Looking back (a first draft).
From June 4 until July 11, 1835 a meeting was held in Raleigh to address issues of balance between the eastern and the western sections of the state of North Carolina. A question had been placed on the general election ballot of 1833 asking whether North Carolinians wanted such a conclave to be held and yes was the overwhelming response (33000 to 1,000). The delegates to this gathering, a Constitutional Convention, had been elected by those eligible to vote in the state. The eligible at that time were “freemen of the age of twenty-one Years, who have been inhabitants of any one county within this State twelve months immediately preceding the day of any election, and shall have paid public taxes.” Place of voting was limited by that measure. African American and Lumbee men were among those eligible to vote. Cherokee people and other American Indians had been generally denied the right to vote though the 1776 Constitution did not implicitly state that prohibition.
By the 1830s the dominance of The East in state politics had become starkly unfair. As settlement and thus population numbers moved westward through the early decades of the 19th century more counties were formed in The West. The designations West and East had great meaning at that time among North Carolinians. There were multiple reasons that this was the case. The Easterners had been residents for much longer and their ancestors tended to have arrived directly by sea. They were engaged in specific kinds of agriculture, generally of the plantation and export variety — they were far more often slave-owners and identified with that class, in that region most often of English origin. Of course, the population count of the enslaved was higher in The East as well. The Lumbee and the Turscarora people were Easterners as well. New Bern and Edenton were considered urban centers. Wilmington was the state’s largest city and had what passed for the most cosmopolitan air about it in those days.
Westerners were later to arrive and in the 1830s many folk were still in the process of journeying down the Great Wagon Road from The North and European starting out points like Ireland, Scotland, and the Germanic states. These people tended to be small farmers, growing for some sale but much more for subsistence. These folks, for economic reasons and for some, philosophical ones, were not nearly as often slave-owners. For those who had been in the middle region of the state, now the Piedmont, for a generation or two, many had themselves come to the Americas as indentured servants. For some others, religion frowned on slavery (Quakers and some other Protestants congregations). Imagine if you will that Salisbury was The Wild, Wild, West in this demographic set-up of North Carolina. Farther west than that and you were heading into very underdeveloped lands.
No doubt the barbecue schism was already afoot as well but information on that from the time is sparse and needs further gathering.
The growing western population had been steadily increasing the volume of their protest of the arrangements for representation in government that the 1776 State Constitution had established, i.e., a system that heavily favored The East. Take a look at a map of North Carolina from 1830:
North Carolina in the 1800s - The Counties As Of 1830. If you consider it carefully and think of Wake County as being the beginning of The West you can see that The East had significantly more counties and since representation was based on such things, more power in the legislature. The growing West could be, and typically was, outvoted by The East. This was important because The West was expanding and much in need of infrastructure like roads and bridges — the kinds of things governments provide for citizens. The East had already worked out such needs and wanted little to no government and especially little to no taxes (especially monies that would go to improve The West, which they would likely never visit and was filled with newcomer barbarians — see David Hackett Fischer’s ‘Albion’s Seed’ on that). The East seemed to hold all the cards though since they had the dominant number of votes and were unlikely to vote to hold a vote on changing that set-up (This reminds one of our current Gerrymandered undemocratic state in some ways). A brief and clever alliance transpired however that turned the tide on the seemingly secure Easterners.
It was the Far-Easterners in the state that made common cause with the Westerners. You see those most coastal North Carolinians did need government. They lived along the Atlantic and the Outer Banks and needed ferries, lighthouses, and dredging operations — similar allocations only made possible by a government active in the lives of its citizens. Forming an alliance, loose and hardly spoken in public, The Westerners and the far-Easterners managed to change the representative structure of the state to one that made public works much more possible.
There were unfortunate aspects to the new constitution though: The free and previously voting African Americans were stripped of the vote as were The Lumbee and all other American Indian people. Other shifts were made in how the state was run. Previously some towns had sent representatives to the legislature — that was ended. The legislature was set to meet every other year, the governor was to be elected by popular vote every two years, the poll tax (pay to vote) was greatly reduced as were property requirements to vote, and in a nod to the William Gaston, an prominent lawmaker and judge at the time who was Catholic, wording in the Constitution was changed from requiring that election was only eligible for Protestants to “Christians,” thus making Gaston’s seating in office finally legal (previously officials has simply looked past this violation). It was not until the 1970s that the religious limitation was removed from the state constitution.
I’ve lived in Western North Carolina a good part of my life though I have never felt like a Westerner and still do not. I am a Chathamite and Piedmontese. While my barbecue preference is probably more broad and forgiving for some it is not a war in which I tend to engage…perhaps that is due to the odd nature of Chatham ‘Cue, but that’s another essay altogether. I have long noted a certain division between The East and The West in North Carolina that hovers over the state even to this day. Of course accents stand out as different quite clearly to all ears and food is different east to west just naturally due to climate and soil variations. Until 1977, high school sports were estranged from one another in an east/west division for example, something that I have always seen as worth considering as significant. When I’m in The East or in The West as opposed to my Piedmont homeland the sense of place is palpable to me. I suspect that other North Carolinians and perhaps even “foreigners” can feel it too. We’re a looooong state after all. We are 560 miles east to west which makes us the longest state east of the Mississippi River! Of course we’re wide too (over 150 miles north/south at least).
Back in 1835 the people — at least those that were then enfranchised, which made up a poor and fake quorum, leaving out as it did all women, the ‘unpropertied’, most American Indians, and the enslaved — acknowledged the East/West discord. Has modern transportation and communication managed to unite us today or are we still divided by the Cardinal Points of the compass even now? Thoughts?
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8.2 | Drama, Romance, War