North Carolina Books

The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson is a breviary of inspirational reading for people who seek wisdom in public affairs. The 98 Jeffersonian selections included in this volume by Editor Peterson offer a deeper understanding of how America's third President and one of its greatest founding thinkers envisioned the country where all men are created equal with inherent and inalienable rights to life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness.

It was not only the Declaration of Independence to which Jefferson put his pen. The book offers digestible servings of Jefferson's thoughts on the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and much of his work on the Virginia state constitution. It reveals Jeffersonian values on citizenship, religious freedom and education. It enriches readers with scores of excerpts from Jeffersonian correspondence with contemporaries like James Madison, John Adams, James Monroe and the Chiefs of the Cherokee Nation. Important history, the book is pleasant because Jefferson was such a good writer and Peterson is a helpful editor.

The selections are valuable because they explain what Jefferson thought, and why. When he wrote a bill in 1777 for the Virginia Assembly establishing religious freedom, we see his commitment to the separation of church and state. "The imperious presumption of legislators and rulers, civic as well as ecclesiastical who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinion and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time.

"Almighty God has created the mind free ... and all attempts to influence it ... tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness..." Jefferson drew inspiration from history as well as from his Puritan neighbors to the north.

"Spin" and political disinformation bedeviled Jefferson's world just like they do ours. In a letter dated November 13, 1787 to William S. Smith, Jefferson wrote, "The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them and & what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves." Jefferson was saddled with his British gazetteers and we struggle with press secretaries, unidentified administration sources and news bunnies. Skepticism was and continues to be in order.

That same day, Jefferson wrote to John Adams, predicting the Constitution needed the 22nd amendment limiting service as President by a single person to two terms that wasn't ratified until 1951. Only Jefferson felt the incumbent should serve only one term. "Once in office, and possessing the military force of the union, without either the aid or check of a council, he would not be easily dethroned, even if the people could be induced to withdraw their votes from him. I wish that at the end of the four years they had made him for ever ineligible a second time."

Peterson says Jefferson was less a philosopher and more a statesman as "a servant and a spokesman of American freedom, democracy, enlightenment and nationhood." His was a life of active learning sparked by native intelligence, omnivorous curiosity and relentless industry. Climbing a lifelong mountain of personal reinvention, Jefferson was a student, a lawyer, a legislator, a governor, an ambassador, a secretary of state, a vice president, a president, a farmer, and through all, an eloquent educator.

Jefferson wrote a report in 1818 on behalf of the commissioners of the University of Virginia on "Education and Progress." His optimism is contagious. "We should be far, too, from the discouraging persuasion that man is fixed, by the law of his nature, at a given point; that his improvement is a chimera and the hope delusive of rendering ourselves wiser, happier or better than our forefathers were.

"Education ... engrafts a new man on the native stock and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth..."

In the same essay, Jefferson encourages educators and the wealthy elite - he held distinguished status in both groups - to avoid complacency. Beware, he warns, of those who find "...themselves but too well in their present condition, oppose all advances which might unmask their usurpations and monopolies of honors, wealth and power and fear every change as endangering the comforts they now hold."

Jefferson's political approach is timelessly attractive. Peterson says his "intellectual bent was activist, pragmatic and utilitarian," ever willing to revise his work to meet the challenge of changing historical forces and events. He moved from history to theory, from law to nature, from the particularism of the English tradition to the rationalism and universalism of the Enlightenment. In the truest sense of two words, Jefferson lived with an open mind. His enthusiasm let him believe reason and inquiry can lead men away from whatever is false, twisted or capricious in human affairs toward truths in the nature of things. With an eagle's eye for detail, he knew big ideas often start small. Looking back in his 1821 autobiography, he wrote, "So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants."

Jefferson was proud of his contribution to the birth of America. Ten days before his death at Monticello on July 4th, 1826, he wrote Roger Weightman of his "delight" that his fellow citizens, "after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made (between submission and the sword).

