As part of the John Locke Foundation’s NC250: Freedom’s Vanguard initiative, this essay contest invited students, scholars, historians, and writers to explore North Carolina’s pivotal role in the American Revolution and the founding of the United States. The project highlights the state’s contributions to independence, liberty, and the shaping of the American Republic.
The story of North Carolina can best be described as an eucatastrophe: one that began in tragedy and became a triumph. In 1584, Elizabeth I granted Sir Walter Raleigh a charter to settle land in what would become North Carolina. Raleigh’s colonies on the coast of the state would fail, leading to the legend of the lost colony of Roanoke. Eventually, settlers from the Virginia Colony traveled south into the Albemarle Sound region and began to settle the land that would be known as North Carolina. The Albemarle Settlements were founded after Roger Green and roughly a hundred Virginians traveled to a region south of the Chowan River in the 1650s. The Albemarle Settlements, while insignificant in stature, are extremely important to the cultural and political tradition of North Carolina in the pre-Revolutionary era. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, North Carolina could be characterized as a scion of the Virginia Colony. Before the rise of North Carolina’s foremost port settlement, New Bern, many settlers either traveled through or originated in the Virginia Colony.[1]
North Carolina’s connection with Virginia is significant in understanding the mainspring of political thought in the colony. Once settlements were established in North Carolina, King Charles II granted eight English noblemen the land of Carolina as a reward, establishing the 1663 Charter. The eight would be known as the Lords Proprietors. Of the eight, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, took the most effectual interest in the colony. Cooper, with the assistance of his secretary, John Locke, drafted the Grand Model for the Province of Carolina, which included the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. The Grand Model was a master plan for the colony that addressed every aspect of colonial affairs, from land acquisition and development to government structure and form. The Fundamental Constitutions were certainly a product of the time, a hierarchical document that prioritized the King first, the Proprietors second, and the people last. It is important to consider that Locke’s influence on the document was diluted by the fact that the Lord Proprietors ordered the constitutions. The constitutions seriously impaired self-government by vesting power solely in the English nobility and Monarchy. The constitutions were never ratified; the assembly, created by the 1663 charter, rejected the constitutions due to their incapacitation of the colonists’ ability to self-govern.[2] This rejection marks the first in a series of attempts by the colonists of the Carolina Province to resist efforts to infringe upon their right to self-govern. North Carolina, much like the Virginia Colony, was deeply rooted in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of common law and self-government. Therefore, the primary motivator of Carolinian resistance to colonial overreach, from the rejection of the constitutions to the Halifax Resolves and eventual revolution, was a particular propensity for the continuation and preservation of self-government and popular sovereignty.
The 1663 Charter granted the Lords Proprietors authority over the Province of Carolina. However, due to the fact that the Proprietors wished to remain in England, authority began to drip to the colonists, who gladly accepted the mantle and honor of self-government. They established assemblies and courts, starting on the path to effective self-rule. Many of the early settlers, due to their Virginian roots, brought the Old Dominion’s tradition of an active assembly of the people to Carolina. No place was that tradition more alive than the Albemarle Settlement. John Jenkins became the fourth Governor of the Settlement in 1672 after Governor Carteret was recalled to England to ask the Lords Proprietors to exempt the settlement from the Navigation Acts, which were hindering the settlement’s development. During the interregnum, Jenkins began to promote self-government in the settlement and refused to collect customs duties for the Navigation Acts, up until the point he was imprisoned by Loyalist John Eastchurch. This imprisonment would spiral into a cycle of events that would cement the settlement’s (and later colony’s) propensity and passion for self-government.
