The following figures and their captions highlight some of the more important events in North Carolina's history from the colonial era to the present. A more detailed and comprehensive discussion of the state's history is found in the print version of The North Carolina Atlas: Portrait for a New Century. Visit our 'Buy the Book' page for more information on obtaining a copy.
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John White, La Virgenia Pars, 1585 MS A.The Development of the Frontier, 1657-1835Avenues of Early SettlementEuropean and African Settlement In 1730The Revolutionary WarHistorical Evolution of County BoundariesInternal Improvements, 1776-1860Slave PopulationMain Indian Removal RoutesThe Civil WarSharecropped Farms, 1890Railroads, 1899Urban Growth Patterns, 1860-1910Location of Cotton Mills, 1899Location of Textile Mills, 1931Highway SystemsThe 1972 Election in North CarolinaVoter Registrations in North Carolina |
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Italian navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano, under French employ, set sail for China in 1564 and landed along the Carolina coast just north of Cape Fear. Sailing northeastward to Ocracoke he came upon his gateway to the Pacific, or so he thought. Verrazzano gazed to the northwest and confidently recorded in his log, “we would see the eastern sea from the ship. This doubtless is the one which goes around the tip of Indian, china, and Cathay.” The navigator had confused Pamlico Sound for the Pacific Ocean. The mistake persisted on European maps and consciousness for nearly a century. A map made by Englishmen John Dee and John White in the 1580s shows “The Sea of Verrazzano” extending from the Carolina coast to southern California. North Carolina was under water.
During the late 17th century, settlement in North Carolina proceeded from Virginia migration, first into the Albemarle region, then into the Pamlico district. By 1710, the new sparsely settled province had a capital at Edenton. But the migration caused growing alarm among the Indian populations resulting in a conflict that raged on and off for four years concluding in 1715 with the decimation of the Indians and the opening up of additional land to white settlement. The key event that affected the colony’s development until the time of the Revolution was King George II’s takeover of North Carolina from the heirs of the Lords Proprietors in 1729. The change generated a land bonanza in the colony as the Crown eased land purchase requirements and sent out the equivalent of real estate agents to drum up business. Their work, and the encouragement of royal governors, touched off a boom in North Carolina that lasted from 1730 to the American Revolution. Forests along the Coastal Plain were leveled for farms, settlers poured into the backcountry, and the line of settlement extended to the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The origins of North Carolina’s 18th-century newcomers varied widely. South Carolinians moved north into the Lower Cape Fear region to establish pine plantations with African slave labor. As land grew scarce in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia after 1730, migrants trekked down the Great Wagon road which began near Philadelphia and extended southwestward to the Shenandoah Valley before veering east into the North and South Carolina Piedmont. These newcomers included a variety of ethnic and religious groups, including Quakers, German Lutherans, German Moravians, and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and Baptists. Settling primarily in the Piedmont, they contrasted with the mostly English and African coastal areas and, in fact, had little contact with those areas. The rivers of the Piedmont flowed into the South Carolina colony and that is the route commerce and communication followed as well. By themed-eighteenth century residents of Piedmont North Carolina had more contacts with Pennsylvania than they did with the coastal district of their own colony.
In 1730, the colony’s population included 30,000 whites and 6,000 blacks, almost all of whom lived along the Coastal Plain; by 1775, the population had grown to 265,000 inhabitants, including 10,000 blacks, and settlement was scattered from the coast to the mountains. By that latter date, North Carolina was the fourth most populous of the thirteen colonies. The population was also among the most diverse with some estimates placing the German population as high as 30 percent.
The Revolution in North Carolina took on the character of a civil war. The patriot cause was most prominent in the eastern part of the colony where leaders were most involved in the Atlantic economy and hence most affected by British trade and tax policies. The Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge in February 1776 was a critical patriot victory against a Scottish Highlander force loyal to the Crown. The battle neutralized highlander efforts in the region and delayed British occupation of the South until 1780. When the British finally turned their attention southward that year, their lightning success in subjugating coastal South Carolina and much of Georgia alarmed North Carolinians. Troops led by General Charles Cornwallis hoped to conquer the colony by rallying local forces in the back country. Setting up headquarters at Charlotte in the midst of a “Hornet’s Nest” of hostile Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Cornwallis mapped out his campaign. But a smashing victory by patriot forces at King’s Mountain and later at Cowpens in South Carolina caused Cornwallis to retreat.
