The wild northern expanse of the huge Carolina grant bordered on Virginia. From the older colony there drifted down a ragtag group of poverty-stricken outcasts and religious dissenters.
Many of them had been repelled by the rarefied atmosphere of Virginia, dominated as it was by big-plantation gentry belong ing to the Church of England. North Carolinians, as a result, have been called "the quintessence of Virginia's discontent."
The newcomers, who frequently were "squatters" without legal right to the soil, raised their tobacco and other crops on small farms, with little need for slaves.
Distinctive traits developed rapidly in North Carolina. The poor but sturdy inhabitants, regarded as riffraff by their snobbish neighbors, earned a repu tation for being irreligious and hospitable to pirates.
Isolated from neighbors by raw wilderness and stormy Cape Hatteras, "graveyard of the Atlantic," the North Carolinians developed a strong spirit of resistance to authority. Their location between aristocratic Virginia and aristocratic South Carolina caused the area to be dubbed "a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit."
Following much friction with governors, North Carolina was officially separated from South Carolina in 1712, and subsequently each segment became a royal colony.
North Carolina shares with tiny Rhode Island several distinctions. These two outposts were the most democratic, the most independent-minded, and the least aristocratic of the original thirteen English colonies.
Although northern Carolina, unlike the colony's southern reaches, did not at first import large numbers of African slaves, both regions shared in the ongoing tragedy of bloody relations between Indians and Europeans.
Tuscarora Indians fell upon the fledgling settlement at New Bern in 1711. The North Carolinians, aided by their heavily armed brothers from the south, retaliated by crushing the Indians in the Tuscarora War, selling hundreds of them into slavery and leaving the survivors to wander northward to seek the protection of the Iroquois. The Tuscaroras eventu ally became the Sixth Nation of the Iroquois Confed eracy.
In another ferocious encounter four years later, the South Carolinians defeated and dispersed the Yamasee Indians.
With the conquest of the Yamasees, virtually all the coastal Indian tribes in the southern colonies had been utterly devastated by about 1720. Yet in the interior, in the hills and valleys of the Appalachian Moun tains, the powerful Cherokees, Creeks, and Iroquois remained.
Stronger and more numerous than their coastal cousins, they managed for half a century more to contain British settlement to the coastal plain east of the mountains.