Chapter 1: Slavery & Revolution

Mecklenburg County’s first permanent Black residents arrived in the 1750s, when ambitious European colonists embarked upon the newly opened Great Wagon Road that ran from Pennsylvania and Virginia to the North Carolina Piedmont.

By then, people of African descent had become an integral component of colonial economy and society. Africans had joined some of the earliest North American explorations. In 1619, shortly after English colonists settled on the Virginia coast, an English privateer arrived with a group of enslaved Africans, whom the crew traded for supplies. Over the next century and a half, as the American system of slave labor solidified, enslaved Black workers built the tobacco fortunes of Virginia and eastern North Carolina and fueled the rice and indigo economy around the port of Charleston. When Europeans began to venture to the Piedmont, those prosperous enough to afford enslaved workers brought them along.

At that time, towering oaks, maples and poplars alternated with grassy meadows on the rolling hills, crossed by paths forged by the resident Catawba Indians. The Catawba resisted the influx of Europeans until 1759, when a smallpox epidemic drastically reduced their numbers. Survivors were forced to sign a treaty that restricted them to a small area around present-day Rock Hill, S.C., clearing Mecklenburg County for further settlement.

The Piedmont’s hilly terrain and rocky, rushing rivers made it far less suited to plantation agriculture than North Carolina’s coastal plain, and most farms started as small family operations. New arrivals began by felling trees and digging rocks. They slept in their covered wagons while they cleared fields and built log homes. They raised sheep, cattle, hogs, geese, corn, and flax. They spun linen and wool for clothes, killed animals for meat, ground corn for bread, and distilled it into whiskey.

Some families were content with self-sufficiency. Others, however, aspired to greater wealth – an ambition that they believed would require enslaved labor. Cash crops such as cotton or tobacco required more work than a family could provide. Since hired labor was scarce, local historian D.A. Tompkins later wrote, “each farmer had to do his own work until he could by diligence and economy save enough to buy a slave.” 1

Those who amassed the means to expand their operations journeyed to the bustling slave markets in Charleston. Many of the people brought back in chains had come straight from Africa, bearing the weight of violent separation from their homes and the horrific Middle Passage. Survival was an extraordinary achievement. Life in their harsh new world would require similar fortitude. 2

Over the years, Black North Carolinians came to know their surroundings well. Hunting and fishing were ways of life for most of the colony’s inhabitants, both enslaved and free. Scattered populations also meant that enslaved residents had to travel to see each other and to form families. Alan Parker of Chowan County recalled a common pattern – his father, Jeff Ellick, lived on a farm 10 miles away from the rest of the family. He “generally came home Saturday nights and now and then would come to us in the night during the week, as a slave did not mind a walk of ten miles after his day’s work if he could have a chance to see his loved ones.” 3 Enslaved Mecklenburg County residents likely did the same.

Enslaved residents also gathered for festivities such as communal corn shuckings, enlivened by music, dancing and flirtation; and for religious ceremonies that transcended the narrow version of the gospel preached to them by slaveholding whites. Carey Freeman, who grew up enslaved in Mecklenburg County, told her daughter, Eliza Washington, about a minister who “used to preach to the colored people that if they would be good . . . and not steal their master’s eggs and chickens and things, that they might go to the kitchen of heaven when they died.” Freeman and her companions prayed more expansively at night, often using a large, strategically positioned iron washpot to muffle their voices: “[They] had to turn the pots down to keep their voices from sounding,” Washington explained, “and they couldn’t sing at all.” 4

But while enslaved North Carolinians found ways to snatch a few moments for themselves, they remained largely at the mercy of their enslavers, with virtually no legal rights. Their marriages had no legal standing, and North Carolina laws placed almost no limits on punishments they might receive. 5 Whippings were common, administered by enslavers, by overseers, and by North Carolina courts, which specified that an enslaved person convicted for actions ranging from setting fires to playing cards to teaching someone else to read should receive “a whipping on his or her bare back, not exceeding thirty-nine lashes.” 6

This precarious legal state had particular consequences for women. “The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear,” wrote Harriet Jacobs, who ran away from a lustful enslaver and then spent seven years hiding in a cramped Edenton attic, waiting for an opportunity to escape the South. “When she is fourteen or fifteen, her owner, or his sons, or the overseer, or perhaps all of them, begin to bribe her with presents. If these fail to accomplish their purpose, she is whipped or starved into submission to their will.” 7

Revolution for Whom?