During Jenkins’ imprisonment, he gained popularity among the colonists, who were angry at the established Government of Thomas Eastchurch and, later, Thomas Miller. These colonists began to dub themselves Anti-Proprietors. This group, led by the “Father of North Carolina,” George Durant, revolted against the Eastchurch-Miller Government. This rebellion would be dubbed Culpeper’s Rebellion due to the fact that one of the co-conspirators, John Culpeper, was tried and acquitted in England on charges of treason, returning to Albemarle a hero. The proprietary period of North Carolina history, dominated by the Albemarle Settlement, is marked by challenges but remains the root of Carolinian resistance to government by a nation an ocean away. The Proprietary government enforced upon the settlers was hindering the development of the settlement, so the popular will of the settlers was to do away with those who led that government, and time and time again, that would occur. The corrupt Governor Seth Sothel was the final governor of the Albemarle Sound. In part due to Sothel’s corruption, the post was restructured and renamed to Deputy Governor of North Carolina. The province of Carolina was not formally split at this time, but differences were apparent, and as such, both regions gained deputy governors.
The southern portion of the province of Carolina was markedly different from the northern region. Founded on the proprietors’ desire to have a more stable settlement in the Carolinas, Charles Town (present-day Charleston) became the anchor of the southern portion of the Province of Carolina. If North Carolina was the scion of Virginia, South Carolina was the scion of the Caribbean planter class. During the first 20 years of settlement in Charles Town, a majority of white settlers came from Barbados and other Caribbean colonies.[3] Charles Town quickly became a highly active port, and the quick ascendance of the southern region of Carolina led to the eventual split of North and South Carolina in 1712. In the years surrounding the split, the Province of North Carolina faced turmoil, with a religious conflict in Cary’s Rebellion and a war with the Tuscarora Indians. In 1719, a rebellion occurred in Charles Town, where citizens staged a coup against the proprietary government and petitioned the Crown to withdraw the proprietary charter of South Carolina and establish it as a royal colony. The Crown partially obliged, appointing a royal governor, and by 1729, the people of Charles Town got their wish, as the Provinces of North and South Carolina became royal colonies.
The establishment of North Carolina as a royal colony came at a turning point for the province, as piracy was declining, immigration was swelling, and cities began to grow, from Wilmington to the influential port city of New Bern. While the establishment of North Carolina as a royal colony was positive for the growth of the province, the change in governance tested the colonists’ commitment to self-governance. After taking control of the Province of North Carolina, the crown held that the assembly existed only by royal decree. During the time of colonial rule, the power of the assembly and local government frequently clashed with that of the Governor, who was appointed by the crown. The Governor received secret instructions from the King’s Privy Council, which covered the entirety of colonial rule. These instructions clashed with the will of the people of the Province, causing the assembly to refuse to pay the salaries of royal officials on occasion. The royal threat to the ingrained tradition of self-governance in North Carolina only stiffened resistance to the crown. Eventually, the threat to self-rule, once revealed, would energize the generations-old spirit in North Carolinians, the same spirit that drove out the Loyalists John Eastchurch and Thomas Miller would later drive the British out of the Albemarle and across the Atlantic forever.
Amid this powder keg, another concern was the rampant corruption of local officials in the colony. Due to poor economic conditions for yeomen farmers, debt cases brought to docket increased nearly sixteen-fold in the 1760s. Cases were often heard in courts dominated by courthouse rings consisting of individuals hoarding judicial power for their own personal gain. In addition to a corrupted local judiciary, local sheriffs were infamous for embezzling tax revenues. Alongside corrupt court officials and excisemen, exorbitant fees for public attorneys pushed the yeomen to the brink. Inspired by the successful protests against the Stamp Act, a disparate ensemble of North Carolinian yeomen, farmers, and smallholders formed the Regulator Movement. First came the Nutbush Address, where a disaffected citizen, George Sims, took his concerns to his neighbors. Beyond the cursory motives behind his discontent, Sims outlined his wish for “man to throw off the heavy yoke, which is cast upon our necks, and resume our ancient liberties and privileges, as free subjects.” [4] The address was published by Thomas Person and became the rhetorical lodestar at the beginning of the Regulator Movement. Beyond the concerns of corruption and exorbitant emoluments, the colonists clearly outlined a strong desire to uphold what they believed was a time-honored and innate tradition of self-government.
