Conceived in Liberty, Volume 5: The New Republic: 1784–1791

There were still two beleaguered states not yet in the Union: Rhode Island and North Carolina. Of all the southern states, North Carolina was by far the least aristocratic. Only the Edenton–New Bern area of the northeast, with its ports, navigable inlets, large slave plantations, and swollen commercial farms, was typically “Federalist”; almost all of the rest of the state was non-commercial subsistence farming. Of the five North Carolina delegates at the Philadelphia Convention, the one westerner, former Governor Alexander Martin, walked out from the forming of the Constitution. Now the Federalists had to face the great burden of the people from the small farming parts of the state, men who remembered the old struggles of the Regulators and who were properly suspicious of government abuses. The North Carolina legislature overrode an attempted filibuster and called elections in March 1788 for a convention to meet at Hillsboro on July 21.

The campaign was a fierce one, with Antifederalists receiving material from Lamb’s Federal Republican Committee in New York and the Federalists aided by Robert Morris’ Federal propaganda headquarters in Philadelphia. Leading the Federalists were William Blount and his northeast clique, including the lawyer James Iredell, while the Antifederalists, in addition to Thomas Person, were led by Willie Jones and Timothy Bloodworth, both well-connected individuals. Bloodworth wrote that the people mostly in favor of ratification in North Carolina were “The Attorneys, Merchants, and Aristocratic part of the community.” The wealthy Jones was the field marshal of the Antifederalists, and for once the Antifederal powers of organization were adequate to the task.

The North Carolina elections were overwhelmingly Antifederalist, even more so than New York, and the number of delegates was seventy-five for the Constitution, 193 opposed. The Federalists, predictably, covered the northeast, but lost four counties behind the coastal communities. The smaller farming inland counties voted extremely Antifederalist, and no other state had such an extreme area of small farms remote from transportation and navigation. The surprise was the heavy Antifederal vote in the southeast counties dominated by large slave-holding planters. The southeast, however, lacking the inlets of the northeast, was far less commercial and export-minded. In the one commercial port town of the southeast, Wilmington instead voted Federalist. The northeast towns—New Bern, Halifax, and Edington—of course supported the Constitution, as well as Wilmington in the southeast and Salisbury in the staunchly Antifederal West.

In the far west, in the Tennessee settlements, the vote was almost unanimously Antifederal. As in the case of Kentucky, the settlers had been persuaded by the Jay-Gardoqui Treaty that the great potential of the Mississippi River trade would not be safe in the hands of the northern nationalists. It is interesting, also, that while the Blount-led western land speculators voted Federalist the settlers themselves were almost totally opposed.

Since Antifederalists and Federalists, as in other states, tended to select their most prominent men as delegates, the disparity in wealth and prestige between the delegates was not nearly as great among the rank and file. In particular, Tennessee and southeastern planters swelled the ranks of wealthy Antifederal delegates, and the disparity was not significant in the distribution of land. Still, the bulk of large slave owners in North Carolina was disproportionately in favor of the Constitution. 

The North Carolina convention in mid-1788 listened stolidly to the Federalist propaganda and was unimpressed. This time there was no betrayal, no sudden conversions—not even pressure—because eleven states had ratified, and the new government of the U.S. was clearly inevitable. The only concession the Antifederalists made was to insist on prior amendments, especially a bill of rights, and to adjourn, rather than reject, the Constitution outright, by a vote of 184-84 on August 2. 

The North Carolina Antifederalists were enthusiastic over the New York circular letter for a second constitutional convention. But one of the secrets of the Federalists’ success throughout the country was that they never took no for an answer. No sooner had the convention adjourned than did James Iredell and other Federalists distribute literature and circulate petitions for a new state convention to ratify the Constitution. Secession blackmail now reared its ugly head in yet another state, for the northeastern Federalists had threatened secession from North Carolina to join the Union, and this meant the shaving off of the commercial navigational area of the state. The Federalists began to win elections, and they managed to gain control of the state Senate. Seeing the tide turn against them on a second state convention, the Antifederalists in the House managed to have the convention postponed for many months, until November 1789.

A massive propaganda campaign was conducted throughout 1789, and Federal strength grew, particularly as Congress agreed to the bill-of-rights amendments. In the August elections, the Federalists achieved a success on the level of the Antifederalists in the prior year, and the November convention only lasted a few days. On November 21, 1789, the second North Carolina convention voted to ratify the Constitution by 194-77.37

• 37[Editor’s footnote] Main, The Antifederalists, pp. 242–48; Spaulding, New York in the Critical Period, p. 269; McDonald, We the People, pp. 310–13.