North Carolina has a proverbial reputation for the ignorance and torpidity of her people, being ill this respect at the head of the Slave States. I do not find the reason of this in any innate quality of the popular mind, but rather in the physical circumstances under which it finds its development. Owing to the poverty of the soil in the Eastern part of the State, and to the difficulty and expense of reaching market with bulky produce from the interior and western districts, population and wealth is smaller and more divided than in the other Atlantic States, industry is almost entirely rural, and there is but little communication or concert of action among the small and scattered proprietors of capital. For the same reason the advantages of education are more difficult to be enjoyed, the distance at which families reside apart preventing children from coming together in such numbers as to give remunerative employment to a teacher. The teachers are generally totally unfitted for their business—young men, as a clergyman informed me, themselves not only unadvanced beyond the lowest knowledge of the elements of primary school learning, but often coarse, vulgar and profane in their language and behavior, who take up teaching as a [153] temporary business to supply the demand of a neighborhood of people as ignorant and uncultivated as themselves.

The aspect of North Carolina with regard to slavery, as I have intimated in previous letters, is less offensive than that of Virginia. Slavery has more of the patriarchal character which is claimed for it; the slave is more generally a family servant, a member of this master’s family, sharing with him, and therefore interested with him, in his fortune, good or bad. This is the result of less concentration of wealth in families or individuals, which is occasioned by the circumstances I have described. Slavery thus loses much of its inhumanity, and, like feudalism in its latter days, is more nearly compatible with civilization. It is still questionable, however, if, as the subject race approaches civilization, the dominant race is not proportionately detained in its progress. One is forced often to question too, in viewing slavery in this aspect, whether humanity and the accumulation of wealth—the prosperity of the master and the happiness and improvement of the subject—are not incompatible. So far as my observation goes, facts would favor such a conclusion, with, of course, such exceptions and modifications as result from individual character.

As wealth naturally devolves upon the more intelligent and enterprising, the slaves, from association with their owners, are often, and (when living in the familiarity I have described as common on the farms in a country where, at the best, wealth must accumulate slowly) generally, a superior class to the poor whites, who from influences of the institution which I sufficiently explained in Virginia, are made to have an imprudent and reckless character. At the same time they seem to acquire generosity, boldness, a certain independence or originality of mind and all those peculiar virtues that distinguish the Indian and other vagabond and wandering tribes of the uncivilized world. They will make a valuable kind of soldier, while their quick insight of character, their respect for real dignity of worth when presented to them in the stump candidate for their suffrages, and their own absence of ambition, make them, as experience proves, conservative and sage, though not honorable citizens to the Republic. North Carolina has furnished more than her proportion of true statesmen to our National Councils, and though eminently prudent and conservative, her political influence has always been of a broader, more generous and catholic character than that of either of her two self-important neighbors. There is no State in the Union whose elements of wealth and usefulness are so varied and interesting as those of North Carolina, and there is reason to hope that while her people move with their accustomed prudence and deliberation, they will not be wanting the sagacity, enterprize and energy necessary to secure from these resources their own private prosperity by making them available to the needs of her country and the world.

The northern parts of North Carolina offer inducements to emigration similar to those I enumerated in Virginia, her political character is more honorable, there seems to be more freedom of thought on the subject of Slavery and [154] the inquisition of public opinion upon its expression is less tyrannical. The State is less cursed with demagogues and self-seeking politicians, and the moral and social atmosphere is less enervating.