken and eyes gouged out. There was a great deal of gambling. But, except at elections and other meetings for political purposes, people saw very little of each other. The isolation of homesteads, which prevailed over the South, reached its maximum in North Carolina. It is not strange, then, that the colony was a century old before it could boast of a printing-press, or that there were no schools until shortly before the war for Independence. A mail from Virginia came some eight or ten times in a year, but it only reached a few towns on the coast, and down to the time of the Revolution the interior of the country had no mails at all.
A frontier democracy.
Segregation and dispersal of Virginia’s poor whites.
Spotswood’s account of the matter.
All these consequences clearly followed from the character of the emigration by which North Carolina was first peopled, and that character was determined by its geographical position as a wilderness frontier to such a commonwealth as Virginia. In the character of this emigration we find the reasons for the comparatively democratic state of society. As there were so few large plantations and wealthy planters, while nearly all the white people were small land-owners, and as the highest class was thus so much lower in dignity than the corresponding class in Virginia, it became just so much the easier for the “mean whites” to rise far enough to become a part of it. North Carolina, therefore, was not simply an Alsatia for debtors and criminals, but it afforded a home for the better portion of Virginia’s poor people. We can thus see how there would come about a natural segregation of Virginia’s white freedmen into four classes: 1. The most enterprising and thrifty would succeed in maintaining a respectable existence in Virginia; 2. A much larger class, less thrifty and enterprising, would find it easier to make a place for themselves in the ruder society of North Carolina; 3. A lower stratum would consist of persons without enterprise or thrift who remained in Virginia to recruit the ranks of “white trash;” 4. The lowest stratum would comprise the outlaws who fled into North Carolina to escape the hangman. Of the third class the eighteenth century seems to have witnessed a gradual exodus from Virginia, so that in 1773 it was possible for the traveller, John Ferdinand Smyth, to declare that there were fewer cases of poverty in proportion to the population than anywhere else “in the universe.” The statement of Bishop Meade in 1857, which was quoted in the preceding chapter,[287] shows that the class of “mean whites” had not even then become extinct in Virginia; but it is clear that the slow but steady exodus had been such as greatly to diminish its numbers and its importance as a social feature. Some of these freedmen went northward into Pennsylvania,[288] but most of them sought the western and southern frontiers, and at first the southern frontier was a far more eligible retreat than the western. Of this outward movement of white freedmen the governor of Virginia wrote in 1717: “The Inhabitants of our ffrontiers are composed generally of such as have been transported hither as Servants, and being out of their time, ... settle themselves where Land is to be taken up ... that will produce the necessarys of Life with little Labour. It is pretty well known what Morals such people bring with them hither, which are not like to be much mended by their Scituation, remote from all places of worship; they are so little concerned about Religion, that the Children of many of the Inhabitants of those ffrontier Settlements are 20, and some 30 years of age before they are baptized, and some not at all.... These people, knowing the Indians to be lovers of strong liquors, make no scruple of first making them drunk and then cheating them of their skins; on the other hand, the Indians, being unacquainted with the methods of obtaining reparation by Law, frequently revenged themselves by the murder of the persons who thus treated them, or (according to their notions of Satisfaction) of the next Englishman they could most easily cutt off.”[289] In this description we may recognize some features of frontier life in recent times.
The German immigration.
The Scotch-Irish immigration.