North Carolina

By: Paul Finkelman, Bradford J. Wood

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

North Carolina

Unlike the adjacent colonies of Virginia and South Carolina, North Carolina remained relatively poor, without enough economic development to support a large-scale plantation system. Naval stores, lumber, and tobacco fit into diversified enterprises and enabled some slave owners to achieve moderate prosperity, but North Carolinians never found a way to make slave labor as profitable as did their counterparts in neighboring colonies. Slaves in early North Carolina fit into a different economic niche and sometimes performed different kinds of work than was typical elsewhere.

The use of slave labor was prominent in early North Carolina; some counties had particularly widespread and substantial slave populations, often in forest industries. Throughout the eighteenth century the colony as a whole tended to mirror its neighbors' legal and cultural approaches to the issue of slavery. The strength and persistence of the institution owed a great deal to North Carolina's vast nonslaveholding white majority, who provided slave owners with staunch support even when the practice did not necessarily support their own interests. By 1830 the experience of African Americans in North Carolina reflected the experience of those throughout the antebellum southern states.

Slavery in the Regions of Colonial North Carolina

African Americans first entered North Carolina gradually and in small numbers as they accompanied whites to different parts of the colony in a series of migrations that transpired over several generations. North Carolina was founded as an offshoot of Virginia in the late seventeenth century, when a number of debtors, religious dissenters, and economically desperate colonists moved into the area around Albemarle Sound. By 1725 a second major area of settlement opened up on the lower reaches of the Cape Fear River near the South Carolina border, leading to the development of a distinctive region with a much larger African American population than that of any other part of the colony. Shortly thereafter settlers began pouring into the North Carolina Piedmont and areas farther west, but these migrants brought or purchased few slaves, making the African Americans in these areas a small minority.

Neither the Carolina proprietors nor the early settlers near Albemarle Sound demonstrated any reservations about the institution of slavery, but the Albemarle settlements grew very slowly and contained few Africans or African Americans. By the start of the eighteenth century only a few hundred slaves resided in settlements that had existed for a half century; sources from several counties indicate that the population was considerably more than 80 percent white. Slave ownership became more widespread in Albemarle by the mid-eighteenth century, as African Americans fit into small-scale plantation operations focused on the tobacco and provision crops characteristic of southern Virginia. Most Albemarle households had at least one slave, but few had large slaveholdings.

A much more substantial population of African descent entered North Carolina with the settling of the lower Cape Fear region in 1725. The initiative for this migration came from the Moores, a family of elite South Carolinians who moved north, bringing significant slaveholdings. Slaves made up a large portion, perhaps a majority, of the lower Cape Fear region's population from the beginning. Meeting little success at rice cultivation, inhabitants of the region used slave labor in forest industries, producing massive amounts of tar, lumber, turpentine, and pitch concurrently with more conventional plantation activities. Owners of plantations in lower Cape Fear achieved far greater wealth, used slave labor on a larger scale, and showed a greater willingness to brutalize and dehumanize people of African descent than did plantation owners in any other part of North Carolina. At the same time, labor in the piney woods undoubtedly exposed many African and African American slaves to greater opportunities for autonomy, periods of isolation, and a generally different range of experiences than those typical of plantation slavery elsewhere.

White settlers moved up the Cape Fear River or into the North Carolina backcountry through various routes, but few African Americans accompanied them. In the four large western counties of North Carolina, on the eve of the American Revolution, slaves had yet to approach 10 percent of the total population, and no farm's slaveholdings reached twenty. These circumstances made racial interaction between blacks and whites less frequent but no less complicated and meaningful. In one particularly well-documented corner of the Piedmont, members of the Moravian church purchased slaves to help provide the economic underpinnings for their new religious haven, creating an Afro-Moravian world. The backcountry also had a more substantial free black population; more than 10 percent of the population was of African descent in the western counties.

Certain commonalities are suggestive of the character of African American life between the rice and tobacco belts of South Carolina and Virginia. Few African Americans found their work routines defined by the requirements of one crop or staple, though Albemarle tobacco plantations or rice-growing plantations along the lower Cape Fear River may have been exceptions. Throughout North Carolina slave labor served diversified and varied purposes. Meanwhile, the absence of a direct slave trade with Africa probably made North Carolina's slave population less African and more creolized than the slave populations of Virginia and South Carolina. Still, contemporaries such as James Murray, John Brickell, and Janet Schaw demonstrate the vitality of African perspectives in North Carolina through their descriptions of slave funerals, weddings, and other cultural activities. By the American Revolution slaves of African descent probably made up between one-quarter and one-third of North Carolina's total population, and the institution of slavery had been growing in tandem with the colony itself, if not as rapidly. White North Carolinians had established the legal and cultural forces of race-based plantation slavery, even though the institution of slavery remained marginal to much of the colony's economy.

