New Bern, North Carolina

“ The great success of this institution has led the citizens of other towns in the State to establish schools of like character. There are now to be found flourishing graded schools at Salisbury, Fayetteville, Goldsboro, Wilson, Greensboro, Charlotte, Wilmington, New Bern, Rocky Mount and Franklinton. Several towns also contain excellent schools of this description for the colored people, and their effectiveness is rapidly becoming apparent. ”

“ How is the influence of lawyers always felt in a community?
CHAPTER XLVIII. ORIGIN OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. A. D. 1837 TO 1842. It will be remembered that in 1767 the first school was incorporated by the Legislature of North Carolina, by the act in favor of the academy at New Bern. In this, and subsequent legislation for schools at Edenton and elsewhere, it had provided that the teachers should all be communicants of the Church of England. This stipulation was, of course, part of the English Church and State system of government. ”

“ King George selected Major Arthur Dobbs, as Governor of North Carolina; and at New Bern, on November 1, 1754, he entered upon the discharge of his duties. He was a man of high temper, and very obstinate in support of his views, but devoted to whatever he believed his duty demanded. His greatest fault was filling public offices with members of his own family and a disposition to make jobs for his own benefit.
2. Governor Dobbs soon visited the new county of Rowan, which was established in 1753, and included in its area most of the western portion of North Carolina and a part of Tennessee. ”

“ The design of a town—the arrangement of streets and lots—expresses the ideas of the people about the right framework in which a good life can be lived.
For our study of colonial towns we are fortunate in having beautiful maps of ten North Carolina towns, all made by the surveyor Claude Joseph Sauthier. The Hillsboro map, figure 3, is one of these drawings. Sauthier traveled over North Carolina between 1768 and 1770, surveyed and made maps of Bath, Beaufort, Brunswick, Edenton, Cross Creek (now Fayetteville) , Halifax, Hillsboro, New Bern, Salisbury, and Wilmington. ”

“ A female seminary of real excellence and great popularity had been founded in 1804, and young ladies from all the Southern States were receiving a good education in this retired and healthful region.
4. Raleigh then contained about eight hundred people: Fayetteville twice as many. Wilmington and New Bern were the largest and most important towns in the State, but were still limited in population and trade. Edenton and Halifax had each lost importance, and many villages were surpassing them both in number of inhabitants and in extent of trade. ”

“ No braver or wiser man has ever borne a part in the conduct of affairs in North Carolina.
11. Apprehensive for his own safety and that of his family, Governor Martin at once made preparations for leaving New Bern. He sent his family to New York by sea, but went himself by land to Fort Johnston, at the mouth of the Cape Fear. * But even Fort Johnston proved unsafe as a place of refuge, and in July the Governor left it and went on board the war sloop Cruiser, then lying in the river before the fort. On the same day Colonel Ashe, with five hundred men, burned the fort to the ground. ”

“ There are several turpentine distilleries, founderies and machine shops, grist and saw mills, manufactories of carriages, agricultural implements, &c. The city has an academy, several good private schools, a national bank, a daily and three weekly newspapers, a monthly magazine, and Baptist, Christian, Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic churches. It was at one time the capital of the province of North Carolina.—During the civil war New Berne, which was defended by intrenchments and breastworks, was captured by Gen. ”

“ The “county road” displays many elegant mansions, the dwellings of some of the more wealthy inhabitants. New Bedford is considered a very wealthy place, and the inhabitants active and enterprising. A large proportion of them are Quakers.’
Newbern, in Craven county, North Carolina, was once the capital, and is still the largest town of the state. It is situated on the Neuse, thirty miles above its entrance into Pamlico sound. The river is navigable to this place, and its commerce is considerable. Population, three thousand six hundred and ninety. ”

“ In the town of New Berne, within the rude triangle formed by the rivers Neuse and Trent on two sides, and our line of fortifications on the other, are 6,560 colored people. The town contained in 1860, 5,482 inhabitants, white and colored. Nearly the whole of the white population abandoned the place before our army entered it. The most valuable, active, and useful of the slaves were compelled to accompany their masters.
But the free blacks generally remained, not having the fear of "the Yankees" before their eyes. They are all self-supporting. ”

“ In soil, in climate, in minerals, in water-power for manufactural purposes, and in area of territory, North Carolina has the advantage of New York, and, with the exception of slavery, no plausible reason can possibly be assigned why land should not be at least as valuable in the valley of the Yadkin as it is along the banks of the Genesee. ”

“ Most of these people are refugees from slavery, not more than one sixth of them having been residents of New Berne before the war. They have followed our various military expeditions on their return to New Berne from the interior, or have stolen in singly, or in squads, from time to time. Every week makes some small addition to the number. ”

“ In 1729, the Lords Proprietors (except Lord Granville) surrendered the government of the province, with all the franchises under the charter of Charles II, and their property in the soil, to the crown for a valuable consideration. The population at that time did not exceed ten thousand inhabitants. George Burrington. Governor of the province under the Lords Proprietors, was re-appointed to the same office by the King. In February, 1731, he thus officially writes to the Duke of New Castle. "The inhabitants of North Carolina are not industrious, but subtle and crafty to admiration ”

“ During the years that followed upon the close of the Revolution the people of North Carolina were busied with the restoration of their ravaged fields and the development of the new system of self-rule inaugurated by the Convention of Halifax in 1776. There were many good and wise men in America who had no confidence in the perpetuity or effectiveness of a polity which rested upon the wisdom and virtue of the masses for its enforcement. ”

“ The census of 1870 showed vast improvement in many departments of human industry. North Carolina, in the many alterations wrought by the war, was learning the wisdom of diversifying the pursuits of the people. Slowly public attention was being turned to the opening of new industries. The Western North Carolina, the Raleigh & Augusta and the Carolina Central Railroads were opening up a new era in the history of such interests in the Old North State. ”