Through the first third of the nineteenth century, each county in the state had the same number of representatives to the legislature, regardless of population, and officeholding remained the privilege of property holders. Between 1790 and 1840 the counties east of Wake County experienced a 53 percent increase in population, compared with a 156 percent increase in the west. But the east controlled the legislature and only grudgingly created new counties (and hence representatives). As new counties were formed in the west, the legislature also increased the number of eastern counties by continually subdividing the existing ones. This ensured that the new western counties did not outnumber their eastern counterparts. This figure, which shows county outlines in 1780, 1800, and 1912, indicates that phenomenon. By the latter year the pattern was established. Western legislators eventually convinced enough easterners that the best interests of the state required a revised political system. In 1835 the lawmakers framed a new constitution that based representation in the lower house of the General Assembly on population.
The state plunged heavily into railroad construction in the 1840s and 1850s to overcome geographic isolation. State and private subscriptions constructed nine hundred miles of railroad by the time of the Civil War and the treasury incurred a debt of nine million collars. The North Carolina Railroad was the key facility as it connected the eastern portion of the state with the Piedmont, extending from Goldsboro to Raleigh to Charlotte in 1856. The railroad served as an early architect of the urban Piedmont Crescent that transformed the state’s economy in the twentieth century. The Crescent extended from Raleigh (and later Durham and Chapel Hill) to what would become the Triad (Winston-Salem, High Point, and Greensboro), and to Charlotte. More immediately, the North Carolina Railroad cut the farmers’ transportation costs in half, although only those with substantial surpluses could use the railroad profitably. Most Tar Heel farmers did not send their produce to market via railroads, but they bore the heaviest tax burden to pay for the system.
While blacks and whites shared the eastern part of the state, white yeomen farmers dominated the Piedmont and constantly pushed back the western frontier where the Cherokee resided. The typical antebellum North Carolina farm held less than 100 acres. The typical farmer lived in a three-room log or frame house, owned no slaves, and had corn as his leading crop. The farmer’s wife and children worked alongside him in the fields. He also cultivated squash, turnips, cucumbers, onions, and sweet potatoes, sometimes in sufficient abundance to market the surplus in the nearby town. Livestock provided an important food source for the farmer as well as some extra income. Leisure activity revolved around family and church, and farm cycles such as corn shucking time, often dictated entertainment. On the plantations in the eastern part of the state, such as Somerset Place, a different pattern emerged. There, white women rarely worked outside the house; the white master was the patriarchal leader for both his family and his slaves. Although the plantations of antebellum North Carolina were not as grand as in neighboring South Carolina, the life of the slave did not differ significantly from slaves in other parts of the South. Slave quarters were rudimentary; the surviving two-story structures at Horton Grove near Durham were unusual for their spaciousness. Slaves, organized into gangs, performed the backbreaking work of worming tobacco or chopping (weeding) cotton. Some slaves managed to perfect artisan skills, learn to read and write (although this was illegal), and grow garden crops which they sold with or without their masters’ knowledge in town. After the Second Great Awakening during the early 1800s, some masters converted their slaves to Christianity. Slaves embraced Christianity, often blending African and American customs and manipulating Biblical parables for their own purposes.
The Cherokees had undergone a remarkable transformation by the early 1800s. They had, essentially, adopted the white man’s agriculture, religion, and the English language. Much of this adaptation occurred among Cherokees in Georgia. But the success of the Americanized Cherokees aroused the hostility of covetous white neighbors and, beginning in 1835, the federal government ordered the removal of the Cherokee from the Southeast to present-day Oklahoma, the infamous Trail of Tears. A small band of Cherokee evaded federal authorities and hid deep in the North Carolina mountains where they remain today.
Eastern North Carolina fell under Union control early in the war as Federal forces took the Outer Banks in August 1861, and by March 1862 they had established headquarters at New Bern. In January 1865 Federal forces took Fort Fisher and closed the Confederacy’s last major port at Wilmington. In March, General William T. Sherman crossed the Cape Fear River and established headquarters at Goldsboro to plan for a confrontation with Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston. The two armies clashed at Bentonville in the bloodiest conflict ever on North Carolina soil. Although Johnston’s army gave a good account of itself, Sherman prevailed. Once Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia on April 9, 1865, Johnston saw the futility of further struggle and advised President Davis in a meeting at Greensboro to fight no more. At the farmhouse of James Bennett near Durham Station on April 18, 1865, Johnston surrendered his army to Sherman. Except for a few bloody but meaningless raids in the western part of the state by Union General George Stoneman, the war in North Carolina was over.
