Struggling to Find Proprietary North Carolina

Abstract

Struggling to Find Proprietary North Carolina Bradford J. Wood (bio) Noeleen McIlvenna . A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. x + 212 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $32.50. Scholars who seek to understand the history of the southern British mainland colonies in North America need to know much more about early North Carolina. Perhaps none of the thirteen American colonies that declared independence in 1776 has received less attention. This would be more understandable if North Carolina were a small colony that varied little from its neighbors, such as New Hampshire or Delaware; but before 1776 it had both a large population and a complex and distinctive history. Almost all of the attention that scholars have given to colonial North Carolina has focused on the decades after 1720, even though settlement had begun along Albemarle Sound by 1660. Consequently we know almost nothing about one of the largest British colonies for over half a century. All of this should make Noeleen McIlvenna's A Very Mutinous People a welcome addition to the historiography of the southern colonies because it clearly fills an important and empty niche. At the same time, it is only a modest beginning to the broader and greater challenge of making North Carolina relevant and explicable to historians of colonial America. Much of McIlvenna's "founding narrative" for North Carolina follows the lead of past generations of historians of North Carolina (p. 13). They have characterized the colony in the seventeenth century and for some time after as a place with an unusual degree of isolation, an antiauthoritarian political culture, tense relations between settlers and proprietors, significant levels of religious dissent, a relatively equal distribution of wealth, an underdeveloped and often subsistence-oriented economy, and relatively harmonious relations between colonists and Native Americans. Along these lines, she describes the movement of often desperate individuals with limited economic means who felt compelled to move south of Virginia, past the forbidding Dismal Swamp, into the relatively inaccessible countryside along Albemarle Sound. The settlement grew slowly but significantly for several generations after 1660 without drawing much attention from the Carolina proprietors or other outsiders and, [End Page 601] consequently, with a degree of autonomy that was unusual even for British America during this period. Predictably, this made the Albemarle settlement a comfortable haven for those seeking religious toleration; and Quakers proved especially important to the new colony, providing it with its first clergy and, for a time, with one of its most powerful political factions. While the Albemarle offered decent agricultural opportunities for the newcomers, its isolation, especially from the Atlantic, made the exportation of tobacco or other profitable staples difficult and unrewarding, so the elite amassed little wealth and probably lived very much like most other settlers in the region. The seemingly ungovernable political climate in North Carolina was perhaps best epitomized by the events surrounding Culpepper's Rebellion. While few people were harmed by the violence in Culpepper's Rebellion, the event revealed widespread resistance to metropolitan customs laws among settlers who paid little heed to the strictures of either the Crown or the Carolina proprietors. Within this economic context, few settlers could purchase slaves, the population remained thin, and limited land use requirements proved initially unthreatening to nearby Native American populations. As McIlvenna notes "Albemarle constituted a liminal space—a borderland where identities were porous" (p. 5). After the start of the eighteenth century, matters started to change in several key ways. Economic and political developments began to connect North Carolina to the rest of the British Empire; and a few merchants and planters, such as Thomas Pollock and Edward Moseley, began to achieve a status and style of life comparable to elites in the neighboring colonies. Between 1708 and 1713, North Carolina reached a state of crisis, as Quaker political power became a source of discontent among Anglican political leaders, resistance to established authority intensified, and increasingly harried Native Americans attempted to eradicate whole areas of settlement in what became known as the Tuscarora War. If McIlvenna had merely provided a more updated and detailed account of these developments, A Very Mutinous People...