Elizabeth Maxwell Steel had known hardship long before the Revolution. Her first husband was scalped by the Cherokees during the French and Indian War...
Before the American Revolution, many North Carolina settlers were already rebelling against unfair taxes and corrupt officials. From 1765 to 1771...
During the American Revolution, the Black Pioneers were one of the few all-Black Loyalist military units. Formed in 1776 during the British siege of...
Gold was discovered in 1799 at Reed Gold Mine in Cabarrus County when a local boy found a large gold nugget in Little Meadow Creek. At first, gold...
The Carolinas Campaign, fought from January through April 1865, was the final major Union offensive of the Civil War in the South. Led by General...
On February 17, 1864, the Confederate Congress expanded the conscription ages. In North Carolina, men aged 45–50 joined the Senior Reserves, while...
By the Civil War, North Carolina’s long-established Quaker community was already in decline, largely due to its strong antislavery stance and earlier...
The Civil War transformed the lives of Southern Black people, who faced both danger and the possibility of freedom. Many enslaved people escaped to...
In the fall of 1774, as the colonies bristled against British rule, the women of Edenton made a daring choice. On October 25, fifty-one of them put...
On September 24, 1777, Mecklenburg County resident Thomas Polk arrived safely in Allentown, Pa., after escorting the Liberty Bell there from...
In the years before the Revolution, Harlowe in Craven County, North Carolina, was home to a thriving community of free Black farmers and craftsmen who...
Royal Governor Josiah Martin is often overlooked in North Carolina’s colonial history, but his actions played an important role in the state’s path to...
The hypocrisy of wealthy, slave-owning white men who expressed abolitionist or antislavery views in North Carolina reveals one of the central moral...
Enslaved literacy and secret education in antebellum North Carolina represented a quiet but powerful form of resistance rooted in knowledge, faith...
North Carolina played a major — and complicated — role in the Civil War. It supplied about 130,000 men to the Confederate armies, as well as...
In response to growing tensions following the Boston Tea Party, local leaders in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, met at the county courthouse on...
In October 1780, while recovering in Charlotte, General Cornwallis learned that Major Patrick Ferguson’s Loyalist army had been destroyed at Kings...
The Moravian community of Salem, North Carolina, known as “The Brethren,” was exempt from military service because of their pacifist beliefs. Though...
Thomas Peters, born around 1738 in West Africa among the Yoruba Egba people, was captured and sold into slavery, eventually ending up in North...
For Quakers in colonial America, pacifism, or the belief in non-violence, was a core principle of their faith and community values. In the mid-1700s...
The Race to the Dan River in Virginia was part of the efforts by American Major General Nathaniel Greene to wear down and stretch supply lines for the...
Unionism before the Civil War was a significant—though often overlooked—current in North Carolina politics and society during the antebellum period...
Long before America’s Revolution, Scotland made its own declaration of freedom. In 1320, Scottish nobles issued the Declaration of Arbroath, asserting...
The rise of the rural plantation in antebellum North Carolina was a gradual but transformative process that reshaped the state’s landscape, economy...
To North Carolina political leaders during the antebellum period, “states’ rights” was not an abstract constitutional theory—it was a practical...
Early Life
Elizabeth Keckley was born into slavery in 1818. Her mother, Aggy Hobbs, was enslaved by Keckley’s biological father, Armistead Burwell...
Chang and Eng Bunker—better known as the “Siamese Twins”—became unlikely political symbols in the deeply divided America of the 1860s. Immigrants from...
Before railroads, North Carolina’s poor roads and shallow rivers limited trade and left many regions isolated. Beginning in the 1830s, railroad...
During the Civil War, the United States revived the tradition of honoring exceptional bravery in battle. Inspired by George Washington’s Revolutionary...
During the antebellum period, life for the white elite in urban North Carolina was shaped by wealth, slavery, social hierarchy, and a growing sense of...
In the spring of 1774, Wilmington was restless. News of the Boston Tea Party had spread south, and townspeople along the Cape Fear River bristled...
The rise of independent Black churches in North Carolina during the antebellum period marked one of the most important developments in African...
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