“ The city of Newbern bears the appearance of some age, is regularly laid out, the streets intersecting each other at right angles, and well protected from the merciless heat of summer by fine old elm trees, intermixed here and there with the chaney and other trees the names of which I do not recollect. The city is located at a point of land formed by the junction of the Trent river with the Neuse, and has altogether an imposing appearance viewed from the approach by water.
The Mass. 23d Reg't, Col. Kurtz, (who was provost marshal,) was then doing provost duty in the city. ”

“ When Judge Moore and his compeer, Cornelius Harnett, were growing old, William Hooper, Archibald Maclaine and the first James Iredell were young lawyers, who travelled to all the Superior Courts in the State and mingled belles-lettres largely with their inspections of Coke and the new lectures of Dr. Blackstone.
5. No man or woman then in North Carolina wrote books, as a profession, but the copious correspondence of that day, which yet survives, and upon which fifty cents were paid as postage for each letter, proves that, what was called "polite literature" engaged much of their attention. ”

“ The State of Vermont originated in the same way; and it is fortunate that such precedents have long since ceased in America. There is some limit to the doctrine of the people's right to self-government, just as liberty is not to be found in mere license.
QUESTIONS. 1. What matters occupied the attention of the people in North Carolina after the Revolution? How were some men disposed to view the new plan of government?
2. What was the opinion of Samuel Johnston? What had been provided for in the Halifax Constitution?
3. What private schools were in operation, and where were they? ”

“ New England, which possessed within itself not only an expansive principle, but one which took deep root on any soil which it touched, had planted not only a little settlement on Cape Fear, which had been fostered in its distresses by the mother-colony, but had sown the seeds of democratic liberty, from which, in part, must be traced the resolute spirit which distinguished the colony of North Carolina in the long struggle through which it had to pass. ”

“ All the wealthy and prominent citizens fled, and have not returned.
The present condition of things will not long continue; a more permanent government, either civil or military, will soon be established, and with it must come a new era which will settle for all time the destiny of Newbern.
Should the leading men of the town and all Eastern North-Carolina make an effort and throw off the incubus that slavery has for a century placed over it, a bright career of prosperity would open before them. ”

“ Men of strong convictions, especially when accustomed to shape public sentiment, do not readily yield to opposing views, and it was a happy thing for North Carolina that she possessed such a man as Caswell, whose commanding influence enabled him to control and finally to compose the fierce differences that prevailed in regard to the character of the proposed new government. ”

“ The inhabitants, indignant at being transferred without their consent, revolted and set up the State of Franklin. Governor Caswell was able to cause the dissolution of this abortive State, and the lands were again ceded in 1790. The next year the capital was located at Raleigh. In 1795 the State University was opened for students. The question of a market for their products was a serious one to the residents of the middle and eastern counties. After 1820 much money was spent in the fruitless attempt to make the shallow rivers navigable, and to connect them by canals. ”

“ Figure 57, a drawing of a house from Brunswick Town, near Wilmington, introduces an amazing new chapter in the story of colonial architecture in North Carolina, a chapter which is just being opened up in our day.
This house, the Hepburn-Reonalds house, built between 1734 and 1742, is of a type not seen before in this study. The structure had a family porch without steps down to the street, rather like a balcony, a protected place to sit and look at life on the street. ”

“ In New England a marked concentration of social life in towns and villages 309 co-existed with complete democracy, while in Virginia the isolated life upon great plantations was connected with an aristocratic structure of society. But between the two Carolinas the contrast was just the reverse of this. Of all the southern colonies, North Carolina was the one in which society was the most scattered, and town life the least developed, while it was also the one in which the general aspect of society was the least aristocratic. ”

“ Governor Tryon asked of Ashe, in private conversation, what the House would do as to the new law." We will resist its execution to the death," said he, and that very day Governor Tryon sent them all home by proroguing the session. Nor did he permit them to assemble again until late in the next year, after the repeal of the Stamp Act. By this means he prevented the election of delegates from North Carolina to the Continental Congress which met in New York in 1765 to organize the opposition to that oppressive measure. ”

“ On the southern slope, therefore, of Rutland’s highest hill the fine hospital now stands; and until people outgrow the foolish notion that a State must have all its State institutions within its own borders,—until Massachusetts knows that North Carolina is a better place for consumptives than any town of her own,—there could not be a wiser choice. The town is so near to Worcester, and even to Boston, that its fine air, broad outlook and big hotel draw to it hundreds of summer visitors ”

“ John, Robert, Zebulon, Benjamin, Adam, and Elizabeth. The three elder brothers, with their sister and her husband, came to North Carolina between 1740 and 1750. The three brothers were all Whigs during the Revolution. John Brevard, whose family is the immediate subject of this sketch, married a sister of Dr. Alexander McWhorter, a distinguished Presbyterian minister from New Jersey, who had for a time the control of Queen's Museum in Charlotte. Soon after his marriage, Brevard also emigrated to North Carolina, and settled about two miles from Center Church, in Iredell county. Dr. ”

“ Prospered in his business, he soon became wealthy and an extensive landholder, and rising in the estimation of his fellow-citizens, was promoted to the magistracy and the Eldership of the Presbyterian Church. He was a member of the Provincial Assembly in 1772, and one of the Delegates to the Convention which met at Hillsboro, on the 21st of August, 1775.
He was also a member of the Provincial Congress, which met at Halifax on the 4th of April, 1776, with John Phifer and Robert Irwin as colleagues. In 1777, he was elected the first Senator from Mecklenburg county, under the new Constitution. ”