Revolution and Resistance

The American Revolution had a profound impact on the lives of African Americans in North Carolina, as the rhetoric of colonial independence and the ensuing war with Great Britain brought African Americans new perspectives on bondage and freedom. The chaos of the war itself was particularly important, as it sometimes offered precious opportunities for greater autonomy or even freedom. British military leaders attempted to turn African Americans against their revolutionary owners by offering slaves their freedom. When the colony's last royal governor, Josiah Martin, attempted to combine Loyalists and rebellious slaves, however, Revolutionary forces won a significant victory at Moores Creek Bridge and temporarily restored their authority. Slaves also served in the Revolutionary military forces and provided labor for both sides. With Loyalists and Patriots alike attempting to exploit and control African Americans in North Carolina during the war, the overall relationship can best be understood as a triangular struggle in which each of the three groups pursued its own interests and agenda. For African Americans the war offered a range of opportunities, from chances for freedom to basic self-preservation. Slaves shared doubts about whether either Patriots or Loyalists could be trusted. In the fierce, chaotic, and notoriously partisan warfare that engulfed the Carolinas late in the war, few choices seemed clear-cut for any of the participants.

The end of the Revolutionary War left the institution of slavery transformed but firmly ensconced in North Carolina society. Numerous slaves had disappeared from plantations during the war, and slave owners sought to purchase replacements in the 1780s and 1790s. To a certain extent, Revolutionary ideology led to an increase in slave manumissions, though North Carolina law supposedly prohibited slave owners from freeing their slaves. Unfortunately, such opportunities for freedom proved to be anomalies, and slaveholders in general proved very willing to defend their interests.

Neither the war's end nor legal or political hurdles dampened African American efforts at resistance or hopes for freedom, however. Slave crimes, escapes, and conspiracies appear to have been especially frequent during the 1790s. The situation came to a head in 1802 when whites discovered an evidently massive slave insurrection plot in the northeastern part of the colony. The planned uprising combined older African American attitudes toward resistance with an increasingly strong interest in the revolutionary aspects of evangelical Christianity. Indeed, the growing importance of evangelical Christianity in slave quarters led to both slaves and slave owners' fashioning religious arguments in support of their interests and values. Authorities responded to the 1802 incident characteristically, increasing repression, executing dozens of slaves, and jailing hundreds more. Resistance continued, but in a more passive form; other slaves simply fled into the Maroon community in the Dismal Swamp or other places of refuge. By the nineteenth century the Dismal Swamp community, along the Virginia border, constituted the largest Maroon society in the United States, probably comprising about two thousand people.

Ambivalent Slave State

The Revolutionary Era marked important changes in the economic basis of slavery in North Carolina and the surrounding states. The loss of the British government's bounty on naval stores dealt a serious blow to the exceptional plantation system along the lower Cape Fear River, leaving the region more like the rest of the North Carolina seaboard. The destructions and dislocations of war, combined with declining tobacco markets, made the entire state even more marginal in the burgeoning plantation economies of the period. The cotton boom, which swept across the Southeast and gave the plantation system a second lease on life in the nineteenth century, never really took hold in North Carolina.

Even as white North Carolinians became increasingly ambivalent about slavery in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the oppression of African Americans escalated in both scale and severity. Between the first federal census in 1790 and 1830, the enslaved population of North Carolina more than doubled, leaping from about 100,000 to almost 250,000. In North Carolina, as in the rest of the southern states, growing anxieties about threats to the slave system from both within and without led to stricter legal restrictions regarding African Americans. Such laws not only underscored the oppression of enslaved laborers but also ensured the economic and social subordination of an increasingly significant free black population. When slavery became economically untenable for some slave owners, massive numbers of African Americans were sold to the burgeoning cotton states, wreaking havoc on slave families and making North Carolina a major supplier in what one historian has termed the Second Middle Passage.

North Carolina's complex relationship with the institution of slavery resulted in some surprising attitudes. North Carolina yielded more abolitionists than most southern states, and its white elite offered a far more limited defense of slavery than its neighbors. In contrast to the relatively weak proslavery voices in antebellum North Carolina, David Walker emerged from the obscurity of his birth as a free black man in Wilmington in 1785, left the south for New England, and penned his powerful and defiant antislavery tract, An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, in 1829. Evidence suggests that Walker's writing both emboldened some of North Carolina's enslaved African Americans and encouraged more severe restrictions from white authorities.

