SUFFRAGE IN THE STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA (1776-1861). By J. S. BASSETT. The question of suffrage is the core of governmental policy. It is the gauge of the conditions of democracy. The extent to which organized society admits its constituent parts into participation in the affairs of government is the extent to which it secures free institutions. Accordingly, the degree in which we understand the conditions of suffrage in a State will be a measure of the appreciation of the politics of that State. It is with a view of getting this appreciation of the politics of North Carolina that the present treatment of suffrage has been undertaken. Suffrage in North Carolina has grown, very naturally, out of the spirit of the people. This State has always been remarkable for her conservative thought. In nothing is this conservatism seen more clearly than in the obstinacy with which she opposed the tendency toward a level democracy, which from the days of Jefferson gradually subdued the political life of the country. It was probably her isolated geographical position, and all the disadvantages consequent upon it, that caused this conservatism. At any rate, it was manifested from her earliest existence as a State. The revolutionary movement there was an affair of the colonial aristocracy. The prominent families organized it in the field and then made the constitution under which the people were destined to live for sixty years. The key to the general political situation will be found in the county politics of the time. There were in each county a certain number of families of wealth and political aptitude who were selected by the governor and the other agents of the royal anthority to be the justices of the peace. These were appointed by the governor and council and in their hands gradually came to be the chief power of the county. They had the right to recommend to the governor three men for the office of sheriff. One of these the governor appointed. This sheriff held the election for assemblyman, and by means of collecting the taxes, executing court decrees, and a hundred other actions of government became the direct symbol of the King's authority to the people around him. He at once became a personage of importance. The Englishry of the people is seen in their ready submission to such leadership. When it came to the election of assemblymen these justices of the peace, with the sheriff and the family connection for which they all stood, would decide on a candidate, and through their combined influence they usually elected him. Often this was the only candidate before the voters. At times the people became dissatisfied and brought out a candidate themselves. Sometimes such a man would be elected, but the usual result was the contrary. Through this means there came about what may be called, without intending to discredit them, an officeholding aristocracy. As long as this influence gave an honest administration-and such was usually the case-the people were satisfied and public business, both locally and centrally, went on with good effect. The point on which these leading families relied in 1776 to maintain themselves in the government was the suffrage. They first made the executive and judicial functions take their authority from the legislature, and then they made sure of that function by leaving the upper house in the hands of the landowners. So complete was their ascendency that it was seventy years before the excluded classes dared to join battle for their rights, and ten years more before they secured them. The slowness to reform was due, in a sense, to a condition of affairs that approached democracy. In the eastern part of the State inferior economic opportunities offered no attraction to men whose means enabled them to settle large tracts of land. Such persons usually went to South Carolina or to Virginia. Consequently, the intermediate colony was settled by small landholders, not a few being people of broken fortunes elsewhere. It is true that the natural growth of slavery brought about a certain number of large plantations in the east, but so great was the former proportion that the genius of landholding, if one may so speak, remained till the civil war on the basis of the small farm. The western part of the State was settled quite independently of the east, and for a long time there was little common life between the two sec |