By the 1770s, as American colonists began to chafe at British political and economic restrictions, Mecklenburg’s white residents leapt to the forefront. On May 31, 1775, they voiced their dissatisfaction with British rule in a set of declarations called the Mecklenburg Resolves.

Participants would later assert that a week or so earlier, on May 20, they had drawn up an even more audacious Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence – the first full declaration of independence in the North American colonies. The “Meck Dec” and its invocation of “a free and independent people” would become a cornerstone of white Charlotte identity, and May 20 an occasion for celebration. 8

Across the colonies, Black residents also warmed to words of freedom and independence. “Liberty is a Jewel which was handed down to man from the cabinet of heaven,” free Black soldier Lemuel Haynes wrote in 1776, adding that “Liberty is Equally as precious to a Black man, as it is to a white one, and Bondage Equally as intolerable to the one as it is to the other.” 9

But in the end, the lofty rhetoric of the American Revolution offered little to enslaved Americans. For more than a century and a half, North American colonists had reconciled the divide between their celebration of liberty and their dependence on enslaved labor by defining Africans as an “inferior” race, unworthy of the rights and privileges white men sought for themselves.

While a few African Americans were recruited to the Continental Army, most of the enslaved who aspired to freedom had to take matters into their own hands. When the Revolution came to Charlotte, local whites harassed the British troops, prompting General Charles Cornwallis to call the town “a hornet’s nest.” Enslaved residents had other priorities. As D.A. Tompkins put it: “A great number took advantage of the exciting times and endeavored to escape.” 10

Some of those who left joined the British forces, who offered freedom to men who fought with them. Across the course of the war, as many as 20,000 men of African descent fought with the British army.

Slaveholding Republic

After the Revolution, Southern whites refused to consider abolishing slavery. While Northern states began to end the practice, neither the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights offered hope for emancipation in the South. Instead, restrictions tightened. Slaveowners had always feared rebellion – North Carolina’s slave code of 1741 was enacted in response to the bloody Stono Rebellion outside of Charleston in 1739. The Haitian Revolution of 1791, in which an enslaved population overthrew French colonists and established a Black republic, heightened those concerns.

In 1793, the Mecklenburg County court ordered officers to arrest all enslaved persons “ranging at large during public meetings in the town of Charlotte except such as carried passes from their masters.” In 1809, “six patrols were appointed for the Charlotte militia district, and these patrols were of much service in preventing troubles among slaves and in apprehending the runaways.” 11

Such militias, often called “paddyrollers,” became an ever-present threat, not only to potential rebels and escapees, but to the many people who ventured out to hunt or fish, to visit family members or to attend clandestine dances or religious services.

“They would go two, or three together mounted on horse-back, and generally accompanied by one or more dogs,” Alan Parker recalled of the Chowan County militias. “They were also armed with guns, and carried great whips, made of raw-hide or leather.” If militiamen sighted someone without the required pass, the traveler began a mad dash for home. “Being on foot he could take to the woods, which he was sure to do if hard pressed,” Parker explained. “Once in the woods he might be obliged to hide unless [they] had dogs with them, but even in that case he might manage to give them the slip, for if he came to a stream of water he would wade or swim across it, or he might walk in it for a little way. . . . In this way he often managed to evade his pursuers.” If someone was caught, “he would be tied to the nearest tree, what few clothes he had on would be taken off, and he would be given thirty-nine lashes on his bare back.” 12

Resistance could be deadly. “I remember one time there was a dance at one of the houses in the quarters,” recalled Fannie Moore, who was enslaved by a South Carolina family with many ties to Mecklenburg County. The dancers were “a-laughing and a-patting their feet and a-singing” when a militia group “shove the door open and start grabbing us. Uncle Joe’s son he decide there was [only] one time to die, and he start to fight. He say he tired standing so many beatings, he just can’t stand no more. The paddyrollers start beating him and he start fighting.” Eventually, one of the men “take a stick and hit him over the head and just bust his head wide open. The poor boy fell on the floor just a-moaning and a-groaning. The paddyrollers just whip about half dozen others and send them home and leave us with the dead boy.” 13

Still, neither fear of rebellion nor concern about the violence required to maintain a slave economy led Mecklenburg’s residents to reduce their reliance on an institution that built wealth. By 1800, census takers counted 10,439 residents in Mecklenburg County. Of those, 1,988 – 19 percent – were enslaved African Americans. As the century advanced, their numbers and significance would grow.