North Carolina - The Tar Heel State 2

North Carolina – The Tar Heel State

English indentured servants were overwhelmingly the largest immigrant group before the Revolution.  As the flow of indentured laborers to the colony decreased with improving economic conditions in Great Britain, planters imported more slaves, and the state’s legal delineations between free and slave status tightened, effectively hardening the latter into a racial caste. The economy’s growth and prosperity was based on slave labor, devoted first to the production of tobacco.

Throughout the Revolutionary War, fierce guerrilla warfare erupted between bands of pro-independence and pro-British colonists.  The English and Highland Scots of eastern North Carolina tended to remain loyal to the British Crown, because of longstanding business and personal connections with Great Britain. The English, Welsh, Scots-Irish, and German settlers of western North Carolina tended to favor American independence from Britain.  In some cases the war was also an excuse to settle private grudges and rivalries.  The American victory at Kings Mountain gave the advantage to colonists who favored American independence, and it prevented the British Army from recruiting new soldiers from the Tories.

On November 21, 1789, North Carolina became the twelfth state to ratify the Constitution.

Planters owning large estates wielded significant political and socio-economic power in antebellum North Carolina, which was a slave society.  They placed their interests above those of the generally non-slave-holding “yeoman” farmers of western North Carolina.

During the antebellum period, North Carolina was an overwhelmingly rural state, even by Southern standards.  In 1860 only one North Carolina town, the port city of Wilmington, had a population of more than 10,000.  Raleigh, the state capital, had barely more than 5,000 residents.

In 1860, North Carolina was a slave state, in which one-third of the population was enslaved.  This was a smaller proportion than in many Southern states. The state did not vote to join the Confederacy until President Abraham Lincoln called on it to invade its sister state, South Carolina, becoming the second-to-last state to officially join the Confederacy.  North Carolina was the site of few battles, but it provided the Confederacy with at least 125,000 troops, which is far more than any other state did.  North Carolina also supplied about 15,000 Union troops.

Geography:

North Carolina consists of three main geographic regions: the Atlantic coastal plain, occupying the eastern portion of the state;

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Cape Hatteras

the central Piedmont region,

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The Piedmont

and the Mountain region in the west, which is part of the Appalachian Mountains.

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Blue Ridge Mountains

North Carolina is bordered on the south by South Carolina and Georgia, to the west by Tennessee, to the north by Virginia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean.

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North Carolina in the United States

Economy:

North Carolina ranked forty-first out of fifty states plus the District of Columbia for median household income.  North Carolina had the fourteenth highest poverty rate in the nation at 17.6%. 13% of families were below the poverty line.

The state has a very diverse economy.  The state leads the region in industry and agriculture.  Charlotte, the state’s largest city, is a major textile and trade center.  Science, technology, energy, and math (STEM) industries in the area surrounding North Carolina’s capital have grown 17.9 percent since 2001, placing Raleigh-Cary at No. 5 among the 51 largest metro areas in the country where technology is booming.

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