North Carolina during the Antebellum Era

From the Revolution to the Civil War, North Carolina's public policy toward slaves and blacks differed in significant ways from other southern states. Unlike Virginia or Maryland, early-national North Carolina did not adopt legislation to facilitate private manumission. Masters could emancipate slaves with the permission of the county court, or sometimes the state legislature. These special acts, usually based on petitions from masters, led to the emancipation of hundreds of slaves in the state. One of the most interesting cases of maters petitioning to free slaves was that of John C. Stanly of New Bern. Stanly was born a slave, but gained his own freedom in 1798 through a special legislative act. He then began to buy and emancipate slaves, usually by petitioning his county court. He freed his wife and two children in 1805 and his brother-in-law in 1807. By 1820 he had emancipated at least twenty other slaves. Through private acts of manumission, with legislative approval, the free black population grew more rapidly than the slave population, going from just under 5,000 in 1790 (4.7 percent of the total black population) to just over 10,000 in 1810 (5.7 percent of the black population). By 1830 there were just under 20,000 free African Americans, constituting 7.3 percent of the state's black population. On the eve of the Civil War, North Carolina had just over 30,000 free blacks—8.4 percent of the free black population. In the same period, 1790 to 1860, the slave population grew from 100,000 to 330,000.

In the colonial period North Carolina's slaves had produced vast amounts of naval products, particularly turpentine, pitch, and tar, and in the process helped give North Carolina its nickname, the “Tar Heel State.” The economy shifted to tobacco by the time of the Revolution. However, where the soil and climate permitted, the state's master class shifted their slaves into cotton production after 1800. Most slaves lived in counties where cotton thrived. By 1860 there were sixteen counties where the population was more than 50 percent slave and in eleven of those counties cotton was the main crop. The state would have had considerably more slaves were it not for the westward migration of tens of thousands of North Carolinians and the thriving interstate slave trade that moved many tens of thousands of North Carolina slaves west and farther south. Unlike the rest of the emerging slave South, at the time of statehood North Carolina allowed free African Americans to vote on the same basis as whites. Until they were disfranchised in 1835 free blacks in a number of counties voted and participated in political debate. The rise of “Jacksonian democracy” in the 1830s led to universal suffrage for adult white men and the complete denial of suffrage for blacks in the state.

From 1808 until the mid-1830s John Chavis, a free man, ran a private school in Raleigh where he taught white children. Among his students were future leaders of the state, including one future U.S. Senator, Willie Mangum, and two future members of the House of Representatives, John Henderson and Archibald Henderson. Separately, and probably for far less money, Chavis also taught free black children. Some North Carolina slaves also learned to read and write. One, George Moses Horton, a Chatham County slave, published two volumes of poetry before the Civil War. Horton's master allowed him to live on his own, paying something to the owner every month. In 1865 Horton published a third volume of poetry with the help of a cavalry captain in Sherman's army. While Horton never acquired enough money to buy his freedom, other slaves did. More important, some free African Americans actually acquired wealth. In 1860 more than 50 free blacks owned property worth more than $2,500. Among them were the carpenter James Sampson, whose holdings were worth over $36,000, and the farmer Jesse Freeman, who had an estate valued at around $20,000. In total, free African Americans in the state owned property worth over a million dollars. Despite this aggregate wealth, probably no more than 10 to 15 percent of the free African Americans in the state owned any land. Very few blacks in the state owned slaves, and by the late antebellum period almost all of these were free people who had purchased relatives, but under the law could not emancipate them. In 1861 the state prohibited free blacks from buying slaves.

In addition to unusual rules for free African Americans—such as allowing them to vote—North Carolina was noteworthy for legal rules it applied to slaves. The North Carolina supreme court was famous for its sophisticated approach to the complexities of the law as it applied to slavery. The legislature was also a significant player in these developments. In 1791 North Carolina made the murder of a slave a felony, to be punished in the same way the killing of a free person would be punished. The text of this statute illustrates a humanitarian goal that was unusual for a slave state. At the same time, the law recognized that power and force were necessary to maintain slavery. The law declared

"And whereas by another act of Assembly passed in the year 1774, the killing of a slave, however wanton, cruel and deliberate, is only punishable in the first instance by imprisonment and paying the value thereof to the owner; which distinction of criminality between the murder of a white person and of one who is equally a human creature, but merely of a different complexion, is disgraceful to humanity and degrading in the highest degree to the laws and principles of a free, Christian and enlightened country: Be it enacted by the authority aforesaid, That if any person shall hereafter be guilty of wilfully [sic] and maliciously killing a slave, such offender shall upon the first conviction thereof be adjudged guilty of murder, and shall suffer the same punishment as if he had killed a free man; any law, usage or custom to the contrary notwithstanding. Provided always, That this act shall not extend to any person killing a slave outlawed by virtue of any act of Assembly of this state, or to any slave in the act of resistance to his lawful owner or master, or to any slave dying under moderate correction."