The Regulator Movement quickly expanded in size and ambition, and in 1770, Regulators broke into the colonial court in Hillsborough, dragging those whom they believed to be corrupt through the streets and interrupting the court’s proceedings. After a successful demonstration at Hillsborough, the Regulators formed a more organized militia, and the Governor responded by declaring the Regulators to be in active rebellion. For around six months into the spring of 1771, the Regulators held strong in areas where they received support, the colonial frontier of North Carolina, near modern-day Chapel Hill. In May of 1771, Governor Tryon gathered government forces and marched to what is now Alamance County to break up the Regulator uprising. The two sides met near Great Alamance Creek, with the governmental forces offering the Regulators an opportunity to surrender. When the Regulators reportedly responded with “fire and be damned,” the battle began. The governmental forces routed the Regulator militia and began a campaign of terror across Western North Carolina. While the Regulator movement was crushed, the drastic actions of the Regulators point to a strong foundation of resistance, not only to corruption but also to infringements on self-governance, years before the revolution. In fact, historian and writer William Edward Fitch referred to the Battle of the Alamance as the first battle of the American Revolution.[5]
The end of the Regulator movement proved to be only the beginning of discontent with royal governance in North Carolina. The aforementioned secret directives from the King’s Privy Council became an increasingly significant hurdle for the Royal Governor’s relationship with the State Assembly. In no case was this tension more apparent than with North Carolina’s final Royal Governor, Josiah Martin. In 1773, the Assembly added an attachment clause to a court bill that permitted the seizure of property owned by foreigners who owed a debt to the province. Governor Martin refused to sign it, pointing to instructions he received from the Privy Council. The Assembly pushed back, refusing to pass a court bill as well as denying the Governor’s own criminal court funding. This meant that after 1773, there was no functioning superior court, the first in the gradual deconstruction of royal governance in North Carolina. This quarrel between the Royal Governor and the Assembly marked a major turning point in the colonist/royal relationship in North Carolina. Before the attachment clause dispute, the Assembly and Governor would find some sort of compromise; however, in this instance, the Assembly enforced the popular will of the people onto the royal government, an increasingly frequent occurrence in the colonies.
After the attachment clause dispute, Assembly leaders throughout North Carolina joined multiple other colonies in forming a Committee of Correspondence for the purpose of communicating grievances and revolutionary sentiment among the colonies. The Intolerable Acts and the Boston Tea Party accelerated North Carolina’s revolutionary path. In fact, North Carolina had its own oft-mentioned tea party in Edenton, where a group of women signed a resolution protesting the Tea Act of 1773. In 1774, due to what many considered major breaches of their innate and inalienable right to self-government, the First Provincial Congress of North Carolina was formed. Before the Congress met, a similar document was signed in Rowan County, entitled the Rowan Resolves. These resolutions included striking condemnations of taxation without representation and signaled significant grassroots support for resistance to continued royal infringements of colonial self-governance. The First Provincial Congress of North Carolina met less than a month after the signing of the Rowan Resolves and greatly expanded on the sentiment in that document. At the core of the many resolutions found in the minutes of the First Provincial Congress of North Carolina was the strong belief that the colonists were entitled to the same rights of self-governance afforded to Englishmen in the British Constitution.[6]
While the First Provincial Congress of North Carolina stopped short of talk of independence, it sent a concrete message to the Crown: The right of North Carolinians to govern themselves will not be infringed. The events of 1775 drastically escalated tensions in the colonies. In April, a Second Provincial Congress of North Carolina convened. During this congress, Committees of Safety were formed that acted as shadow governments in lieu of deteriorating royal control. The aims of the Provincial Congresses naturally permeated the Lower House of the North Carolina Assembly, as they officially voted to endorse the Second Continental Congress. This action led Royal Governor Josiah Martin to dissolve the chamber. However, this only led to more resistance to royal governance. On May 31, 1775, the Royal Governor, fearing for his life, fled the capital of New Bern under the cover of night. As he fled, the Governor and his council maintained that “the deluded People of this Province will see their error and return to their allegiance [to the king].”[7] To the present day, the people of this province, which has now become a state, have held a singular allegiance. An allegiance guided by a simple principle: that our collective citizenry, informed by rights given by their creator, must be the determinant of the operations, government, and direction of their state and nation.
