The colony of North Carolina was among the least prominent of the original thirteen colonies, in part because of its geographic semi-isolation. The Outer Banks provided a long, rugged coastline, which blocked most of the colony from easy access to the ocean; the Cape Fear River furnished the sole deepwater port.
Original Inhabitants
When the first English colonists arrived at Roanoke in 1585 in present-day North Carolina, the Catawba, Cherokee, Tuscarora, and various other Indian peoples occupied the area. The Tuscarora lived in the Piedmont in western North Carolina. In their society, both genders carried out essential economic roles, with men hunting and women planting corn and beans and gathering berries and other foods. Related linguistically to the Iroquois (of New York), the Tuscarora sometimes allied with them in raids against their common enemy, the Catawba. Like most Native Americans along the East Coast, the Tuscarora became dependent on European trade goods, which created struggles with neighboring Indians to control hunting grounds and commerce with Europeans. In addition, North Carolina’s colonists encroached on the land of the Tuscarora and paid their enemies to capture the Tuscarora and to sell them into slavery. In 1711, the Tuscarora retaliated by killing a British trader and then attacking colonial plantations, thereby setting off the Tuscarora War (1711-13). The North and South Carolinians defeated the Tuscarora, who then moved north to become the final group in the Six Nations of the Iroquois.
Like many other Native Americans, the Catawba sustained huge population losses from European diseases, became dependent on English metal goods, and suffered attacks on their culture and independence. The Catawba acted as brokers in the trade between other Natives and the English, which helped them to maintain their autonomy. As the political structures of neighboring Indians disintegrated, the Catawba adopted many of them into their society, simultaneously creating new cultural groups. Severe smallpox epidemics and the diminishing deerskin trade undermined the power of the Catawba in the mid-18th century.
The Cherokee dominated the Appalachian Mountains in present-day Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina. Although decimated by diseases contracted from 16th-century Spanish explorers, they were able to recover their population before sustained contact and trade with the English in the 17th century. In 1650, the Iroquoian-speaking Cherokee probably numbered about 22,000. Typically, their villages consisted of a small number of log cabins, where women and men shared political and social power. Women engaged in agriculture while men hunted. Selected by each town, chiefs had a division of responsibilities between wartime and peacetime leaders. During the late 17th and early 18th centuries, select Cherokee villages signed peace treaties with Carolina’s settlers, and a number of Cherokee women married Europeans, especially traders. The Cherokee’s excessive reliance on European manufactured goods weakened their political bargaining power and caused them to cede large tracts of lands to white colonists to pay their debts. During the Seven Years’ War, some Cherokee towns supported the French and launched sustained attacks on the Carolina backcountry. Generally siding with the British during the American Revolution, the Cherokee eventually lost even more land and became subordinate to the new United States government.
The “Lost Colony”
The French and Spanish explored and claimed the area in the 16th century. They were especially interested in Pamlico Sound, which they hoped to be a gateway to an ocean route to China.
In 1583 Queen Elizabeth I conferred the exclusive license to discover and colonize “remote heathen and barbarous lands” upon Walter Raleigh, who was already intensely involved in colonizing Ireland and heavily invested in lucrative privateering forays against Spanish shipping. Planning his American colony as a base for privateering, Raleigh dispatched Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe in 1584 to reconnoiter a settlement site close to the West Indies and the homeward route of the Spanish treasure fleet. They found Roanoke Island, sheltered between the Outer Banks and the mainland of present-day North Carolina, to be a plausible site for a covert naval base. Amadas and Barlowe were warmly welcomed and entertained by Granganimeo, the werowance who ruled Roanoke at the pleasure of his brother Wingina, the paramount chief of an alliance of local Algonquin villages. Wingina was eager for English allies in intracultural rivalries with his neighbors. He also hoped to enhance his power and prestige by becoming an intermediary in the trade with the English.
On their return to England in September 1584, Amadas and Barlowe brought glowing reports of the New World’s potential along with Wingina’s advisers, Manteo and Wanchese, who learned English and taught Thomas Harriot the Roanoke Algonquian dialect. Elizabeth knighted Raleigh for his efforts, but forbade him to go to sea. Instead, Sir Richard Grenville (see Volume I) was named admiral of the fleet and general of the expedition. Grenville’s expedition reached Wococon Island on June 29, 1585, and he planted the colony on the north end of Roanoke Island, close to Wingina’s principal village, Dasamonquepeuc.
