Ante-Bellum North Carolina: A Social History: Electronic Edition.

           The type of writing which most vitally touched the daily lives of the people was the casual literature which issued from the local presses--the broadside, almanacs, and pamphlets. The broadside, the earliest form of news printing, was a single sheet of paper printed on only one side. Local poets, ballad writers, and composers of "spiritual hymns," often printed their compositions in this manner, peddling them on the village streets and in the country at a penny or so a copy. Political parties, religious societies, reform organizations, and private individuals also used the broadside, and it was from these sheets, distributed without cost, that many of those who could read obtained their knowledge and passed it on to others less fortunate.

           Gales' North-Carolina Almanack for 1818 was a diminutive thirty-six-page pamphlet for which John Beasley, astronomer of Wake County, had calculated the weather, the cycles of the moon, and the eclipses. The almanac sold for 10 cents a copy, 75 cents a dozen copies, or $40 a thousand. Postmasters, storekeepers, and peddlers distributed them throughout the country. The edition for 1818 contained brief articles on fall ploughing, on the cultivation of red clover, on the use of plaster of Paris, on cheap manure, and on religion. It gave "valuable hints to a young tradesman," a "family lecture," "miscellaneous receipts," "medical receipts," anecdotes, and instructions on "how to break ill news." It also gave a list of the members of the General Assembly, the names of the judges, and the time of the sitting of the Federal, Supreme, Superior, and County courts. Interspersed throughout were brief historical notes listed by years from 1798 to 1812.

           The cheapest method of getting into permanent form a political address, an essay, a biography, a sermon, or a historical narrative was to engage the local printer to publish it as a pamphlet.

           A great many addresses which might have been printed to the benefit of succeeding generations were lost as soon as uttered. It has often been said that the oration was the highest type of literary effort developed in the ante-bellum South. In 1884 Professor George Tayloe Winston, lamenting North Carolina's lack of taste for literature, declared that, while the people of the State would not read a literary magazine or encourage the publication of a scholarly book, they would "travel many miles to be present at court and listen to the oratory of the lawyer and the wisdom of the judge"; they would "at any time leave their usual business and devote one or two days to hearing a joint discussion between two political orators"; and they would listen all day to pulpit oratory. "Excepting a few large cities, it is doubtful whether finer specimens of genuine, moving eloquence in sermons and in prayers have been uttered anywhere in America, than

           The first important religious work published in the nineteenth century was A Concise History of the Kehukee Baptist Association written by the Reverend Lemuel Burkitt and the Reverend Jesse Read and published in 1803 by Abraham Hodge of Halifax. In 1834 Joseph Biggs reprinted the history and brought it down to date. In 1805 William Glendenning of Raleigh, who had already published his Autobiography in Philadelphia in 1795, published in Raleigh an edition of Sermons by the Reverend Devereux Jarratt of Virginia, and The Dying Thoughts of the Reverend Richard Baxter. For the next twenty years, the State was flooded with religious sermons and argumentative religious essays, for this

           Among the volumes of sermons and theology published may be listed Sermons, Chiefly of a Practical Nature which Joseph Gales published in 1821 in memory of his son-in-law, the Reverend Anthony Forster; the Work of Bishop Ravenscroft which the Episcopal Bible, Common Prayer Book, Tract, and Missionary Society of North Carolina published in 1830; Twelve College Sermons by the Reverend Charles F. Deems, published in 1846, and his Home-Altar in 1850; and the works of that prolific writer, R. B. C. Howell, especially his Terms of Christian Communion, which ran through several editions in this country and in England, and his The Deaconship, which had at least six editions.

           The Concise History of The Kehukee Association was the only sizable work on religious history to appear until the forties. In 1843 Robert B. Drane wrote a brief account of the Episcopal Church in Wilmington, Historical Notices of St. James' Parish, Wilmington; in 1844 William Henry Foote published his valuable history of the Presbyterian Church, Sketches of North Carolina; in 1849 John Paris wrote the first history of Methodism, History of the Methodist Protestant Church; in 1852 the Reverend N. Summerbell published in Raleigh A History of the Christian Church; in 1857 Bishop Reichel published The Moravians in North Carolina and in 1859 George W. Purefoy his History of the Sandy Creek Association. Notable pamphlets are S. C. Alexander's An Historical Address Delivered at the Dedication of Back Creek Church of 1857; Neill McKay's A Centenary Sermon and Banks' Centennial Sermon, both delivered before the Presbytery of Fayetteville at Bluff Church in 1858. One of the most valuable of these works on religious history was Foote's Sketches of North Carolina, a lengthy volume containing not only the history of the Presbyterian Church in North Carolina but copies of church documents and considerable reference to the historical development of the State itself. When the Reverend Eli W. Caruthers wrote his Sketch of the Life and Character of the Rev. David Caldwell in