"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves and to assume the blessing and security of self-government.

"That form which we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion...

"For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights and an undiminished devotion to them..."

Great insight into Antebellum Charleston and the South! A Great read as well.............

This book is special. My family comes from Mountain City Tenn and I thought no one else was like us. This book chronicles a lifestyle never revealed in the romantic narratives of what most people think of as "the south". As a Delaware Northern Girl, it makes me sad that my parents relocated and I will not live like that.

This is an excellent resource for the study of colonial NC, esp. since very little has been written on the subject. "Poor Carolina" is well written, well-researched and painstakingly documented. Having been through most of the records the author used to write this study, I can attest to his great ability to analize and contextualize the raw materials of NC before the Revolution.

The edition by iUniverse never got off the ground because of publication errors. The current publisher (without errors) is Trinity Publishing, with ISBN 0-7414-0690-X, and with 61 maps.

Neufeld's Popular History of WNC is a true marvel and the sort of history I like best. It's people.

Neufeld's research is detailed and accurate, as it should be, but he takes a giant step closer to his research than most -- he talks with people. His section on WNC women by itself is to be applauded and cheered. The personal histories of everyday life among railroad and lumber camp women, trainmen's wives, members of the 1920s High School Girls' Championship Basektball team, and others, sets a high goal for other historians.

You don't just read about history in this wonderful book. You meet the people who are history. What a rare treat it is being introduced to Inez Virginia Daughtery. Neufeld lets her tell you what it was like growing up black in Black Mountain in the 1920s. Bee Fraizer's life as a black nanny in WWII Asheville is told both through her original letters from the 1940s and through Neufeld's conversations with Jordan Maynard, who grew up under the care and attention of his nanny Bee. Written history doesn't get any better than this.

Neufeld's "peoples' history" moves from the original Cherokee of the area, the settlers and pioneer families, the War of Separation... to the lives (and death) of the people behind a roadside memorial of a simple white cross with the name Festus prainted on it --- and to a delightful contemporary profile of Maria and Juan Carballo, who migrated to Arden, North Carolina, from the mountains of El Salvador. I'm proud to call them neighbors.

The music of the mountains is always in the background (and sometimes the foreground) of Neufeld's insightful work. Still, it is the voices of the people you will remember best.

A handsome book, Neufeld's "Mountains, Heroes, & Hootnoggers" includes numerous historical photographs. Like all good books, though, the best pictures here are drawn by words. The book concludes with a very useful bibliography. But don't be fooled; the real bibliography of this volume is the author himself -- and the people he has met. You need to meet them, too.

I lived on the edge of the poquosin country for a decade, and it seemed so wild, so untouched, so empty that it couldn't have had a history. But of course it did, and Professor Jack Temple Kirby has written it in his expected elegant style.

A poquosin is a slightly higher and drier patch in the soggy coastal plain of the American South, with its center in the Great Dismal Swamp of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. It might have been logical that with an entire rich continent to expand into, the early white settlers would have passed by this unhealthy and difficult country. But that is not how people behave.

Kirby divides the people into the cosmopolitans and the inhabitants, or as he calls them, the hinterlanders.

The cosmopolitans lived on the fringes of the swamp, were educated and had capital and skills. They wished to employ these close to home. They financed canals, roads and railroads and hired the inhabitants or paid for the resources they could gather, primarily shingles, but also furs, turpentine, fish.

The hinterlanders were marginal characters, especially the black slaves, getting by on canal digging, trapping, fishing, logging, turpentining and farming. Yet, ironically, they were also independent. For the slaves, especially, working on their own, away from their owners, being a "swamper" was a kind of freedom.

Kirby also interprets these men and women as more or less conscious rejecters of consumer society. "Free workers used their wages to resist modernity."