In State v. Boon (1801) the state supreme court found the statute too vague to enforce. In 1817 the legislature responded with a straightforward declaration that the killing of a slave “shall partake of the same degree of guilt when accompanied with the like circumstances that homicide now does at common law.” In 1823 in State v. Reed the state supreme upheld the death sentence of a white man convicted for murdering a slave. That year in State v. Hale the court also upheld a conviction of a white man for savagely beating a slave he did not own. The court noted that such crimes “are usually committed by men of dissolute habits, hanging loose on society,” that if they could not be punished for harming slaves “the public peace will not only be rendered extremely insecure, but the value of slave property must be much impaired, for the offenders can seldom make any reparation in damages.” While the prosecution of whites for harming slaves was most important as a tool for protecting slave property, it was also important for the integrity of the legal system and the honor of the state. Thus in State v. Hoover (1839) the court upheld the capital sentence of John Hoover, convicted of barbarically murdering his own slave. The governor later approved the sentence and Hoover was hanged. In another case, State v. Will (1834), the North Carolina supreme court reversed the death sentence of the slave Will, who killed his white overseer after the overseer had shot Will in the back with a shotgun. In State v. Caesar (1849) the court similarly reversed the murder conviction of a slave named Caesar, who accidentally killed a drunken white man named Mizell, after Mizell and another white man accosted Caesar and two other slaves and began beating one of the other slaves. The court noted that Caesar acted as another other human would have in protecting his friend from an unwarranted beating by two drunken strangers.

Despite these decisions protecting slaves, the North Carolina supreme court was most famous for its decision in State v. Mann (1829), written by Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin, which exonerated John Mann, who shot a rented slave, Lydia, in the back when she tried to avoid being whipped by “running off.” Lydia was not attempted to escape from slavery, but only trying to avoid a beating from the short-tempered and vicious Mann. Lydia's owner made a criminal complaint against Mann. The court ruled that Mann, as the renter, had exactly the same authority as the master over Lydia. And that authority, Chief Justice Ruffin asserted, was absolute. Ruffin wrote that the obedience of the slave “is the consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body. There is nothing else which can operate to produce the effect. The power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect.” Ruffin confessed “the harshness of this proposition” but declared “in the actual condition of things it must be so. There is no remedy. This discipline belongs to the state of slavery.” Ruffin stated simply that it was “inherent in the relation of the master and slave.” Thus, in language that the rest of the slave South happily adopted, Ruffin declared that short of murdering a slave, the master had absolute dominion over the slave. “We cannot allow the right of the master to be brought into discussion in the Court of Justice. The slave, to remain a slave, must be made sensible, that there is no appeal from his master; that his power is in no instance usurped; but is conferred by the laws of man at least, if not by the law of God.”

On the eve of the Civil War, North Carolina's 331,059 slaves constituted one-third of the entire state's population. Only about 27 percent of the state's white families owned any slaves at all, and the vast majority (about 71 percent) owned fewer than ten slaves. Only about 2 percent owned more than fifty slaves. North Carolina had far fewer slave owners—and more significant numbers of non-slaveholders—than in the Deep South. The state also had relatively few large plantations. The experience of Hinton Rowan Helper illustrates the complexity of slavery and race in antebellum North Carolina. Helper was a native of the state and came from a family of small farmers. In his book The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (1857) Helper argued that slavery should be abolished because it harmed the majority of whites in the south, like those in his family. Helper was not, however, a friend of blacks, arguing for white supremacy and the forced expulsion of blacks. After publishing his book Helper was forced to leave the state, as was his brother, because by the late antebellum period people throughout North Carolina would not tolerate antislavery sentiments, even if the motivations were racist and white supremicist. The complexity and contradictions of the state's relationship with slavery—large numbers of non-slaveholding whites and few planters, but no tolerance for any antislavery ideas—led North Carolinians to resist the call for secession that emanated from its immediate neighbor to the south in 1860. When the first seven Confederate states met in Montgomery in early 1861, North Carolina sent no delegates. But when the war began in April, North Carolina left the Union, along with its neighbors to the north and west (Virginia and Tennessee). In the western part of the state, however, where there were very few slaves, a significant number of North Carolinians tried to remain neutral or even openly favored the Union.

