The best brief summary of the political domanance exercised, from the late colonial period to 1861, by North Carolina’s upper class (or gentry) over the remainder of the state’s population is found in Paul D. Escott
The best brief summary of the political domanance exercised, from the late colonial period to 1861, by North Carolina’s upper class (or gentry) over the remainder of the state’s population is found in Paul D. Escott and Jeffrey J. Crow, “The Social Order and Violent Disorder: An Analysis of North Carolina in the Revolution and the Civil War,” THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY. Volume 52, Number 3 (August, 1986), pages 378 and 379.
“....The Carolina gentry, moreover, showed scant interest in the promotion of religion, polite society, arts, or education. North Carolina’s colonial elite, primarily first- or second-generation immigrants, displayed a strong acquisitive spirit and a keen sensitivity to the forces of an emerging commercial economy. The colony’s political institutions were thus used to advance the gentry’s private ends. Struggles over land, quitrents, representation in the [state] assembly, taxes, and patronage consumed the elite’s energies in the half century before the Revolution. When the [North Carolina] gentry drafted the first state constitution in 1776, high property qualifications for officeholding and the payment of ‘public taxes’ in order to vote assured the men of property [real and personal] and substance would continue to run the commonwealth’s affairs and exercise the suffrage [the right to vote]. Indeed, the seven-member Council of State and the governor were elected by the legislature rather than by popula