Abstract
In November 1789, delegates at a state convention in Fayetteville, North Carolina voted to adopt the United States Constitution, ratification having failed the year before. North Carolina was the second to last state to vote for the Constitution due to a number of concerns and reservations its political leaders raised about the terms of the new union. The state’s history during the 1780s shows a pattern of disinclination on the part of Carolinians to wed their interests with the larger enterprise of American unity. Carolinians exhibited a strong desire to protect their own interests over national political goals. Their focus included possession of valuable western territory and the burden of financial debts; jealous concerns over the potential loss of state sovereignty; the traumatic wartime experiences of the state’s citizens; and a localism that emphasized the importance of their own communities. All of these issues came directly from the trying experience of the American War for Independence between 1775 and 1783, the rebellion of the American settlers against the British authorities. In the context of this conflict the Continental Congress declared the colonies free and independent states in July 1776. One year later these 13 states became the United States of America, a loose union under the Articles of Confederation (commonly referred to as the ‘Confederation government’). The war ended in 1783 with a peace treaty that confirmed the new nation’s separation from the British Empire.1
Keywords
- United States Constitution
- State Sovereignty
- United States Government
- Federal Constitution
- Financial Debt
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Notes
Norman K. Risjord, Chesapeake Politics, 1781–1800 (New York, 1978), 5. Risjord argues that geography was also a factor in North Carolina’s continued provincialism during and after the war. ‘It is clear that North Carolina was the most isolated of the thirteen states’, for the most part due to the Outer Banks and high sand bars at harbour entrances, both of which inhibited trade and commerce.
See Blackwell P. Robinson, William R. Davie (Chapel Hill, NC, 1957), 213–215;
and Gordon DenBoer et al. (eds), The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, 1788–1790, 4 vols (Madison, 1989), vol. 4, 303–309.
See John R. Maass, ‘“A Complicated Scene of Difficulties”: North Carolina and the Revolutionary Settlement, 1776–1789’, dissertation thesis (The Ohio State University, 2007);
Samuel A. Ashe, History of North Carolina, 2 vols (Raleigh, NC, 1925), vol. 2, 100;
Hugh Talmage Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome, North Carolina: History of a Southern State (Chapel Hill, NC, 1954), 285;
John C. Cavanagh, Decision at Fayetteville: The North Carolina Ratification Convention and General Assembly of 1789 (Raleigh, NC, 1989), 13, 20 and 22; DenBoer, Documentary History, vol. 4, 306 and 313–312;
Alan D. Watson, ‘States’ Rights and Agrarianism Ascendant’, in The Constitution and the States: The Role of the Original Thirteen in the Framing and Adoption of the Federal Constitution, eds. Patrick T. Conley and John P. Kaminski (Madison, 1988), 255–256; and ‘James Madison to Anthony Wayne’, 31 July 1789, Bickford, First Federal Congress, vol. 16, 1185–1186. Federalist leader Hugh Williamson feared that if the Constitution were not adopted in 1789, several counties in the Albemarle Sound region would seek to be admitted to the union ‘as a separate state under some other Name’. ‘Hugh Williamson to Nicholas Gilman’, undated, ibid., vol. 15, 648.
See Jackson T. Main, The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781–1788 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1961);
Forrest McDonald, ‘The Anti-Federalists, 1781–1789’, in The Reinterpretation of the American Revolution, 1763–1789, ed. Jack P. Greene (New York, 1968), 365–378;
Jackson T. Main, Political Parties before the Constitution (Chapel Hill, NC, 1973);
Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999);
and Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (eds), The Bill of Rights: Government Proscribed (Charlottesville, VA, 1997).
E. Wayne Carp, To Starve the Army at Pleasure: Continental Army Administration and American Popular Culture, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1984);
James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward Lender, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763–1789 (2nd edn, Wheeling, IL, 2006), 148–154, 160;
and Jack Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics (New York, 1979), 288–295.
Merrill Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation, 1781–1789 (New York, 1950), 375–398.
Richard B. Morris, Forging the Union, 1781–1789 (New York, 1978), 58–63, 87–91 and 196–197; Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics, 145–147; and Jensen, The New Nation, 25 and 43–46, 399–421. Jensen argues that ‘the Articles of Confederation … left ultimate power in the hands of the states’, as does Gordon Wood, who concludes that ‘the Confederation was intended to be, and remained, a Confederation of sovereign states’.
Gordon S. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1969), 357.
Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics, 164–176; Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 355–357; and John Sayle Watterson, Thomas Burke: Restless Revolutionary (Washington, DC, 1980), 61–64.
Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, KS, 1985), 275.
See John R. Maass, ‘“All This Poor Province Could Do”: North Carolina and the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762’, The North Carolina Historical Review 79/1 (2002): 50–89;
and William S. Powell, North Carolina through Four Centuries (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989), 226.
Marvin L. M. Kay, ‘The North Carolina Regulation, 1766–1776: A Class Conflict’, in The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (DeKalb, IL, 1976), 71–123.
See Robert L. Gaynard, The Emergence of North Carolina’s Revolutionary State Government (Raleigh, NC, 1978), 82–83, 88.
McDonald, ‘The Anti-Federalists, 1781–1789’, 365–378; Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick, ‘The Founding Fathers: Young Men of the Revolution’, The Political Science Quarterly 76 (1961): 181– and 200–216;
and Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York, 1986), 4, 22–23 and 26–27.
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Maass, J.R. (2016). North Carolina and the New Nation: Reconstruction and Reconciliation Efforts in the 1780s. In: Forrest, A., Hagemann, K., Rowe, M. (eds) War, Demobilization and Memory. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-40649-1_7
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