The Civil War and Postwar Years

The Civil War altered the lives of all “tar heels,” black and white. Sandwiched between Virginia and South Carolina, the state was insulated from combat for much of the war. Thus North Carolina's slaves had fewer opportunities to escape to U.S. Army lines. Moreover, when the United States began to enlist black troops, they initially came from other states. On 8 February 1864 the United States enlisted former North Carolina slaves in the First, Second, and Third North Carolina Colored Regiments. They were later reorganized as the Thirty-fifth, Thirty-sixth, and Thirtyseventh U.S. Colored Infantry Regiments. On 17 March 1864, at New Bern and Morehead City, former slaves formed the First North Carolina Colored Heavy Artillery Regiment, later renamed the Fourteenth U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery Regiment. In March 1865, as General Sherman's army swept across the state the 135th Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry, was organized at Goldsboro. In the end about 5,000 African Americans from North Carolina would serve in the army. The Thirty-fifth Regiment saw action in the state, as well as in Virginia and Florida. The Thirty-sixth fought in Virginia and was part of Grant's army at Appomattox, where General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army, effectively ending the war. The regiment was then shipped to Texas where is served until October 1866. The Thirty-seventh fought in Virginia and North Carolina and was part of the army that accepted General Joseph E. Johnston's surrender, whose Confederate force was the last to cease fighting. The Thirtyseventh remained in service until February 1867, helping to secure freedom for former slaves throughout the defunct Confederacy.

After the war, blacks sought education, economic opportunity, and political equality. By 1900 there were over thirty-five colleges and universities in the state dedicated to black higher education. Of these, only ten survived to the end of the twentieth century, along with one (North Carolina Central University) that was founded later, in 1910. In 1865 Baptists in Raleigh founded Shaw University, the first institution of higher education for blacks in the South. In 1867 four more black colleges opened in the state: Saint Augustine, founded by Episcopalians in Raleigh; Johnson C. Smith, founded by Presbyterians in Charlotte; and Barber-Scotia in Concord. That year the Howard School (now Fayetteville State University) was also founded. In 1879 the AME Zion Church opened Livingstone College in Salisbury and two years later the United Methodist Church opened Bennett College in Greensboro. In 1891 Elizabeth City State University and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University were established. A year later Winston-Salem State University opened its doors. These private and public schools would form the backbone of the state's African American elite, educating teachers, members of the clergy, nurses, physicians, and other professionals.

During and after Reconstruction, African Americans were actively involved in North Carolina politics. Nearly two hundred blacks held some elected or appointed position in the state during Reconstruction. From 1867 to 1869 ten blacks served in the state senate and forty-eight in the house of representatives. But even after Reconstruction ended blacks held on to some political power in the state. The Second Congressional District—known as the “black second”—was over 60 percent African American. Eight of the ten counties in the district had a black majority, and the biggest county, Halifax, was close to 70 percent black in this period. The counties sent at least fifty African Americans to the state legislature between 1868 and 1900. The district sent four African Americans to Congress, including George H. White, who left Congress in 1901 and was the last southern black in Congress until the 1970s. Remarkably, African Americans from this district served six terms—twelve years—in Congress in the eighteen years between 1882 and 1900. James O'Hara, a lawyer in New Bern, attended the North Carolina Colored Convention in 1866 and then left the state to study law at Howard University. He returned in 1873 to serve as chairman of the Halifax County Board of Commissioners (1874–1878), then served in the U.S. Congress (1883–1887), after which he practiced law and edited a newspaper. Black political power in North Carolina ended with the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898. During the election of that year whites used violence and intimidation to suppress the black vote. George H. White won his last term in Congress, but other blacks legally elected were illegally thrown out of office. Others who might have been elected were not because of fraud and violence. Wilmington had a black majority in 1898, but by 1900 whites were in the majority as thousands of African Americans fled the city and the state. However, representing the future of blacks in the state, in 1900 the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Insurance Company was founded. This would become one of the most successful black-owned businesses in the nation; at least for some African Americans it provided economic opportunities just as they were being shut out of political roles.

See also American Revolution; Black Family; Black Loyalists; Black Migration; Civil Rights; Civil War; Crime and Punishment; David Walker's Appeal; Discrimination; Economic Life; Education; Free African Americans to 1828; Free African Americans before the Civil War (South); Laws and Legislation; Maroons; Moravians and African Americans; Occupations; Political Participation; Reconstruction; Resistance; Riots and Rebellions; Slave Trade; Slavery: Mid-Atlantic; Slavery: Upper South; South Carolina; Violence against African Americans; Virginia; Voting Rights; Walker, David; and Work.

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