In manufacturing there had been considerable development with the promise of more. The manufacturing situation in 1860 is best seen from the following:

Government was comparatively inexpensive and in the amount of taxes paid in the different States, North Carolina stood twenty-first in 1860 as against fifteenth in 1850.

Intellectually, the State was improving. Twenty years of public schools, with the system for eight years of that time under Calvin H. Wiley, were beginning to show results. The school situation in the two census years appears in the following:

Number of schools 1850, 2,657; number of teachers. 2,730; number of pupils 104,095; amount expended $158,564; number of schools 1860, 2,994; number of teachers 2,928; number of pupils 105,025; amount expended $268,719.

There were also many private schools and academies, each class showing an increase over 1850. The number of illiterates had decreased from 73,566 in 1850 to 68,128 in 1860.

While in many respects the outlook was encouraging, the State was still ridden by national politics, ever the curse of the people. With the adoption of the free suffrage amendment which had performed an incredibly valuable service to the State in awakening interest in state affairs, it looked as if the people would relapse into their former indifference. In 1860 the question of ad valorem taxation gave promise to renewed interest in State politics. The following extract

from a letter written in 1857, shows the feeling of the few who recognized the greatness of the evil:

It was intended by the framers of our governmental organism, both State and Federal, that the will of the whole people should be ascertained in the way just pointed out (Legislative elections in the States), and experience has taught us, that any departure from our organic laws, and any lack of due observance of them while in force, are attended with direful results. This was never more obvious than in the case of this State. Who can say, without fear of successful contradiction, that North Carolina, with all her natural advantages, is not this day, far behind her sister States in an agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial point of view? Is she not rather following slowly in the wake of other States? We are forced to admit that she is. And why? Is it because she has no rich and productive soil that invites the industry of the husbandman? No. Is it because the manufacturer cannot manufacture cotton fabrics, woolens, flour, tobacco, shoes, boots, etc., etc.? No. Is it because a widespread and enriching commerce would not certainly grow out of a well directed system of agriculture and manufactures, fostered by an extensive system of internal improvements? No. There is, in fact, no good reason— there never has been any plausible reason, why North Carolina should not soon be in advance of most of the States of the Union, in point of her agriculture, manufactures, and commerce. On the contrary, there are many powerful reasons why she should be a great and prosperous State. She possesses the natural elements that form the sure basis of wealth and power, and these only require the hand of industry properly applied to develop them in all their strength and worth. Her soil, for the most part, is rich and astonishingly productive, and is susceptible of the highest state of cultivation. She has water power unsurpassed, sufficient to drive any amount of machinery. She has harbors on her seaboard that will compare favorably with the best on the Atlantic coast, and the surface of her territory is such that railroads, leading from almost every point of trade, may be built with a very moderate outlay of means.

Why, let me ask, have all these advantages been so long

neglected? There must be some cause for this novel condition of our State. Our people are intelligent, industrious, and enterprising when properly encouraged, and it is not because they are wanting in these indispensable requirements of success. If we will look at the leading characteristics of our Legislatures and legislation, we may find the prime cause of all our backwardness and neglect of precious and valuable interests and advantages. The Legislature and legislation have almost uniformly been of a partisan and political character. Whig, Democrat, or American, Federal politics entered chiefly into the election of legislators, and the result was political legislation. Witness the proceedings of our Legislatures, and say if this is not true. What do our Governors and legislators talk about for the most part, but Federal politics and the offices to be filled? How much time has been lost in electing our Senators to Congress, our Attorney Generals, and solicitors-in discussing empty resolutions touching matters with which the State Legislature had nothing to do. Look to the journals of, and the debates in the Legislature, and every conservative man will learn to his supreme disgust. One will be astonished and dispirited to see how completely Federal politics control our best interests, and that too, in our halls of State legislation. Look to our legislation upon matters of pressing and practical importance, and no one can fail to see how great detriment the whole State has sustained from time to time by political and office-seeking Legislatures. Look, for example, at our system of internal improvements, the great mainspring of commercial wealth and prosperity at this day. Who can tell where it begins, or where it is eventually to end? What is the settled policy of the State upon this great matter of public concern? Who can tell? What great points of trade and commerce are to be united by railroads and navigators? What have we not now, roads giving our seaboard and the whole State a direct connection with the great heart of the Mississippi Valley, so that our State might enjoy the incalculable benefits of that commerce that ought to belong to it? Misguided honesty and political legislation is the cause. Who dares to say that ever upon the internal improvement interests of the State, Federal party politics has not exerted an unwholesome influence?

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Indeed, the time has fully come when the people of North Carolina ought to look to her immediate interests when her people ought to throw off party ties in the election of Governor and members of the Legislature, and when their votes should be influenced in these elections by questions of State policy solely. Politicians and office seekers should be trampled under foot, and the people should call upon the candidates for office and not the candidates upon the people to elect him.

The slavery situation in the State furnishes a most interesting field of study. North Carolina, like Virginia in the early years after the Revolution and even thereafter, looked upon slavery as an evil. During all these years anti-slavery sentiment was freely expressed and various organizations were founded for securing emancipation, the most notable being the North Carolina Manumission Society with headquarters at New Garden which had over 30 separate branches by 1830. Naturally the feeling was strongest among the numerous Quakers in the State and they were the most active, but it was not at all confined to them. Cotton growing was a negligible interest in the State and the large plantation was the exception. Hence slavery was not nearly so profitable and the interest was not so shielded as in some of the other Southern States.

The rise of the abolition movement in the North with its loud, unjust, violent, and threatening attacks upon slaveholders as well as slavery changed this condition. The Southampton insurrection only hastened the process. Opponents of slavery within the State ceased to agitate against slavery and began to defend it. The Manumission Society and kindred organizations disappeared. Laws against the negro, whether slave or free, became, on the statute books at least harsher and more rigid. The free negroes were deprived of the suffrage. By 1849 opposition to abolitionist doctrines had entered politics and each party regularly charged as its most damning indictment against the other that it had a leaning in national affairs towards the abolitionists, or that it was controlled by them. Politics, not economics, solidified North

Carolina sentiment in favor of slavery, and politics was responsible for the complete suppression in behalf of slavery of free thought and free speech which now followed in respect to the whole question. Not that slavery was not increasingly valuable, viewed from one angle. With Virginia, North Carolina discovered that the breeding and selling of slaves to the Southern market paid well, and hence the prices of slaves in North Carolina rose steadily until in 1859 and 1860 they reached their highest point. It is said that in those two years the two States sold more than 100,000 slaves to the South. If that be true, and there is no reason to suppose it false, the reason for the advance in the price of slaves is clear.

In spite of these facts, slavery was a curse to the vast majority of white people in the State. Consider the question of slave ownership, by no means the most important consideration. In 1860 there was a total of 34,658 slaveholders owning 331,059 slaves. The distribution of the latter is most interesting.