The presence of Raleigh’s colony profoundly unsettled regional Algonquin life. English demands for corn threatened the Indians’ surplus already made meager by several years of drought. The English also spread deadly diseases, which undermined the Algonquins’ confidence in their native religion. Wingina eventually adopted a policy of resistance. He changed his name to Pemisapan (“One who watches”), withdrew from the English, refused to provide them with food, and eventually hatched a plot eradicate the colony. The colonists responded by raiding Dasamonquepeuc and killing Wingina and his advisers, thereby making most Roanoke implacable enemies of the English.
The Indian embargo on trading foodstuffs, Grenville’s delay in resupplying the colony, and the unexpected arrival of Sir Francis Drake and his privateering fleet in June 1586 induced the colonists to take up Drake on his offer to transport them back to England. Shortly thereafter, Grenville arrived with three ships. Finding the colony abandoned, he left 15 men on Roanoke with provisions for two years, “being unwilling to loose the possession of the country which Englishmen had so long held.” The failure to find precious metals or even a suitable harbor for refitting privateers quickly soured enthusiasm among wealthy investors for the Virginia enterprise. Raleigh, however, held fast to his dreams of empire and backed John White, the painter, in gathering support for another expedition. After his appointment as governor, White led 14 English families to Roanoke Island in May 1587. In August, White went to England to secure additional supplies and support. White’s return was delayed by English naval engagements with the Spanish Armada, and when he arrived in Roanoke in 1590, he found that the colonists had vanished, leaving only clues that they might have tried to relocate the colony inland or to Chesapeake Bay.
Colonization
King Charles I claimed Carolina (the Latin name for “Charles”) in 1629 by granting the region to Sir Robert Heath, but he failed to establish any settlements. King Charles II granted the area to eight supporters whom he named the Lords Proprietors over Carolina. Their charter provided them with extensive power over the colony, and they promised political and religious freedom as well as land to settlers. When these promises failed to attract many colonists, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper (subsequently earl of Shaftesbury) and the philosopher John Locke wrote the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669, which maintained feudal privileges but also provided some popular rights. However, settlers did not adopt the Fundamental Constitutions, and the colony developed along considerably different lines than envisioned by the authors of that document.
The colonization of North Carolina proceeded slowly in the 17th century. Virginians established the first permanent settlement around Albermarle Sound in the early 1650s, and migration from Virginia continued, especially after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. In 1689, the Virginia proprietors appointed a governor for the province of Albermarle, which gradually became known as North Carolina. The pace of migration increased after the English Parliament’s 1705 passage of the Naval Stores Act, which encouraged the production of turpentine, tar, and pitch, all of which were possible in the area’s vast pine forests. Freeholders also relied on indentured servants and black and Indian slaves to produce corn, TOBACCO, and livestock. As Native Americans were pushed west of the Appalachian Mountains, German and Scots-Irish migrants flowed into the Piedmont. Scots and smaller contingents of Swiss and French migrants settled along the Cape Fear River.
The early 18th century was a time of difficulty. The Tuscarora raided white settlements in 1711, and the Yamasee attacked the Carolinas in 1715. Pirate activity near the Outer Banks contributed to the unrest. Dissatisfied Carolinians complained about the proprietors’ failure to protect them or to provide additional lands. In 1712, North Carolina was made a separate colony. The boundary between North Carolina and Virginia was surveyed in 1728, and in 1729, North Carolina became a royal colony.
At the end of the colonial era, the colony was deeply divided along regional, class, and racial lines. Small family farmers with few slaves came into conflict with more affluent eastern owners of slaves and larger estates. Western farmers, perpetually in debt, paid high fees and taxes and exercised little power in the colony’s general assembly. They organized the Regulators to “regulate” their communities in a more honest and equitable fashion.
Further reading: A. Roger Ekirch, “Poor Carolina”: Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729-1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Totowa, N. J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984); James Merrell, The Indians’ New World: The Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989); Daniel Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
—James Bruggeman and Billy G. Smith
World History
