Bradford J. Wood. This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in the Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina, 1725-1775. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. xx + 344 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57003-540-1.

Reviewed by Peter Moore (Texas A & M University-Corpus Christi)
Published on H-NC (January, 2008)

Regionalism Revisited

Since Darrett and Anita Rutman broke new ground in their 1984 community study of Middlesex County, Virginia (A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750 [1984]), social historians have covered the colonial south like the summer sun. From tidewater plantations to the open-country neighborhoods of the Shenandoah Valley, from low-country rice fields to backcountry corn fields, from the mountain south to the lower Mississippi Valley, historians have left few stones unturned in their quest to recover the lives of the region's red, white, and black inhabitants. Yet, one place has remained curiously understudied: North Carolina's Lower Cape Fear.

In some sense, this scholarly neglect is justified. The Lower Cape Fear was settled relatively late (after 1725), and unlike the southern backcountry, it remained sparsely populated throughout the colonial period. It was, moreover, "remote" in almost every sense of the word, and its remoteness has made it problematic for historians. The region occupied a sort of ill-defined borderland between tidewater and low country, lacking the best parts of both. Never achieving its vaunted potential, never quite rising to its promise, here was poor Carolina's version of a plantation system: heavily commercialized and export driven but never very profitable, slave based but nonagricultural and not altogether labor intensive. Neither a burgeoning backcountry nor a great plantation enterprise, the Lower Cape Fear was marginal to the colonial economy, and as a result, historians have marginalized it. When considering the region at all, they have viewed it as the northern frontier of South Carolina's rice economy, thus failing to see it on its own terms, as a unique region with its own history and integrity.

Until now, that is. Bradford J. Wood has filled this hole in the literature with a fine-grained, comprehensive study of the region's early history. Drawing on a database that integrates over twenty-nine thousand local records, Wood recovers nearly every facet of this history in stunning detail. Limiting his study to the two counties at the heart of the Lower Cape Fear region (Brunswick and New Hanover), he uses separate chapters to examine immigration and settlement, land distribution and usage, family and kinship, social networks, local politics, the plantation economy, and urban development. In the process, he asks important questions about the role regionalism played in shaping early American identity, and by extension, he challenges the boundaries historians draw when carving up the colonial landscape.

From the time the region was opened to settlement in 1725, a variety of immigrant groups were attracted by the commercial potential of the Lower Cape Fear. Its coastal location and navigable port made it particularly appealing to South Carolina rice planters seeking new lands and lower taxes. Ambitious merchants, like James Murray of Scotland, also felt the lure of an unexploited region, as did both absentee and resident land speculators. These early settlers were joined by two streams of less conspicuous immigrants, one from North Carolina's politically embattled Albemarle region, the other consisting of Highland Scots trickling in from the Upper Cape Fear. In short, the Lower Cape Fear was a mixed region, dominated economically and politically by South Carolina planters, although they always made up a minority of the white population.

Its mixed population notwithstanding, the most striking demographic characteristic of the Lower Cape Fear was how few people actually settled there of their own accord. Despite its commercial promise, the region never boasted more than 5 percent of colonial North Carolina's population--and well over half of these were slaves who immigrated involuntarily. Why did the Lower Cape Fear fail to attract appreciable numbers of settlers? For starters, soil quality was at best inconsistent, and the land was not generally suitable for farming (including rice production), but it did contain an abundance of long-leaf pine, making it ideal for producing naval stores (primarily tar, pitch, and turpentine, as well as lumber). Since making profits from forest products required vast quantities of land, land ownership was highly concentrated, and the best lands (those with river access) were grabbed early. To make matters worse, land acquisition was a nightmare (as was the case throughout much of the province). Overlapping claims, squatters who postponed taking out patents to avoid paying quitrents, and large-scale speculation all made land acquisition a difficult and frustrating process, which, combined with the poor prospects the land afforded, tended to discourage settlement and retard regional development.

In the same way that the Lower Cape Fear imposed its realities on the commercial vision of the settlers, it also left its stamp on their families. Family structured immigration, and once people settled, they intermarried locally along class lines, creating dense kinship networks. Yet, if residents entertained any hopes of imitating the English metropolitan family model--patriarchal nuclear families and strong extended kin networks--regional conditions made for something quite different. Disease and high mortality rates disrupted and truncated nuclear families, and a high incidence of widowhood created a significant number of female headed households. Communities were hard-pressed to properly care for their many orphans. Extended kinship networks were surprisingly weak due to the dispersed settlement pattern and low population density. In short, the Lower Cape Fear did not readily give itself over to the economic or social visions of the colonists. Accordingly, in what is perhaps the book's greatest understatement, its "new regional identity ... was not entirely positive" (p. 33).

