donbosco
Distinguished Member
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- 449
“Thank goodness for South Carolina,” was a phrase once both important and frequently heard. Once upon a time our ‘sister’ state beneath was regularly depicted as the wayward one. During my kid days in the 1960s young couples ‘running off to South Carolina’ to get married was a frequent topic of conversation overheard from my eavesdropping perch in the backseat of my parents’ Mercury — Little ‘Pitchers’ Do Have Big Ears after all. In a lot of ways South Carolina seemed to be the Florida of my childhood with a bold but dunderheaded ‘South Carolina Man’ blazing the stupid trail for today’s ‘Florida Man.’
Once in the 1980s while skiing at the Western North Carolina resort of Hawksnest (try that in Sub Carolina!) as I rode up the chairlift the stranger beside me and I started talking. I mentioned having gone to Carolina. He said he was in school there at the time. I asked where he lived and he gave the name of an apartment complex that was unfamiliar to me (I was only a year gone from Chapel Hill so that seemed strange). I said that I had most recently lived on Old Airport Road. He looked confused. The revelation hit us nigh simultaneously - he mistakenly believed his school (the University of South Carolina) to BE Carolina. We spoke no more. The possibility that the lift might arrive at the summit carrying a single passenger was real such was the enmity immediately sparked.
The names Ribock, Riker, and Roche still rile. Thuggishness defined.
To be side-by-side, or rather over/under, NC and SC have always struck me as very, very different places. Charleston is a nice town and the state has some solid beaches to be sure, but historically I can’t really get much past the reluctance by Founders from that colony to suffer any alterations of the institution of slavery even at the expense of sabotaging Independence or their so-called Fire-Eater attitude during the antebellum period which contributed so significantly to the tragedy of the Civil War. The figure of South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks beating Massachusetts Representative Charles Summer over a point of ‘honor’ thinly veiled in a defense of enslaving other human beings is also deeply lodged in my memory banks vis a vis that state.
And there’s the travesty of their so-called barbecue. No more need be said on that.
North Carolina is hardly without faults mind you - for Preston Brooks and Strom Thurmond we offer up the global embarrassment of Jesse Helms after all. And most recently we seem to have done our best to present for election candidates that eclipse their worst (see Madison Cawthorn and Mark Robinson for starters). Both states have been the home to far and away too, too many KKK rallies and Klavens or whatever klownish titles their Grand Poobahs grant them. North Carolina had a much bumpier row to hoe in the early years as well. While South Carolina was colonized by already set-up plantation owners from Barbados, for good or ill (a dichotomy worth pondering) NC was originally the home to an invading rabble of colonists — uncouth and barbaric folk in many ways from the borderland areas of the United Kingdom — people frankly pretty difficult to get along with. Add in stubborn Quakers and Anabaptists and the political lay of the land in the early 1700s was rough and rocky. If you’re looking for some reading evidence on that assertion look no further than historian Noeleen McIlvenna’s ‘A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713.’ Amazon.com
‘A Very Mutinous People’ might seem to contrast with another more well-known state sobriquet - ‘To Be Rather Than To Seem.’ Still, when pitched in with the long-held prideful observation on our state’s humbleness (how’s that for irony?) that North Carolina is “A Vale of Humility Between Two Mountains of Conceit,” - Fire-Eating South Carolina and Virginia (“The Mother of Presidents”) being said twin pinnacles literally boxing in Tar Heels with historic levels of hubris, regional rivalries come clearer in all their glory. In the end, despite the Helmses, the early fitfulness in governing, and our General Assembly’s most recent abandonment of simple thoughtfulness and recognition of the value of education, we’ve had some good moments when compared to regional neighbors. Nevertheless, I don’t say “Thank goodness for South Carolina” any longer. We have sadly grown closer recently to our so-called sister comportment-wise and the separation so fortunate in 1712 is in dire need of rededication.
But the barbecue will always be the undeniable proof in the wisdom of our division into North and Sub Carolina.
#OTD 1712 Edward Hyde, 1st governor of separated North Carolina colony died of Yellow Fever at home on Albemarle Sound. He never truly secured the office as N.C. was beset by war and ńdisease in his time. Even his appointment was disputed. Hyde was himself a very troubled man who lived a life of much misfortune. Perhaps his greatest potential good fortune was that as Governor he was the first to preside over the separate northern part of the original Carolina colony. Edward Hyde and Turmoil in Early Carolina
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