           A large part of the literary effort of the ante-bellum period was directed toward the production of historical narratives and the collection of historical documents. Hugh Williamson, a native of Pennsylvania who lived in Edenton from the time of the American Revolution to 1793, a physician and man of letters, was the first to produce a history of the State. His two-volume work published in 1812 deals with the period from 1584 to 1786, but it was more an exposition of his theory of the effect of climate upon the course of history than it was an accurate story of the development of North Carolina. In 1787 he had contributed a series of articles to the American Museum on the economic defects in the United States under the title of "Letters of Sylvius" and in 1811 had published his Observations on the Climate in Different Parts of America.

           The next history of North Carolina, another two-volume work, was published in New Orleans in 1829 from the pen of Francois Xavier Martin. The author, a French refugee, had come to North Carolina and settled at New Bern where he opened a printery and continued to live until he moved to Louisiana in 1809. He published, beginning in 1791, a series of legal works, among them his Decisions of the Superior Courts of North Carolina in 1797 and his Revisal of the Laws of North Carolina in 1804, and reprinted volumes of novels, such as Lord Rivers and Stephanie de Bourbon. He wrote a History of North Carolina, an inaccurate compilation rather than a well-ordered narrative, after his removal to Louisiana.

           Before the appearance of Martin's history, the State had been aroused to an interest in its past by Wirt's statement in his Life of Patrick Henry that this Virginian "gave the first impulse to the ball of Revolution." There had been a tradition in North Carolina that Cornelius Harnett's committees of correspondence

           Late in the same year, December 18, 1838, the National Intelligencer published an account of other resolutions, less radical than those of May 20, which were passed at Charlotte on May 31, 1775, a copy of which Peter Force had found in the Massachusetts Spy. This gave a new angle to the controversy. In June, 1839, the Southern Literary Messenger of Richmond declared editorially

           This controversy greatly stimulated interest in the collection and preservation of historical documents and the production of state histories and biographies. Archibald D. Murphey, who brilliantly but ineffectually had striven to give the State a system of internal improvements and of public education, also conceived the idea of writing a political, economic, and social history of North Carolina. In 1826 the General Assembly granted him authority to raise a sum by lottery to publish the history which he had already outlined in some detail. The lottery failed, and Murphey's own slender income, together with his declining health, made the writing impossible except for an introduction and some notes on the Indian tribes of the State; but he did begin the collection of documentary material and he aroused interest in the preservation of historical data. Largely through Murphey's influence, the Legislature of 1826 made its first request to obtain permission from the Board of Trade and Plantations in London for copies of materials relating to colonial North Carolina.

           In 1833 "Y. S. R.," through the columns of the Harbinger, called for a meeting in Raleigh during the sitting of the Legislature to organize a state historical association to preserve historical material and publish it in pamphlet form. Other newspapers joined in the call but the meeting failed for want of a leader. Nevertheless, the Harbinger continued to urge the preservation of historical documents as long as it continued publication. Eleven years later, President Swain took up the idea and organized the North Carolina Historical Society at the University. Swain at once began the collection of documents and soon gathered a valuable amount of material, some of which was unfortunately lost after his death.

