Exploring the History, Literature, and Culture of the Tar Heel State
On this day in 1783: Except in Salem’s Moravian community, North Carolinians ignore Gov. Andrew Martin’s call for the first statewide observance of the Fourth of July.
The Moravians, committed to a celebration “as impressive as our circumstances allow,” listen to a sermon in the morning, sing in early afternoon, march in late afternoon and ring bells and illuminate their houses at night.
“[Some former slaveholders] sought to ‘drown our troubles in a sea of gaiety,’ reviving the aristocratic social life of the antebellum years as if nothing had changed.
“Tournaments straight out of ‘Ivanhoe,’ complete with knights adorned with lances and plumed helmets and ladies competing to be crowned Queen of Love and Beauty, made an incongruous reappearance — although in one North Carolina community, the cult of medieval nobility waned after blacks organized a Tournament Association of their own.”
— From “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877” by Eric Foner (1988)
“[Bascom Lamar Lunsford] turned out to be just the opposite of what I expected. He sings like an old mountain reprobate, full of glee and friendliness. He turned out to be a reactionary aristocrat. The first question he asked us was ‘Are you Communists?’ He claims that hundreds of Communists have been going around the country with tape recorders and collecting songs and using them for progressive causes.
“Telling him we were friends of Pete [Seeger] and Woody [Guthrie] and from New York didn’t help….”
— Folk singer Guy Carawan, recalling a 1953 visit to Asheville (as quoted in “Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970” [2002] by Ronald D. Cohen).
On this day in 1989: Richard Nixon, driven from office 15 years earlier by the Watergate scandal, addresses a fund-raiser for Gov. Jim Martin at Winston-Salem’s Benton Convention Center. It will be the 76-year-old Nixon’s final appearance in North Carolina, a state that twice gave him its presidential electoral votes.
“When I was in Washington, D.C., a couple days ago, I saw one of my friends in the press,” he tells the crowd of 300 campaign contributors. “The other one was out of town.”
“The railway [from Richmond] to Wilmington bears the reputation of being one of the very worst, if not the worst, in the United States. It had, however, been newly laid, and, save for a short distance on which the old timbers of the road were plainly to be felt, struck me as remarkably easy.
“The cars… were more like remnants from the last century than the cars used in the more northern States. [In Weldon], however, we had a new car provided, which approximated more the style of conveyance in vogue among the more civilized.
“The room arranged for [our supper] was not large, and about a hundred travellers entered it. Scarcely were these seated than a horde of strangers — well-dressed ladies, with or without their bonnets, gentlemen in every description of habiliment, and even boys and girls — crowded in.
“One pertinacious and ill-bred, and slightly colored (with a brush be it observed), but remarkably pretty woman, dressed in mourning, raised her eye glass to her brow, and standing at about three feet distance, and exactly opposite where the fair Swede was sitting, contemplated every mouthful eaten by her…. Mademoiselle Lind possessed considerably more modesty, or suffered more from bashfulness, than her admirer, and disappeared in a few minutes, so uncomfortable had she been rendered by this unceasing examination.”
— From “Jenny Lind in America” (1851) by C. G. Rosenberg.
Under the management of P. T. Barnum, “the Swedish Nightingale” gave an enormously successful series of opera concerts in the United States in 1850-1852. En route south to Charleston, the troupe stopped in Wilmington, but Barnum denied fans an impromptu concert because no hall was large enough.
— Might those be banana trees in the supposed photo of North Carolina slave children?
— “We thought it was just a stick,” recalls the Draper woman who pulled an iron-tipped, 19th century bateau pole from the Dan River.
— On the wish list of the revived and relocated North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in Kannapolis: a glass elevator from which visitors can view the nearby Dale Earnhardt statue.
— “If the waitress calls me sweetie and the place is full of old people telling stories,” confesses historian and omnivore blogger David Cecelski, “I’m going to say it’s the best place ever, even if I hear can openers in the back.”
“I wish that someone would lock [J.] Pierpont Morgan up for homicides already committed on his Southern roads…. One of my boys pulled out fourteen spikes with his fingers on a two mile stretch on the Atlantic Coast main line, in North Carolina…. You are going after the New Haven [Railroad] people right.”
–– California Congressman William Kent in a 1913 letter to “People’s Lawyer” Louis Brandeis, who was mounting an epic challenge to Morgan’s railroad monopoly. (Brandeis wrote back to Kent, a fellow reformer: “I note what you say about the condition of the Atlantic Coast main Line. It is, as you say, Morganatic.”)
“Booming war industries have already increased child labor…. During 1941 North Carolina issued 10,000 new labor certificates to 17- and 18-year-olds, 1,000 to 12-to-15-year-olds. ‘The situation,’ observed State Labor Commissioner F. H. Shuford, with a dead pan, ‘is as healthy as the war that brought it on.’ ”
— From Time magazine, June 15, 1942
“The decline of the homicide rate came later in North Carolina than in New England or the Chesapeake, but by the mid-18th century it… also had a low rate ….
“Indian warfare and political strife (including three rebellions against the colonial government) had periodically reduced the colony to lawlessness. But as racial slavery took hold in North Carolina in the 1720s and 1730s, white solidarity increased, and as the colony’s government became more effective, the homicide rate declined….”
— From “American Homicide” (2009) by Randolph Roth
“The American mogul William A. V. Cecil told a bi-national meeting at Leeds Castle, Kent, in 1980 how he had transformed his North Carolina estate, Biltmore, from debt-laden encumbrance to lucrative honeypot by moving out of the house. This horrified the custodial English, bent on tenanting their stately homes even if bankrupt. Britons cared about living in their homes, Americans about owning them.”
– From “The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History” by David Lowenthal (1996)