One problem with densely researched, data-heavy local histories is that they sometimes amass vast amounts of data to draw painfully small conclusions. Wood's chapter on social networks is an unfortunate example of this tendency. To be sure, his ability to integrate his sources, identify social contacts, and map out networks is impressive indeed, but his conclusion is anticlimactic: people in this remote part of the world lived locally, their social contacts were almost exclusively with others in the region, and their interactions were concentrated more heavily according to ethnicity, religion, and kinship. Wood uses the local approach more fruitfully in his discussion of politics. Unlike North Carolina politics in general, which was notoriously bitter and divisive, local politics in the Lower Cape Fear region were surprisingly harmonious after 1740. A very small ruling class achieved a high rate of incumbency for a long time, demonstrating that it either kept all its constituents happy or shut them out of power completely (the sources do not say). In any event, the political system functioned to maintain social order, peace, and harmony--words not normally associated with colonial North Carolina. In this case, Wood makes good use of the local perspective to complicate the broader narrative of political contentiousness at the provincial level.

Wood's treatment of African Americans is nicely balanced and in places thorough, as one would expect in a study of a place where slaves made up as much as 70 percent of the population. He integrates slavery into nearly every chapter, treating population, family and community, resistance and runaways, the internal economy, and work, among other aspects of slave life. Although he poses no truly new questions about slavery, his discussion of slaves and work in chapter 6 is particularly interesting and informative. In an economy centered on forest products, slaves enjoyed more autonomy and were not as closely supervised as they were on agricultural plantations. At the same time, the region apparently had considerably more slaves than it needed to meet the needs of its export economy. How did this paradox--the threat of a slave majority coupled with an autonomous and relatively fluid work regimen--affect the way masters and slaves negotiated their relationship? Wood does not fully explore this question, though he generally concludes that slave life in the Lower Cape Fear was neither better nor worse than elsewhere in the plantation south, that the isolated nature of slave work could be detrimental as well as beneficial, and that "most slaves probably experienced a middle ground between [the] extremes of paternalism and brutal neglect" (p. 212).

This is a book with many strengths. First and foremost, it is densely researched. The twenty-nine thousand sources that make up Wood's database include tax digests, conveyances, wills, estate inventories, civil and criminal court records, militia lists, county court minutes, town records, port records, and church records. Through this database, Wood has identified more than five thousand individuals and created a detailed demographic and economic profile of the region, reconstructing settlement patterns, land distribution, kinship and social networks, land use patterns, urban development, and political culture. He supplements these core sources with travel accounts and correspondence, which lend warmth to a sometimes dry, faceless social history. Wood also shows an impressive command of a broad range of topics. This kind of local history requires familiarity with a whole array of issues and processes--land acquisition, settlement patterns, land use patterns, soils, kinship, social networks, inheritance patterns, court proceedings (civil, criminal, and probate), politics, economies, trade, urbanization, work, production processes, and slavery--along with the historical literature surrounding these issues. The depth and breadth of Wood's analysis is truly impressive.

However, I found myself hungering for a story as I read This Remote Part of the World, and I was not satisfied. To be sure, Wood traces the development of the Lower Cape Fear in great detail, and he fully demonstrates the importance of regionalism as a factor in both the colonization process and colonial identity. Yet, he leaves the transformation of this region--the decline of the naval stores industry after the American Revolution, and with it the gradual supplanting of regional identity with nationalism--to a brief epilogue. This is a fine study but not a particularly engaging narrative.

Still, Wood brings light to a neglected corner of the colonial south, and in the process, he demonstrates that the models and categories historians use to think about plantation systems are inadequate. The Lower Cape Fear does not fit the mold. Yet, instead of pointing to the anomaly, Wood challenges us to consider the mold itself, to rethink what is normative in the colonial south. In This Remote Part of the World, social history is up to its old tricks again, complicating the narrative, blurring the boundaries, championing the local, shattering the center (or one of the few centers left in colonial history, the plantation model), and reminding us that colonial people's lives were imposed upon and molded by small places.

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Citation: Peter Moore. Review of Wood, Bradford J., This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in the Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina, 1725-1775. H-NC, H-Net Reviews. January, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14055

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