The flight of Governor Martin signified the end of royal authority in North Carolina; however, even at this time, colonists were unsure of the trajectory of their newborn rebellion. Unavailing attempts to avoid war, such as the Olive Branch Petition, were rejected, but the aim of the burgeoning revolution remained unclear. Was this to be a war for independence? While the other colonies were debating the way forward, North Carolina was embracing its newfound freedom at the Third Provincial Congress. Meeting in Hillsborough, the delegate count doubled from the previous congress. The chief outcome of the Congress was the establishment of militia districts and the election of an executive council to effectively govern the province in the absence of British rule. The North Carolina Provincial Council’s first president was Cornelius Harnett, dubbed “the Samuel Adams of North Carolina” by Sons of Liberty spokesperson Josiah Quincy Jr. in a formative meeting before the First Provincial Congress of North Carolina. The results of the Third Provincial Congress were clear: War with Britain was imminent, and the people of North Carolina were actualizing their end goal of retaining their endowed tradition of self-government.
During the term of the Third Provincial Congress, King George III declared the colonies to be in open rebellion, sparking the British counter-effort following the Battles of Lexington and Concord. One of the colonies marked for assault was North Carolina, with General Henry Clinton set to lead more than 2,000 troops arriving in February 1776. Amid reports of impending reinforcements, Royal Governor Josiah Martin, directing the Loyalist operations from his sloop, began to ramp up recruitment efforts. These efforts specifically targeted Scots Gaels inhabiting the interior portion of the state, in an attempt to link up with the coming British forces. Loyalist forces raised around 3,500 men; however, that number dwindled to around 1,000 when news broke that this regiment would have to fight the patriot militia to meet the incoming British forces. Despite this setback, the recruited Loyalist force began marching southeast towards Wilmington from an area near modern-day Fayetteville. The Loyalist force met an equally numbered Patriot militia at Moore’s Creek, roughly 20 miles from Wilmington. During the battle, the Loyalists, consisting primarily of Scots, performed the last known attempt of a Highland Charge. The charge on Moore’s Creek Bridge proved disastrous, resulting in around 50 casualties, which forced the Loyalist armies to retreat. After the retreat, the Patriot force captured up to 850 of the disorganized and rudderless Loyalists. The Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge was so disastrous for the British that it discouraged General Clinton from pursuing his aforementioned assault on the North Carolina coast. North Carolina would remain unthreatened militarily for nearly five years.
The Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge not only protected North Carolina as a patriot stronghold, but also gave political leaders confidence to proceed with one of the most momentous occasions in American history.[8] Less than two months removed from the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge, in April 1776, the Fourth North Carolina Provincial Congress met at Halifax Courthouse. When the Congress convened, Colonel Robert Howe remarked: “Independence seems to be the word; I know of not one dissenting voice.” Howe was correct. Empowered by a victory at Moore’s Creek Bridge, the delegates authorized their representatives to vote for independence from Great Britain at the Second Continental Congress. This made North Carolina the first colony to explicitly direct their representatives to the Second Continental Congress to vote for independence. This resolution would come to be known as the Halifax Resolves and earned North Carolina the unofficial title of “First in Freedom,” proudly displayed on state license plates. The delegates at the Fourth Provincial Congress recognized one simple, yet important truth: The fight to preserve self-government now required independence. The result was to be a nation founded on the principle that the liberty of a people consists in being governed by laws made by themselves. Only then, in that nation, would the North Carolinian and American values of self-government and popular sovereignty be adequately protected and maintained.
Eventually, on July 4, 1776, the 13 colonies were in agreement, and the Declaration of Independence was signed. To be first is not simply symbolic; when North Carolina put her foot first and led the charge for independence, the floodgates opened. Later in 1776, the Fifth North Carolina Provincial Congress met again in Halifax and signed the North Carolina Constitution, along with the North Carolina Declaration of Rights. This was the culmination of decades of strife to maintain North Carolina’s unique tradition of self-government. The first two articles of the North Carolina Declaration of Rights read: “I. That all political power is vested in and derived from the people only. II. That the people of this State ought to have the sole and exclusive right of regulating the internal government and police thereof.” Before all else, those men, gathered in December 1776, recognized and articulated the priority of self-government in building their new state. These men would go on to fight, die, and win the American War for Independence, all for the promise of a state and nation that had a government whose power was derived and vested in its own people.