I don't think this is the correct reading. They consumed avidly when they had the money, which was seldom. That they did not abandon their hard, sickly life was probably because it is easier to be a poor man in the country than in the city. For a long time, cities had not much to offer the debilitated, illiterate, unskilled poquosin-man.

Once that changed, the people escaped. For the blacks, with lower material expectations, this happened around 1916. Whites, slightly more demanding, did not flee until 1940. (See my review of Linda Flowers' "Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina.")

Left behind were the helpless and feckless. Kirby has not much to say about them, except to lament the "tragedy of a people unable to sustain themselves harmoniously on a rural landscape." Well, as Peter Huber wrote in "Hard Green" (see my review), the peasant squatting over a cow-dung fire is not green, he's just poor. The people of the area did sustain themselves harmoniously, they were just desperately poor.

It isn't in Kirby's book, but in 1966, Sen. Bill Spong of Virginia made a hunger tour of the area and found whole communities -- almost all black women and children, the men were gone -- that sustained themselves on an annual two-months' worth of low-paid labor in vegetable canneries, plus whatever they could scratch out of their gardens. They were hungry, but they had not rejected modernity. Modernity had rejected them.

As in Kirby's book "Mockingbird Song" (see my review), which is an expansion geographically of the themes in "Poquosin," the author weaves his human story with ecological history. Trees, or the disappearance of them, dominate ecological writing about the South. For Donald Edward Davis, writing about the southern Appalachians in "Where There Are Mountains," the missing tree is the American chestnut. For Kirby, it is the longleaf pine -- always described as tall and stately.

The piney woods are still piney, but today the trees are slash pines. Hogs and turpentining almost extinguished the longleaf. Kirby understates the violence of the turpentine camps, being more concerned about the trees. They were more brutal but less picturesque than Hollywood's idea of Dodge City, and there was no tradition, not even a mythical one, of freelance agents of justice who cleaned up the camps.

Kirby arguably also understates the impact of diseases in preserving the premodern life of the poquosins. Robert Desowitz, in "Who Gave Pinta to the Santa Maria?" has a good summary of how malaria, hookworm, yellow fever and other diseases beat down the Southerner, white or black.

I am not particularly sympathetic to the yearnings of writers like Kirby or Flowers or Davis for the old rural South. I lived in it, and the modern South is nicer. But Kirby's books about the South are stimulating, valuable, engaging. The real history of the South was much different from the opposing, highly politicized versions its young people more commonly are exposed to today. They should all get a good dose of Kirby.

I saw Robert Drapala at a book signing last summer on Hatteras Island because I was a fan of his last book, but this one was even more interesting. I did not know that the first amphibious attack of the Civil War was on Hatteras Island--it was absolutely fascinating! The journal drawings are just beautiful, I never knew they existed. As a 12-year summer resident of Hatteras Island, I learned a lot from this book. Just wonderful!

A terrific read for anyone interested in the Barrier Islands of NC and their amazing history plus a little bit of Nicholas Sparks-ish love story woven in to make all of us baby boomers recall what young love on the beach was like. The early years of WWII off the US coast have been kept secret from the average American until recently. This novel recounts the bravery and hardships endured by so many ordinary citizens caught up that period and also provides an accurate glimpse into the particular culture of the coastal fishing villages that struggled to survive the elements, the changing moires...and the Germans! Grab a chair, prop up your feet and turn off the phone for several enjoyable hours.

This book took me through a wonderful pictorial journey- through the history of one small southern town that rightfully claims its own special niche in Georgia's rich cultural heritage. This collection of photographs shows how one small community maintained its beautiful southern charm but also prospered when the rich mineral content of the town's seven springs brought visitors to enjoy the water's medicinal powers. For anyone who marvels at southern history, architecture, or culture, this book is a gem. Whether you are intrigued by spiritualism or scandal, Hannon includes something to please any enthusiast. The photographs are complemented by informative captions that reflect a depth of research. Also: thanks to the author for avoiding a shortcoming in some historical works by including a lovely assortment of African-American scenes.