As before the Civil War, agriculture remained at the center of the state’s economy. The pattern of small farms and small towns persisted as well. But the lives of many Tar Heel farmers changed for the worse in the decades after 1865. Between 1865 and 1890 independent farming receded before sharecropping and tenantry. Black freedmen and white landowners achieved a labor accommodation of sorts in the decades after the Civil War in the form of sharecropping. In exchange for one-half or one-third of the crop, black farm workers usually received a house, farm implements, and the freedom to work the land as they saw fit. As cotton and tobacco became the major cash crops in a cash-poor region, more land was given over to those crops resulting in overproduction, falling prices, and increasing debt. The economic situation ruined not only the fond hopes of blacks, but forced numerous white landowners into dependence as well. By 1890, one of three white farmers and three of four black farmers were either tenants or sharecroppers.
By 1900, more than 3,800 miles of track served the state. The ruling Democratic Party had kindly provided railroad companies with relief from taxes and corporate regulations so that at the turn of the century, three major lines connected North Carolina with the rest of the nation: the Seaboard Airline Railway, the Southern Railway, and the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. All of these railroads ran, roughly, in a North-South direction. The dream of uniting eastern and western North Carolina via a road or railroad, remained elusive.
The result of a business-oriented state government and the enterprise of industrialists was urban growth, especially in the Piedmont region. In 1870, only one town in North Carolina – Wilmington – possessed more than 10,000 inhabitants. By 1900, five additional towns had crossed that population threshold, four in the Piedmont (Charlotte, Winston, Raleigh, and Greensboro), and one in the mountain region (Asheville). The urban growth reflected a shift in the state’s economy to the towns and cities of the Piedmont, though North Carolina remained an overwhelmingly rural state.
Textile milling had existed in North Carolina since before the Civil War supplying a primarily local market. But, in the early 1880s, Charlotte entrepreneur D.A. Tompkins launched the Cotton Mill Campaign designed to encourage the development of the textile industry in the Carolina Piedmont. The number of spindles operated in North Carolina nearly quadrupled between 1870 and 1889, and tripled between 1889 and 1899, reaching more than 1.1 million in the latter year. That total surpassed the number in either Connecticut, Maine, or Vermont. North Carolina mill developers followed the “Rhode Island model,” by building isolated villages to house worked employed in one small water-powered mill. The fast flowing streams of the Piedmont offered the greatest array of such energy sites within the state. Of the 91 mills in North Carolina in 1890, at least 70 wholly or partially used water power. But nine years later, only 41 percent of the mills used water power and many of those supplemented their energy supply with more reliable and consistent steam engines.
Improved technology for generating and transmitting electricity after 1900 gave mill owners locational freedom. By 1929 southern textiles had surpassed New England in the number of spindles operating and the amount of cotton consumed. North Carolina led the South, accounting for over one-third of the number of spindles among the six leading southern states. More efficient southern mills, no longer satisfied with producing only cheap cloth, began taking markets away from the increasingly obsolete New England factories. The textile industry reinforced the dispersed settlement pattern of North Carolina. In the north, industrialization reinforced urbanization. In the Carolinas, manufacturing enterprises, especially textiles, were located in mill villages and not in the cities of the Piedmont.
During the 1920s, North Carolina made significant strides toward modernization. Governor Cameron Morrison (1921-1925) became known as the “Good Roads Governor.” Morrison’s vision was to break the isolation of the rural parts of the state and begin to connect the disparate geographical divisions. He created a state highly commission and promoted bond issues totaling $65 million for the construction of state highways. This figure shows the state highway system in 1920 and its expansion under the federal highway system by 1962.
The civil rights movement of the 1960s, led by Democrats in Congress and two Democratic presidential administrations, triggered party realignment throughout the South. In what is termed the “Great White Switch,” many white voters left the party of their ancestors and voted Republican. Large numbers of newly-enfranchised African American voters flocked to the Democratic standard. The 1972 election of Jesse Helms (a former Democrat) to the U.S. Senate and James E. Holshouser Jr. (1973-77) as governor, as well as the persistent vote of the state for Republican presidential candidates for every election except that of 1976, reflected the growth of two-party politics in North Carolina as well as the persistence of racial issues.
This comparison of black and white voter registration between 1960 and 1974 reflects the impact of lowering the voting age to 18 (which accounts, in part, for the decline in voter registration among the eligible white population) and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which applied to forty of North Carolina’s one hundred counties, guaranteeing a color-blind voting registration and electoral process. Together with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial segregation in public places, and the series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions culminating with Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), which ordered busing to achieve racial balance in the public schools, the voting rights legislation destroyed the last legal vestiges of Jim Crow in North Carolina. The state’s African American population played a major role in these landmark events, beginning with the student sit-ins in Greensboro in 1960 and concluding with the lawsuit filed by Darius Swann in Charlotte.