           Largely as a result of the interest aroused when the State published in 1843 the "Index to Colonial Documents Relative to North Carolina," obtained as a result of the request of 1826 and printed through the influence of John H. Wheeler, the Legislature of 1848 authorized the governor to spend $1,000 for copying North Carolina records in England. The governor asked President Swain

           With the appearance in Sparks's Library of American Biography of a brief sketch of General William R. Davie, written by Professor F. M. Hubbard of the University, readers abroad began to wonder why North Carolina had not made more of her public men. "Certainly there are many more whom North Carolina may boast of, and memoirs of whom would make her own name more illustrious," was an opinion expressed in the Southern Literary Messenger of August, 1848. "We may mention Richard Caswell, of whom the elder Adams said that in the darkest hours of the Revolution, the whig leaders in Congress looked always with hope and reliance to Caswell,--Governor Thomas Burke, whose history has some touches of romance, Governor Samuel Johnston, a strong-minded, inflexible, honest man,--James Iredell, a justice of the United States Supreme Court, than whom this country has seen few men more learned in the law, of more commanding eloquence, or more gentleman-like accomplishments, and Cornelius Harnett, 'the Samuel Adams of the South.' These are a few only of the noble spirits who have adorned her annals;--and when we speak of later times, what State might not be proud to remember among her sons, Ravenscroft and Gaston?"

           In 1851 Calvin H. Wiley published his North-Carolina Reader as the first of a series of textbooks prepared for use in the public schools. It was "a work designed to familiarize the minds of the young with the character, history, and resources of their own well-favored father-land." It contained a brief history of the discovery, settlement, and progress of the State; political and oratorical exercises, some of which were written by North Carolinians; and chronological and historical tables. When Wiley became superintendent of public schools in 1853, he turned over the textbook work to Professor F. M. Hubbard of the University of North Carolina who edited two volumes in the series.

           Other textbooks had been prepared by North Carolina teachers before this. It is likely that successful teachers in the private schools occasionally published textbooks at a local printery for the use of their pupils, most of which, having but a local patronage, have been lost. Brantley York, for instance, published his English Grammar at the office of the Salisbury Watchman in 1855 and his Common School Grammar at the office of the Spirit of the Age in 1860. Textbooks written by college professors usually had a wider circulation. Notable among the list are Joseph Caldwell's Compendious System of Elementary Geometry, 1822, James Phillips's Elements of the Conic Section, 1828, Denison Olmsted's An Introduction to Natural Philosophy, 1835, Elisha Mitchell's Elements of Geology, 1842, and Charles Phillips's A Manual of Plane and Spherical Trigonometry, 1857.

           In 1854 Mary Bayard Clarke, a native of Raleigh, edited a two volume anthology of North Carolina poetry which she called Wood-Notes. The work contained 182 poems by 60 authors. Among the best known of these poems was Mrs. Clarke's own "Triumph of Spring" which she had first published in the Southern Literary Messenger under the name of Tenella; H. S. Ellenwood's "Marriage of the Sun and Moon," first published in the Raleigh Register and widely copied in other newspapers of the country; William Gaston's "The Old North State"; Philo Henderson's "The Flower of Catawba"; Abraham Forrest Morehead's "The Hills of Dan"; and "Swannanoa" by an unknown poet.

           "One of the strings which a certain class of writers and speakers

           Back of this aggressive spirit which could point with pride to "the first state university in the Union"; "the best public school system in the South"; "the most elegant state capitol in the country"; more than a million dollars invested in manufacturing; a press which had almost doubled its numbers in the fifties; "a climate more salubrious than that of any other state in the Union"; "a soil as plentiful and varied in its agricultural and mineral stores as any in the world"; "a steady, sober, industrious, population," there was a tense localism which forty years of humiliation had produced.

           North Carolina was a village state and, consequently, even to the close of the period, a provincial one. The State had always had a small educated class but the chasm between it and the yeomanry had always been deep. The people were jealous of their personal rights. Long after the Jeffersonian spirit had been discarded by the political leaders of the country, the yeoman on his little farm still clung to his "personal liberties." Here, a farmer exhausted his thunder against a general Thanksgiving Day because it was recommended by the Legislature and the Executive of the State. There, another was out with all his side arms against a general superintendent for the public school system. They saw in these measures a fatal blow to the personal liberties of the people.

           These were the prejudices which swayed the vote for legislators and retarded social reform. It took sixty years of agitation to obtain a law requiring the licensing of medical practitioners but not even seventy years of agitation obtained a penitentiary for the State's criminal class. More than sixty years after the constitutional

           After three decades of abasement, the State was again taking its place among the leaders of the nation. Its educated men and business leaders had goaded a poverty-ridden people to tax themselves for public improvements, public education, and social reform. The glimmer of an enlightened self-interest was broadening up toward morning. But the dawn brought war.