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Reviews of Books
Lorena Walsh, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
| This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina, 1725–1775. By Bradford J. Wood. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. 368 pages. $39.95 (cloth).
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The publication of This Remote Part of the World marks the appearance of a new generation of local studies that draws on the strengths of earlier works of social history and accommodates more recent trends in colonial American scholarship. Bradford J. Wood applies the methods of collective biography and mining of all available county-level records employed in earlier local studies of New England and the Chesapeake to an understudied and ostensibly thinly documented area, eighteenth-century colonial North Carolina. Though relying heavily on quantitative analysis of computerized databases linking disparate mentions of more than five thousand identifiable residents of the Lower Cape Fear region, Wood also makes use of analytical concepts such as race, ethnicity, gender, and the construction of identity that were less explicitly employed or not employed at all in earlier local studies. He also connects his findings about the Lower Cape Fear River area to other localities in the British North American mainland and to the wider Atlantic world. |
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Wood argues that Lower Cape Fear, conveniently comprised of two counties, New Hanover and Brunswick, constituted a coherent cultural and economic region (a colony within a colony) that organized and defined the contours of settlers' lives until the formation of a national government necessitated a reorientation to state, broader region, and nation. Lying between older settlements around Albemarle Sound and the South Carolina low country, Lower Cape Fear was not settled until the 1720s. A charter group of elite migrants from South Carolina was attracted by the possibility of expanding rice culture; some less privileged compatriots hoped to escape South Carolina taxation and political authority. These settlers were soon joined by other migrants from the Albemarle region and from England, with lesser numbers coming from the middle colonies, Scotland, Ireland, and New England, most of whom were enticed by the economic opportunities they perceived in the new settlement. The South and North Carolinians brought slaves with them and other settlers who did not initially own slaves soon acquired them, mostly through South Carolina, and later directly from Africa. Within five years of initial settlement, slaves became a majority of the population and many settlers considered slave owning a prerequisite for economic success. Wealth was more highly stratified than in the rest of North Carolina, but not to the extent prevailing in the South Carolina low country. Slave holdings were quite large, with three-quarters of the enslaved living on plantations with twenty or more bondspeople. By 1776 the region had grown to approximately eight thousand inhabitants. |
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Wood first traces the process of land distribution that, due to an initial period of confusion, speculation, and abuse of the patenting system, resulted in unusually stratified holdings and sparse and dispersed settlement patterns. Much of the land was unsuited to agriculture and, as settlers turned to naval stores and lumbering, entrepreneurs required large amounts of land that they developed lightly if at all. After the first fifteen years, much of the land and all the best land with water access had already been taken up, and was then usually retained, by wealthy planters. |
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