By the 1770s, North Carolina was home to roughly 300,000 people—including some 80,000 enslaved persons—drawn from English, Highland Scots, Scots-Irish, German, and African backgrounds. This land had been home to Native Americans for thousands of years. Geography shaped daily life profoundly: a forbidding coastline of shifting shoals and swamps left few deepwater harbors, slowing trade and communication. Much of the interior, long home to Native peoples, had been settled by small subsistence farmers in the backcountry. These geographic realities bred self-reliance and a longstanding wariness of authority. Originally part of a larger colony, North Carolina separated from South Carolina in 1712 and became a royal colony in 1729. Colonists challenged authority repeatedly, most notably in the Culpeper Rebellion of 1677–78, and that tradition of resistance resurfaced powerfully in the Revolutionary period. The colony's path to independence was marked by several decisive actions: Stamp Act protests by the Sons of Liberty in Wilmington and other areas in 1765; a 1774 non-importation resolution; the Edenton Tea Party of October 1774, when 51 women signed a resolve supporting the boycott of British goods, considered the first organized political action by women in the colonies; and the Halifax Resolves of April 12, 1776, widely regarded as the first official colonial authorization for independence.
Interviewees
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Sally Bloom
- Curator of Distance Education, North Carolina Museum of History