Two hundred fifty years later, the story of a people who rebelled for a cause as simple as preserving their own power in their own land is salient. From Georgia to New Hampshire, the uniting cause for revolution was to maintain a system of self-government that ran generations deep, from the New World to England. Englishmen fought time and again to resist a tyrannical king threatening their right to self-govern, and stories of men like John Hampden and Algernon Sidney were deeply rooted in the minds of colonists. This attitude was displayed clearly by Levi Preston, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, present at Concord. Preston, when asked about his reasoning for joining the Patriot militia at Concord, answered plainly: “We had always governed ourselves and we always meant to.”[9]
Historians have long elevated abstract causes of the Revolution, pointing to Enlightenment ideals, vague idioms of freedom, and the social contract as the guiding force of colonial resistance. While those played a role in the road to revolution in America and might have been primary motivations for the intellectual class, for which we have more documentation, the motivation for the common colonist to take arms against, many times, their former homeland and king was to preserve their decades-old right of self-government. That motivation is as important in 2026 as it was in 1776.
While all colonies were united in preserving self-government, North Carolina played a chief role for the reason that the motivation to preserve that right appears throughout its history. Although Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia are highlighted as the primary drivers of revolution, North Carolina remained the first to push for independence, without the intellectual powerhouses of Virginia and New York, or the circumstantial importance of Massachusetts. This stemmed from the fact that no other state represented the primary motivation of the revolution more than North Carolina. From her Virginian connections to the original rejection of the Fundamental Constitutions, Culpeper’s Rebellion, the Regulator Movement, the Halifax Resolves, and the North Carolina Declaration of Rights, the string that ties North Carolina’s formative era together is a constant striving to maintain a system of self-government. On the Semiquincentennial of the founding of our great nation, the role of self-government in North Carolina’s road to independence, and North Carolina’s subsequent influence on the Revolution, exemplifies the importance of self-government, which has never been more pertinent than in the present day.
[1] DiNome, William G. “Settlement Patterns.” NCpedia, July 2023, https://www.ncpedia.org/settlement-patterns. Accessed 20 July 2025.
[2]DiLascio, Tracey. “Analysis: The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina.” EBSCO, 2022, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/analysis-fundamental-constitutions-carolina#document-analysis. Accessed 20 July 2025.
[3] Edgar, Walter. “One of the enduring myths of American history is the centuries-old assertion that the thirteen original colonies were “English” colonies.” South Carolina Encyclopedia, 17 May 2016, https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/english/. Accessed 13 August 2025.
[4] Boyd, William K. “The Petition of Reuben Searcy and Others and An Address to the People of Granville County: Introduction.” Some Eighteenth Century Tracts Concerning North Carolina. Raleigh, N.C.: Edwards and Broughton. 1927. https://archive.org/stream/someeighteenthce00boyd#page/176/mode/2up
[5] Fitch, W. E. Some neglected history of North Carolina, being an account of the revolution of the Regulators and of the Battle of Alamance, the first battle of the American Revolution. New York, Fitch, 1914. Library of Congress, https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/public/gdcmassbookdig/someneglectedhis00fitc/someneglectedhis00fitc.pdf. Accessed 14 August 2025.
[6] “Minutes of the Provincial Congress of North Carolina.” Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, University of North Carolina, https://docsouth.unc.edu/csr/index.php/document/csr09-0303. Accessed 15 August 2025.
[7] “Minutes of the North Carolina Governor’s Council.” Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, University of North Carolina, https://docsouth.unc.edu/csr/index.html/document/csr10-0052. Accessed 16 August 2025.
[8] Nothstine, Kelley. “Halifax Resolves.” North Carolina History Project, https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/halifax-resolves/. Accessed 20 August 2025.
[9] Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. “Module 03: A Revolution for Whom?” U.S. History, Digital History Reader, https://www.dhr.history.vt.edu/modules/us/mod03_rev/context.html. Accessed 20 August 2025.
